Dr Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test) (Lab)

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I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

Hon. Members will be sad to know that I have failed in the ballot to be one of the 2,000 supporters to watch Southampton Football Club this Saturday. I will reflect on that, but I have already sat here for much longer than 90 minutes in near-freezing conditions, watching two equally matched teams slug it out together, so I am not too upset about it. That is the last thing I will say about the unpleasant conditions in this Committee Room.

I hope this clause will be seen as helpful to the Secretary of State and as an addition to the armoury of this Bill in dealing with the multitude of different circumstances under which influence may be sought, or technologies and sensitive information may be acquired, as we have discussed. It seeks to give the Secretary of State an exercisable power under the clause 1 call-in powers and it follows on from what my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford South said in the previous debate.

Start-ups may be invested in by venture capitalists, but those venture capitalists may turn out to be bodies that are effectively seeking to gain influence in the start-up or small company, by means of investing in it. They are not seeking to control it, or to control either the entity or the asset, in terms of the meaning in section 8 or 9, but to put themselves in a position where it is pretty impossible for those companies to resist providing information to that limited partner.

In the UK, British start-ups effectively rely on foreign investment. In 2019, 90% of large tech investment rounds included US or Asian investors, according to Atomico’s “The State of European Tech.” There are many circumstances in what we might call our UK venture capital ecosystem in which that kind of sourcing of funds is a regular state of affairs. Venture capital-reliant firms in this country are now receiving millions of pounds from Chinese investors, as my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford South has enumerated for us.

Those venture capital investments do not end up, and are not supposed to end up, with the seeking of material control of those companies. As I have said, it would be difficult—practically impossible—for that venture capital-based firm to deny its limited partner investors access to technological information from portfolio companies. In such cases, especially when limited partner investments in the fund take place after an initial trigger event, those would be missed by the Bill as it currently stands. Indeed, that is made tougher still by the fact that most venture capital funds do not publish the names of limited partners. So the Government would not even know when those investments happen and when access to information passes into potentially hostile hands. That series of circumstances is becoming pretty widespread in the high-tech world, and does not appear to be focused on very accurately by the provisions already in the Bill.

What the amendment seeks to do, as I have mentioned, is enable the Secretary of State—if it is considered by the Secretary of State to be an issue that warrants further consideration—to make regulations for the provision of that call-in power outside the terms of clause 9 of the Bill. I think that is a potentially very positive additional power that would reside in the Bill and would be an additional piece of armoury in the hands of the Secretary of State on the basis of what we think is a continuing expansion of investment which may have malicious intent to scoop up, by that venture capital arrangement, a slice of sensitive information.

I was thinking about the equivalent of Chinese dragons in “Dragons’ Den”, taking a portion of the company in return for having a hand in that company’s investments. In a sense, that is what venture capitalists will do under these circumstances. Although the control of the company, as we see in “Dragons’ Den”, remains very much in the hands of the person who has gone into the den in the first place, the investment in that company is nevertheless a source of very substantial leverage in what the company does, what information it provides and what sensitive information it gives out.

I offer this new clause in what I hope will be seen as a very constructive spirit. The clause endeavours to strengthen the Bill by providing a particular option to the Secretary of State, when looking at the entire landscape of how influence is sought, at how sensitive information may be provided and at how assets may effectively be acquired.