Societal Impact of AI: Government Policy

Debate between Esther McVey and Emily Darlington

Wednesday 8th July 2026 Westminster Hall

[Emily Darlington (Milton Keynes Central) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms McVey. I have rewritten my speech because I do not want to repeat all the things that have been said. I think we are in agreement, although we may have different perspectives.

I want to take us back to 80 years ago, to a country house a few miles from Milton Keynes in my constituency. A handful of mathematicians built a machine that cracked the enigma code, and it gave birth to modern computing. That was Bletchley Park, where Britain proved that it could outthink the world. That inheritance still runs through Milton Keynes in the data centres rising on our edge, the British Standards Institution at Knowlhill—the oldest standards institute in the world, whose kitemark has told people that a product is safe since 1903—and a plethora of AI start-ups that outnumber Oxford or Cambridge.

Britain is standing at another one of those moments, as we see with our economy and our military tech coming together and pushing forward either for the good of the nation or for its ultimate damage. The potential benefits of artificial intelligence are enormous, and not only for the private sector. AI is a tool that can pull our public services back from years of managed decline. The technology will allow us to detect diseases earlier and cut NHS waiting lists. It will free nurses and other public servants from back-office grind for work that only people can do.

However, every country can see that prize, and the question that decides whether Britain leads or merely buys in is whether we make the technology or just import it. A maker exports its products, services and ideas around the world, as we did in world war two, but the UK is at risk of becoming an AI taker and simply handing over the keys to giant US tech firms that are buying up our best young AI companies. It is still our technology; it is just being bought up, packaged and sold back to us so that we become indebted.

As we are talking about the impact on our economy and our society, I want to point to Palantir, which has the contract with the NHS. We know that UK companies could do exactly the same work, because I and many Members present have spoken to them. Even more concerning is that the Ministry of Defence now uses the company. With the activist Government in the US turning off technology and restricting its availability outside the US, that puts at risk not only our NHS but, most importantly, the defence of our realm against Russia, for which others may have more sympathy than we do.

There is also a social cost, as people look at a company such as Palantir and say that it does not reflect their values. It is used by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and by Israel to target Gaza. That has a huge impact on public trust. It is also bad for the UK economy and innovation, because it crowds out UK firms that could have those public contracts. That is just one example of a dependency that is putting us at risk both socially and economically.

It does not have to be that way. British AI firms need three things to succeed: customers who will buy their products, the ability to increase supply to meet demand, and a USP that British AI is the most trusted. The Government can help with all three. First, we have to act as a good customer. Why should those NHS and MOD contracts not go to British AI firms? Not only would that increase trust, but those products would be developed in a way that meets our needs; we would not be buying something that had been developed elsewhere. That would also mean that we had to invest in the entire British AI stack—it must be British from start to finish.

The second issue is supply. We need to make sure that we have the compute power we need and that we are not relying on US firms again for that. We are overly reliant: despite the fact that we part-own Crown Hosting, that accounts for only 6% of public sector data; the rest is nearly all on Amazon Web Services, which is a significant risk. We need to look at how we diffuse the supply of compute power—the underused capacity—to increase that.

Finally, we need to increase AI take-up across British businesses by building trusted products. The British Standards Institution is at the heart of that. It does not always have to be about regulation; it can be about standards that lift everything up. What attracts the world to the BSI is that it is known for doing that and its standards become international, so we get first-market advantage.

This partnership model of an industrial strategy is mission-driven, creates public trust, evaluates the impact on society and creates opportunities for our ideas and innovation to flourish. That is something we did with the innovations at Bletchley Park. We need to become an innovation leader again—an AI maker, not just an AI taker, which puts us at risk.

[Esther McVey (in the Chair)]

As three Members wish to speak, the time limit for speeches is three to four minutes, because we are going to the Front Benchers at 3.30 pm.