Technology Sovereignty

Al Pinkerton Excerpts

Tuesday 10th March 2026 Westminster Hall

[Dame Chi Onwurah]

My fellow member of the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee makes a very important point about the definition of sovereignty. I do not want to get too bogged down in the actual definition, but I agree that control matters, and I will say a little more about that.

I will raise the definition of digital sovereignty cited in the House of Commons Library briefing, which accompanies this debate, which is

“the agency and capacity of any organisation to make intelligent, informed choices to shape its digital future by design.”

On that basis, choosing between Amazon Web Services and Microsoft for our data centre is technology sovereignty. I also think that if British sovereignty depends on our leaders’ ability to make intelligent choices, they spent a lot of our history not having sovereignty.

The Library definition came from a global consultancy called Public Digital. Emily Middleton, the interim director for digital transformation in DSIT, was previously a partner at Public Digital. It rules out digital independence and says that our goal should be intelligent dependence. Can the Minister say whether he is aiming for intelligent dependence?

The definition I like best, however, is that sovereignty is whatever a sovereign power says it is—that is what sovereignty means. The UK has extraordinary technological human capital resources, particularly in AI, where we are probably third in the world, but also in clean energy, quantum synthetic biology and much more. Our human capital means that we are not just any mid-sized country; we can aim higher than intelligent dependence. Elon Musk chose to turn off Ukraine’s Starlink capacity at a critical time in Ukraine’s defence of its sovereignty against Putin’s illegal aggression. None of us wants the UK to be in such a position of dependence.

[Dr Al Pinkerton (Surrey Heath) (LD)]

The hon. Lady mentions Britain’s extraordinary human capital. In my role as my party’s Europe spokesperson, of late I have been speaking to very large international defence firms, which thrive in the UK intellectual environment. They have great links with universities, but they say to me that they are increasingly looking to move some of the start-ups that have been created in the UK into Europe, so that they can assemble rapidly the kinds of teams that they need to take those initial ideas and scale them up. Does she agree that having a closer working relationship with our European partners and colleagues, allowing that freedom of movement to return, could be an enormous benefit—counterintuitively perhaps—to our sovereign capacity?

[Dame Chi Onwurah]

The level of interest shows just what an important issue this is. I will come on to discuss some aspects of collaboration as it relates to sovereignty, but I observe that the last time our sovereignty as a mid-sized power was seriously debated was during Brexit, and the slogan “Take back control” reflected the sense that too much sovereignty had been ceded to the European Union without an honest debate with the British people. As a member of the Labour party, I know that we are stronger together and that that can require some loss of autonomy to deliver results, which actually make people more secure, but that must not be done without an honest debate.

Let us look at the four specific sovereignty challenges, the first of which is critical infrastructure and cloud data dependency. The Competition and Markets Authority found that cloud services in Britain are dominated by AWS at 40% to 50%, and Microsoft at 30%. Crown Hosting is meant to be our sovereign hosting capability, but it only hosts 4% of Government legacy services. Both Amazon Web Services and Oracle claim to offer a sovereign cloud—they do say to deal with the difficult part in the title!

The second issue I want to look at is the hot topic of AI. There is no Brit large language model but there is the ambition to transform our public services and industry through AI. The AI opportunities action plan repeatedly references sovereign AI and sovereign compute without defining them. The major AI companies Google, Anthropic, OpenEye, Microsoft and DeepSeek are all headquartered abroad. DeepMind formed Google’s AI capability and was founded right here in the UK before being bought. What capability does the UK now have in AI? What minimum capability does the Minister think we need? How do we respond to the EU Cloud and AI Development Act, which may exclude UK companies?