Digital and Technology Policy: National Sovereignty
House of Lords · Lords Chamber · 23 Jul 2026 · 28 speeches · Official Report
Motion to Take Note
Moved by
That this House takes note of the impact of digital and technology policy on national sovereignty.
My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords taking part in this debate. I pay particular tribute to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford for his leadership in advocating for digital systems to reflect our ethics and values, who today makes his valedictory speech. Anyone who has heard me speak about technology over the past 15 years could be forgiven for thinking that I do not much like it. Nothing could be further from the truth. I love what technology makes possible. I rely on it for my health; I use artificial intelligence every day; and I still marvel that I can speak face to face with people on the other side of the world as though they were in the room. My criticism has never been of what technology can do, but rather of the political and economic choices that we have allowed to shape its development. Technology is not an independent force that arrives from nowhere. It reflects the interests, incentives and values of those who build it, finance it and control it. Technology now underpins every area of public and private life, so digital policy is no longer simply about innovation, information or efficiency. It is a constitutional issue that raises serious questions about sovereignty, including whether Governments retain the practical ability to govern in the interests of their own citizens. That is why I secured this debate. At heart, sovereignty is the capacity to choose. Sovereignty means that Parliament makes the laws, government governs, regulators...
My Lords, we stand today at a moment of profound vulnerability for the United Kingdom. Our economic security, our national safety and even our long-term sovereignty are at massive risk because we do not yet host or own enough of our own computing infrastructure, our own cloud services or our own advanced AI capabilities. By relying so heavily on foreign businesses and Governments far from our shores, we leave ourselves exposed to the possibility of remote disablement, restriction or withdrawal of the very systems that our society, our public services and our businesses increasingly depend on. Today, the UK relies almost entirely on American and Chinese companies for the most capable AI models. Recent events, including the United States restricting access to one of Anthropic’s most advanced systems, show how fragile that dependence is. In a world where AI increasingly underpins economic growth and national security, Britain must develop homegrown capabilities. Yes, we have a sovereign AI fund, but it is just a fraction of what our neighbours are pursuing. Other nations are already building sovereign AI systems at scale. The United States, China and the European Union are investing billions into domestic computing infrastructure, national-level model development and secure AI infrastructure. France has launched a sovereign AI initiative centred on national cloud and compute capacity, the UAE is developing its own frontier-led models, and countries such as Japan, South Korea...
My Lords, it is time for the formal and ritual congratulations to the noble Baroness, Kidron, not merely on starting the debate but for recognising her enormous energy, concentration and focus on the real issues, which I am glad we are debating now at the end of this term. Of course, the key issue is who holds power and how on earth, in the new conditions in which power is shifting all the time, we will maintain some control-the noble Baroness who has just spoken rightly reminded us of this-over areas that we can realistically control, rather than pursuing hopes and slogans that would only raise hopes when nothing can be done. I say, incidentally, that the slogan “Take back control” is one of the silliest, most immature and most useless slogans that has been thrown into the political debate over the last decade or so. That is not the question; it gives us no guidance as to how on earth we establish the new powers, how we can contribute to them, or how we retain the areas where sovereignty has obviously been completely changed and partly dissolved from what existed 20, 30 or 40 years ago. Where does it lie now? It lies increasingly, as the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, and others know perfectly well, with the great platforms-I am not sure whether it is the four American ones, the two or three Chinese ones or other platforms that are emerging. We try our best in some areas, but it is with the platforms that the power exists. The question is how on earth we are to identify areas...
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for facilitating this debate on such an important topic. It is, as always, a pleasure to follow my noble friend, who makes such thoughtful contributions. I want to concentrate on artificial intelligence. As I think we all know, alongside magnificent opportunities, it presents many risks. The greatest of those risks is not intelligence or what the technology can do, but the concentration of power in too few companies, in too few countries and, ultimately, in too few hands. We have seen the consequences-the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, has talked about some of them-when digital markets become dominated by a small number of powerful platforms: reduced competition, weaker innovation and increased dependency. The question, therefore, is not whether concentration of power matters-it plainly does-but how we respond. I share with many noble Lords the concern that the UK should not become dependent on a handful of foreign tech companies for critical digital capabilities, but I am not convinced that the answer is more regulation. The largest and most dominant frontier model developers benefit if Governments believe that only they can be allowed to develop safely the most powerful AI. They benefit from a resulting policy debate in which ever greater risks are assumed to require ever greater regulation. That, to me, is the real danger of regulatory capture. Regulation introduced in the name of safety can become a barrier to...
