AI Growth Lab

Lord Markham Excerpts

Thursday 26th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lloyd of Effra (Lab)]

In our AI opportunities action plan we have indeed set out a plethora. That is because this is a technology that provides great potential benefits, and adoption is absolutely key. We need all areas of the economy to be thinking about the implications. We are a heavily service-based economy and it is very much in our future interests to adopt this technology and harness its benefits, whether that is in healthcare, energy efficiency or many other areas. So we will continue to focus on all areas of the development of AI, from data centres to regulation.

[Lord Markham (Con)]

My Lords, my experience as Health Minister in this space is that we have fantastic innovation and fantastic pilots: the joke in the NHS is that the NHS has more pilots than British Airways. But the challenge is always the scale-up funding and, because that scale-up funding is not there, we then lose the best to America. The problem is that the AI budgets are all fragmented across hundreds of different hospitals. What are we doing to centralise those budgets so that we have the firepower to truly scale them and not lose our best British innovation to America?

[Baroness Lloyd of Effra (Lab)]

Building on both noble Lords’ recent questions, we need to look across the whole of the economy. There will be a great amount of private investment going in, as well as investment from our public financial institutions. We are also thinking about how we can harness the benefit of sovereign AI here in the UK, and we are making a particular effort to think about where our sovereign AI fund is going to invest, so that the UK can benefit British frontier AI companies, not seeking total self-reliance but to build and defend comparative advantage.