Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what discussions his Department has had with individual academics and academic bodies on the potential benefits of distributed ledger technology for public services.

In the report ‘Distributed Ledger Technology: beyond block chain’ (Jan 2016), Government Office for Science makes the case for how the technology has the potential to transform the delivery of public services. The report includes details of a range of academics consulted in its development.

Following publication of the report, and working alongside the Department for Digital, Culture Media and Sport, officials from BEIS, GO Science and from other Government departments have continued these wide ranging discussions. Officials have met with academics from a number of UK universities, including the Imperial College Centre for Cryptocurrency Research; the University College London Centre for Blockchain Technologies; the Department of Informatics at King's College London; and the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge.