Bletchley Park

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho Excerpts

Wednesday 12th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho (CB)]

My Lords, as a novice Baroness and a woman who has worked in technology her whole career, an invitation to tea from the noble Baroness, Lady Trumpington, in the first few weeks in your Lordships’ House was indeed a highlight. Hearing her this evening, I defy anyone of my generation not to be inspired by her example. I am not an expert on the situation at Bletchley, but I would like to suggest three ideas which I hope illustrate why it still has wide-ranging significance and must be preserved.

First, today is the 25th anniversary of the invention of the world wide web. It was probably about this time of the day when Sir Tim Berners-Lee gave to his boss the piece of paper on which he had written down his invention, and on which his boss famously wrote “vague but interesting”, and handed it back.

Like the millions of lives that were saved due to the direct work at Bletchley, the web has transformed millions of lives, and both are achievements that this country should be immensely proud of and grateful for. I believe that both Bletchley and the invention of the web could be used more widely as examples of British creativity and possibility. I am not convinced that many people in our country are aware of the history of either.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to spend time in the Science Museum with the computer on which Tim wrote the first code for the web. It has come on loan from CERN, and I felt a bit giddy next to it. We were in a room full of computational history, including Charles Babbage’s analytical engine, the first Lyons tea factory LEO computer and ERNIE—the random number generator that ran the premium bonds. What struck me was how many women were part of the stories of all these computers—from Ada Lovelace to the women working on ERNIE and at Lyons.

Starting with Bletchley and on through the 1950s and 1960s women worked in computing and fuelled the burgeoning computer industry. The unbelievable Dame Stephanie Shirley employed only women in her company, all working remotely at home and on complex problems, from the black box on Concorde to the Polaris submarine. Half the people working at Bletchley were women, yet we are now facing stagnation in the numbers of women in the tech sector. How can Bletchley be more widely used to help reverse this trend? The numbers are depressing.

Finally, I should like to mention coding itself. From September this year, every child at primary school will be taught to code. This is a visionary policy and the Government should be congratulated. We will lead the G8. A number of organisations have been encouraging coding for many years, especially among children—including Young Rewired State, Decoded, Free:Formers, Code Club and #techmums, started by Dr Sue Black. The curriculum shift has also raised the profile of coding, with Hour of Code and Year of Code being particular examples, and demonstrates the power of this incredible language. Yet, there remain a number of challenges in training teachers and it would be sad if this incredible opportunity was not given the best chance of success.

I look at Bletchley and think what an immense shame it would be if it did not continue to be a national treasure. What a tribute it would be to the brave people who worked there in secret for so long if we used it to celebrate more noisily our technology inventions, to encourage more gender equality in the sector and, finally, to inspire a whole new generation of coders.