King’s Speech

Lord McNicol of West Kilbride Excerpts

Thursday 14th May 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord McNicol of West Kilbride (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to speak in response to His Majesty’s gracious Speech, and I am grateful to my noble friends who moved and seconded the Address with such witty eloquence. I want to use my time to speak about two issues I think are critical to the future of the country: social mobility and artificial intelligence—not as parallel tracks, but as a single challenge and a single opportunity.

The journey that brought me to this Chamber started a long way from Westminster. I grew up in West Kilbride on the west coast of Scotland. Many of those around me held a simple belief: work hard, keep learning, grasp the opportunities, and doors can open. My journey was the product of the architecture built into British society that had decided deliberately that all individuals should share equal opportunities to succeed and fulfil their potential, no matter their postcode or their parentage.

That architecture was built by the people of this Parliament, by previous Labour Governments. Attlee’s Government created the welfare state to declare that no talent across Britain should ever go to waste, and when Harold Wilson spoke of the “white heat of technology”, he was making a promise to working people that technology would lift people up, not leave them behind. The architecture of social mobility was built by Labour hands with Labour values, and it is those same values that must shape what comes next.

We must be honest: the architecture has weakened and the scaffold of social mobility has decayed, hollowed out after years of underfunding and neglect. The Institute for Fiscal Studies confirms that spending on classroom-based adult education stands at 40% below the figure for 2009 and 2010. Even those who break through face a class pay gap, with professionals from working-class backgrounds earning on average of £6,000 less per year than other colleagues. Look at the good work that KPMG did, analysing its own professional staff and the people working for it: its data shows this.

Yet, arriving alongside this decline is a technology of extraordinary potential—artificial intelligence. But AI is not neutral by design. Deployed without intention, structure or political will, AI will not heal divides in our society but could actually deepen them. As the McKinsey Global Institute has said, AI’s productivity gains will not be evenly distributed unless government actively intervenes to shape adoption. That is precisely the challenge, and our responsibility. The question before this House and for the Government is whether the arrival of AI becomes a moment we can use to rebuild that ladder of social mobility, or one where we see it continue to slip.

I welcome the Government’s approach to AI so far. After years of drift and missed opportunities, we finally have a Government with a vision and a courage to drive an AI agenda rooted in opportunity. The AI growth labs announced by DSIT are now operational in priority sectors including healthcare, professional services, transport and advanced manufacturing, representing a significant step forward by creating controlled, real-world sandboxes where regulations can be temporarily adjusted to test AI innovation responsibly. The labs are designed to cut unnecessary bureaucracy while maintaining safeguards.

The commitment to bring AI tutoring to 450,000 disadvantaged children is social mobility in action. Skills England will provide skills training with AI tools for millions of workers across the country. I welcome and commend this agenda, but we need to go further, and I want to put three direct asks for the Minister to respond to.

First, Britain must not be a passenger in the AI revolution. We must build sovereign capabilities right here, not import our future. The sovereign AI fund is a start, but this Government must go further. They must create the industrial conditions, the infrastructure, the investment and the strategy for Britain to develop and grow its own AI capabilities. This is not only an economic argument; AI infrastructure built in Britain means jobs created in Britain, in the towns and cities that have been overlooked for too long. An industrial mission must reach Motherwell, Merthyr and Middlesbrough.

Secondly, we must make further education one of the vehicles for this agenda. The practical and technical hands-on skills taught in our colleges and sixth forms are not secondary to this mission but central to it. It will be these skills that help to build our future infrastructure. Our AI skills agenda must reach every type of learner.

The third ask is perhaps a bit more personal to me. AI is coming to every workplace in the country. As a Labour Government, we must guarantee that this transformation is led jointly by businesses and the workforce. Workers who shape the technology will trust it, adopt it and ultimately benefit from it.

I close by returning to where I began. The Government’s own AI Skills for Life and Work report, published earlier this year, stated plainly that the concentration of AI capabilities

“among a small, highly educated, and well-compensated proportion of the workforce risks creating a divide in AI accessibility and adoption”.

That divide maps precisely on to the fault lines of class, region, education and opportunity that have defined our social mobility challenges for decades. There is nothing inevitable about that. Whether AI becomes the greatest equalising force of our age or the latest mechanism to enrich privilege is a political choice.

My journey to this Chamber was made possible because those who came before us made those right political choices. Do not let that opportunity pass: construct the architecture, restore Britain’s commitment to social mobility, and make it last.