Science and Technology: Economy

Lord Drayson Excerpts

Thursday 31st October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Drayson (Lab)]

My Lords, I join noble Lords in thanking my noble friend Lord Stansgate for opening this debate in such style. I take this opportunity to pay tribute to the long-standing commitment and passion he has shown to science and the scientific community. It is a particular pleasure to follow a former colleague, the noble Lord, Lord Tarassenko, given his deep expertise in engineering and innovation and his skill as an academic entrepreneur, and to build on the argument that he made.

I will focus my contribution in this debate on artificial intelligence, given the accelerating impact that this technology is having on our society and economy. In doing so I draw the House’s attention to my registered interests, particularly regarding Appella and Arcturis—two companies engaged in the development and application of AI.

Over the past 38 years as a science entrepreneur, I have experienced first hand the challenges of creating wealth from UK science and technology. However, never have I witnessed the pace of change and the breadth of impact that I see now, as virtually every company, CEO and entrepreneur tries to understand and adopt AI technology, whatever sector they are in.

Unusually for a new technology, AI plays to the strengths of the large incumbent tech businesses and disadvantages the start-ups aiming to disrupt them. The key elements needed to develop and apply AI, such as access to large sets of training data and huge computing power, require massive capital investment. This puts the big US tech companies at a considerable advantage. Together with their ability to leverage their established customer bases to deploy AI via their existing product platforms, it presents a formidable barrier to competition. This has serious implications for the UK and for government policy.

How can we ensure that the value generated by the adoption of this transformative new technology, often based upon research undertaken here, fuels the UK economy? The answer is for the UK to adopt a proactive partnership strategy in AI with the United States and its leading technology companies. We know that many UK businesses are enticed to the US by access to its substantial market and large pool of capital. To ensure that AI businesses stay and grow here, we need to create joint UK-US initiatives that leverage our complementary strengths and enable those businesses to become transatlantic—for example, by establishing joint R&D grants; building on existing programmes to encourage US/UK talent exchange in AI; facilitating transatlantic university partnerships with common IP and data-sharing agreements; and building bilateral AI labs where we can work together to develop and scale the application of AI in health, defence and finance, sectors where the UK and the US have common interests and where the UK has deep expertise and competitive advantage.

As we look to regulate AI, let us align our policies with the US and attract American capital to fuel UK-based businesses and infrastructure by creating a common listing framework for the London Stock Exchange that is aligned with NASDAQ, rather than trying to sustain our own failing AIM. In summary, let us leverage our special relationship with America to ensure that British science remains at the forefront of AI research and is a major driver of a prosperous UK economy.

King’s Speech (4th Day)

Lord Drayson Excerpts

Monday 22nd July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Drayson (Lab)]

Message received, Chief Whip.

My Lords, I add my congratulations to my noble friend Lord Vallance on his excellent maiden speech and his appointment as Science Minister. I look forward to him bringing his wealth of experience to the role and to our debates in this House. In my brief comments today, I wish to focus on wealth creation, and I draw the attention of the House to my business interests in the register.

My favourite painting in the Houses of Parliament is the one of “Queen Elizabeth I greeting her Merchant Adventurers”. It represents a wonderful evocation of the national importance of wealth creation and makes the point that creating wealth involves accepting risk in the pursuit of opportunity. That is what makes it an adventure. Today, that adventure means grasping the potential of science and technology to create wealth and drive economic growth, rewarding and celebrating people for being willing to work hard, take risks and make growth happen, celebrating not just the results of success but the very process of wealth creation itself.

The King’s Speech, setting out the Government’s mission to secure economic growth, and the Prime Minister’s commitment during the election to make wealth creation his number one priority, make it clear that this Government will champion wealth creation—that they stand by the side of the wealth creators, celebrating and motivating them to succeed.

I welcome the national wealth fund and the recently announced changes to the listing rules by the FCA that will come into effect next week. I also welcome my noble friend Lord Livermore’s new role, leading on growth in the Treasury, and I encourage him to move quickly to address the main problem holding back technology entrepreneurs from realising their full potential: lack of scale-up capital. We urgently need to increase the funding available so that our companies can get the capital they need to grow.

We need to stop the flow of equity investment out of the UK and get it flowing back into UK businesses. As of the end of June, UK equity funds have had 37 months of consecutive outflows, totalling more than £20 billion. The UK has the third largest pension market in the world, worth over £2 trillion, but—unlike other countries—we do not invest those assets in the UK. Our pension funds currently own only 2% of the UK market.

That wall of money exiting the UK has depressed valuations, starved companies of growth capital and dried up the UK market for IPOs. It has led to our companies being acquired at low prices, with the number of listed UK companies down by 20% in five years. We have lost many great companies, DeepMind, Arm, Solexa and Darktrace being just some high-profile examples. I therefore welcome the pension schemes Bill and the opportunity it brings to encourage our pension funds to consolidate and to invest in these UK companies to drive growth. We need to get our financial institutions back into the business of backing UK science and technology.

Because of our strong science base, we will create some of the most innovative companies in the world over the next 20 years, in life sciences, aerospace, clean energy and computer science. However, it is not enough to be good at the science and the start-ups—as we are—because we need to be good at scaling them up too. If we build the gigafactories, the server farms and the biolabs here, we will secure the highly paid jobs that go with them and the taxes to fund the public services we need. If we are prepared to grasp this opportunity, ensure growth capital is available, accept the risks and manage them well, we will once again become a wealthy nation. It can be done, and I am delighted that this Labour Government have the will and the plan to do it.

Cancer Research: Funding Gap

Lord Drayson Excerpts

Monday 29th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Camrose (Con)]

Indeed: it is so important to have not only a cross-government approach but a cross-sectoral approach. The Government work closely with academic, industry, charitable and other stakeholders. The crux of this is the healthcare missions of the Office for Life Sciences. The OLS cancer mission aims to show leadership in oncology innovation by developing further the approach first successfully used in the Vaccine Taskforce. Among other things, it has implemented the UK cancer research strategy forum, which brings together bodies of all kinds that are active in cancer research to ensure that they are effectively co-ordinated in today’s research and in future directions.

[Lord Drayson (Lab)]

My Lords, UK citizens willingly volunteer to allow excellent initiatives such as UK Biobank, Genomics England and Our Future Health to generate databases of health data that are excellent for cancer research. These databases are a sovereign UK asset funded by taxpayers, yet we allow the IP to leak abroad without any meaningful contribution to Treasury coffers. When will the Government implement an effective commercialisation policy to ensure that this leakage of wealth is stopped and directed to help fund cancer research?

[Viscount Camrose (Con)]

I cannot comment directly on leakage of either information or wealth. I noted with great interest the latest report of the Tony Blair Institute that was publicised over the weekend, which argued that we should put our healthcare data on a commercial setting for this purpose. I am not familiar with any individual allegation of leakage or undue movement of data out of the country, but I am willing to look into it and take it up with ministerial colleagues.