Digital and Technology Policy: National Sovereignty

Viscount Camrose Excerpts

Thursday 23rd July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Camrose (Con)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for securing this important debate, and I thank all those who participated. It has been fascinating throughout and brilliant points have been made from all sides. I welcome the return of the Minister to her place. As ever, the reward for hard work turns out to be more hard work, but I certainly welcome the continuity and wish her well for the future. I add my own thanks and comments to those of the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford. My dealings with him have always been a pleasure and he has shown true leadership on the subject of AI, in bringing the ethical dimension to our deliberations. He will be greatly missed.

I am delighted that we all recognise the growing importance of and the complex dynamics behind this debate. The risk of the erosion of Britain’s strategic position in digital technologies is real. The capacity of most nation states to shape their own digital future is far lower than we might imagine or wish. From critical national infrastructure to our public services, the need to strengthen our sovereign capability is both acute and growing in urgency.

The British Government need to be working towards a coherent holistic sovereignty strategy—one that assesses our strengths and weaknesses relative to the full range of sovereignty risks and that sets out a path to fortify our position. But, in a quandary familiar to noble Lords who take an interest in the cyber security Bill, we are trying to assess Britain’s digital sovereignty policy without the Government having first published a comprehensive digital sovereignty strategy. As of this week, we do not even know which ministry to ask for such a strategy.

I fully accept that Ministers have set out various measures, including the sovereign AI fund, the compute road map and some industrial strategy initiatives, but where is that overarching programme? Where is the White Paper that brings all these elements together? Where is the strategy and where is the explanation of how these disparate powers and initiatives fit within a broader holistic approach to protecting our digital economy and strategic resilience?

I turn now to the nature of the risk and some of the boundaries of our actions. I will not try to repeat or outdo the brilliant summary of those risks by the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, but I offer a further refinement. The risks to sovereignty come in different forms but public discussion often focuses on the extreme end of the risk spectrum: the catastrophic loss of access to or control of our digital systems as a result of decisions made in other countries, which we have heard about from a number of noble Lords. But while we must constantly bear that risk in mind, there are a range of more probable, if lower-impact, risks that deserve more attention than they often receive.

We may find that, even while our systems continue to function, we lose access to the most advanced capabilities or cede control of our data. When our hospitals, energy systems, financial infrastructure and Armed Forces depend on technologies to which we lack genuine alternatives, we face the risk of strategic disadvantage. Of course, the further we fall behind, the more we risk depending on others for the innovations that confer competitive advantage.

I worry that we are edging towards strategic drift. We need clear answers to essential questions. Where is sovereignty genuinely essential, perhaps starting with defence and cyber, and how do we retain it? Where sovereignty is not achievable, how do we become indispensable? Where neither sovereignty nor indispensability are possible, how do we develop resilience? Perhaps when the Minister responds, she can explain how the Government intend to answer these questions, in addition to the excellent point about measuring the results of their intervention, made by the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron. Maybe the inquiry brilliantly proposed by my noble friend Lady Shields is the right step forward as we develop a holistic strategy.

I am sure many noble Lords will agree that the stakes are highest in artificial intelligence. The noble Baroness, Lady Berger, set that out clearly and well. At a certain level of artificial superintelligence, at which it becomes impossible to control, our species is in mortal danger. There is universal agreement that we must collaborate to protect ourselves against this. However, there is a level of AI beneath that, at which its developer attains permanently unassailable strategic, commercial and military advantage—the “winner takes all” model. We heard the leaders of the AI labs, and indeed the People’s Republic of China, earlier this month, calling for international safety collaboration and regulation while, behind closed doors, remaining in hot pursuit of those sovereign AI models that confer on them unprecedented power. The “winner takes all” dynamic in AI means that public commitments to safety measures, even if made sincerely, are systematically subordinated to the strategic imperative of technical advance.

This raises troubling questions about the adequacy of a strategy that relies primarily on inward investment from large, foreign, technology companies. As the previous Prime Minister’s approach prioritised short-term inward investment over long-term sovereign capability, will the new Government alter that calculus?

I suggest that there are available to us at least three levers to address the sovereignty problem. The first is the use of open-source and open-weight models, as my noble friend Lady Stowell set out so well and clearly, to build AI tools and, in so doing, to develop sovereign capability around building our applications from their foundations. This would not just reduce the costs of and time for development but also reduce the “winner takes all” incentives of the AI labs that are driving the AI industry towards what I might call a Darwinian oligopoly—and, eventually, monopoly—of sovereign solutions. Can the Minister confirm what proportion of the sovereign AI unit’s funding is directed towards open-source components of the AI stack?

The second lever is government procurement, as others have observed, both central and local. Here I should declare my interests, as set out in the register, in early-stage tech ventures. The state continues to be the largest technology buyer in the United Kingdom. We are very fortunate here in the range and technical accomplishment of our start-ups, but the state does not buy enough from our early-stage tech ventures. We often worry here, as my noble friend Lord Vaizey described, about how to convert more of our start-ups to scale-ups. A large part of the answer is for the state to be more open to being their customer. The noble Lord, Lord Drayson, set this out brilliantly. This creates credibility and cashflow for the start-up, and it brings innovation and productivity to the state. As they show us every day in the United States, it creates the sovereign technologies of the future. I refer noble Lords to Oracle, Palantir, SpaceX and many others, all of which started out through government procurement in the United States.

Will the Minister outline what proportion of government procurement in digital technologies is currently directed towards early-stage British tech ventures? What benchmark are the Government using to assess whether procurement is being deployed effectively in the service of sovereignty? I am going to accelerate to the end of my speech, otherwise the Whip will need to hurry me along. I have written too much, but I say briefly that better use of the digital markets Act is going to be the third lever, and I feel we should make more and greater use of that.

In conclusion, I ask the Government to provide as soon as possible a comprehensive digital sovereignty strategy, clear criteria for determining where Britain invests in direct sovereignty versus strategic leverage, a coherent procurement strategy aligned with sovereign and capability objectives, an explanation of how digital competition policy serves sovereignty rather than undermining it, and clarity on the data and copyright policy that preserves our strategic leverage. These seem to be critical and urgent questions. I, too, deeply regret that we no longer have a single front door to a ministry that can answer them all, and that those civil servants who could be focused on answering them will instead spend the coming months in a complex reorganisation.