Technology Adoption Review

Lord Hampton Excerpts

Monday 15th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lloyd of Effra (Lab)]

The technology review and many others have identified that there is no silver bullet in respect of technology adoption. What is needed in the creative industries is perhaps completely different from what is needed in the energy sector, for example. The review’s approach and its adoption into the industrial strategy is to match the needs of a particular sector with a set of technological or digital approaches. Beneath that are some common themes—for example, on skills, connectivity or infrastructure. We have to look at it in that way: measures cut across the economy and specific measures are suited to subsectors.

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, as a teacher, when anybody in the House says, “We need to teach people stuff”, I keep on saying, “Why do we not teach it in schools and why do we not teach it properly?”

[Baroness Lloyd of Effra (Lab)]

The question of digital skills and media literacy is probably most relevant to this area. The noble Lord will have seen that the curriculum and assessment review, which came out recently, has taken into account the need to update our approach to embrace both the risks and the opportunities of the digital world and AI.