AI and Creative Technologies (Communications and Digital Committee Report)

Viscount Stansgate Excerpts

Friday 13th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Stansgate (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to be able to make a short contribution in the gap. I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, and the members and staff of her committee on producing such an excellent report. I thought her opening remarks well encapsulated the issue we face. I also congratulate the two maiden speakers. They were of contrasting kinds, but they will make great contributions to the House in future, and I am sure that they both feel much better for having made them.

In some ways, this is a well-timed debate, with the comprehensive spending review on Wednesday; it would have been more helpful to have had it in the context of the industrial strategy that we are expecting, but that will come soon. I thought the report’s main thrust and conclusions have targeted something absolutely fundamental to the UK economy. There have been so many excellent speeches in today’s debate that I will recommend today’s copy of Hansard, because I think we should keep it to hand.

I came to make one point in this debate, and that is to connect it with others that are going on in the same way elsewhere in the House. I find that the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, who is not in his place at the moment, made exactly the point that I came here to make—that is part of the trouble of speaking at the end. I should add that we work together on the Foundation for Science and Technology, and in the declaration of interests I declare mine as president of the Parliamentary and Scientific Committee.

The point I want to make is that other debates are going on that directly bear on today’s. Take the House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology’s report earlier this year on engineering biology. That is an amazingly exciting area, which might in the future, for example, enable us to grow sustainable aircraft fuel and so on. We were world leaders in what was called synthetic biology a decade ago, and we are now losing our lead. When our Science and Technology Committee produced a report earlier this year, our title was Don’t Fail to Scale, which is very much in line with one of the themes of today’s debate.

My second example is about space. We now have a space committee looking at aspects of the space economy, which will be extremely important to the UK in future. There are many different ways in which space is vital to the operation of the UK economy. Some of the things already being talked about for the future include, for example, growing antibodies in space, which, because of microgravity, are of such pure quality that they could be immensely more effective when brought back to earth and used in medical applications. Companies of the future may develop along those lines and we will be making a terrible mistake if we do not support them and scale them up.

The opportunities that emerge are now being looked at by the Science and Technology Committee, which is my final example. We are looking at what prevents this country being able to take a stage further forward the wonderful start-ups, incubators and other things we have heard about today. That will be the subject of a debate when we publish our report. We have taken fascinating evidence from venture capitalists and, only on Wednesday, a high-ranking scientist from DARPA.

We need to understand what leads companies such as Oxford Ionics to take the decision it has and be a loss to some extent a loss to this country. The Government’s Mansion House reforms will be very important, and I was interested in what the noble Lord, Lord Massey, said about rebuilding our risk culture.

In conclusion, I hope that when we come to discuss the current report of the Science and Technology Committee, Members here today will come to that as well, because no matter what subtitle you pick—Less Talk, More Action or Don’t Fail to Scale—this is the central issue to the future of the UK economy.