My Lords, my congratulations and gratitude go to the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for securing this debate. Though it feels like we have an almost weekly debate in your Lordships’ House on one aspect or another of AI, I think it is most welcome, given that this is one of the most concerning, unregulated areas that affects our daily lives, and is likely to remain so in the future. Nevertheless, there has been little debate about how our national sovereignty is being slowly eroded, in real time, by those who control our data, our infrastructure and our algorithms. Most worryingly, they are not bound by our laws. I believe we are standing at a critical crossroads. As we have heard from noble Lords who spoke before me, not controlling our own digital destiny risks our becoming a digital colony of the American monopolies and being subject to powers who are, let us say, our fleeting friends. That is why I strongly welcome Prime Minister Burnham’s decision to bring the AI Minister, Kanishka Narayan, to the Cabinet table. This structural promotion signals and recognises that artificial intelligence is the very foundation of our future national security and public services, ensuring economic growth. However, while this is a welcome change, our defensive and regulatory framework remains dangerously behind the curve. Building fences for the large language models of today could mean being completely defenceless against the autonomous threats of tomorrow. I agree with what the noble...
My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to take part in this debate, and I add to the plaudits directed at the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, who has prosecuted her agenda on digital safety and digital rights for more than a decade with acute skill and has certainly moved the dial on many occasions. May I also say how pleased I am that the Minister has survived the reshuffle cull? As she knows, I had a small desire that she would move to the environment department, so that we could refer to her as Baroness Lloyd of Effra of Defra, but we will have to wait. And may I say how sad I am that the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, has left the Government? She was an absolutely excellent Minister. I declare my interest as an adviser to Digital Futures, which deploys AI engineers into companies and assesses their AI capabilities. In November, the House of Lords Science and Tech Committee described the UK tech economy as an incubator economy. More recently, Amanda Brock from OpenUK made the point that we should not seek, when we talk about AI sovereignty, to build the whole AI tech stack by ourselves. Somewhere between those two statements lies the way forward, because we are in an interconnected world: we cannot simply ignore the rest of the world, but we must do better than be the incubator economy we have been for so many years. We must support British companies to scale and grow in this area. Let me make five recommendations to the Government. The first is obviously to invest in...
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for securing this debate and for a powerful and incisive introduction which rightly identified that what we are talking about today is a constitutional issue-among the many that the British state currently faces, which has a lot to do with the state of Britain today. Governments must be able to make decisions and laws for the good of the British people, not for the profits of a few foreign Governments or at the behest of a capricious foreign regime. That is not what is happening in the digital area. As the noble Baroness outlined, and others have referred to, we see a situation where decisions are made once. A contract is awarded in a choice between two or maybe three giant companies out of the handful that might have put in for it. Then we are locked in, unable to go anywhere else because the costs of changing horses would be too great. We must acknowledge that the UK has a terrible record on sovereignty. This is not an isolated issue, and here I respectfully entirely disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Howell. The slogan “Take back control” in the last decade showed that the public understood this problem very clearly. That concern was entirely misdirected-it was directed to the east when it perhaps should have been directed to the west-but none the less the public could see the problem that was arising. Another example which fits nicely with this is the issue of secret courts for ISDS-investor-state dispute settlement...
My Lords, I refer to my membership of a number of APPGs on digital inclusion. I also congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, on securing this debate today. Like her, I am not against technology, AI or any of the platforms that exist. However, I worry about the numbers of people who remain excluded from being able to utilise it for their own knowledge and protection. That is why I wanted to speak in this debate. A few days ago, I was watching a television programme about two types of intelligence: artificial intelligence and latent or civilizational intelligence, which we as human beings have had over centuries in our capacity to learn, to retain and to pass on. It made me think about this debate today. While we can talk about the wider implications of a few companies having such an impact on us in the UK and more widely, it made me think about it being a new form of colonisation across the world, one in which there is very little power in the hands of leaders who do not have access to the complex technologies that exist in only a very few countries on the planet. While we are very keen to cut down the time it takes to get answers, it also removes the ability for a large majority of people to be part of a debate in which they can fully question what is happening to them. The role of government and Houses such as this is to scrutinise what we are going to deliver and lay out for the majority of the population of the country we serve. I felt quite helpless when I thought...
My Lords, I, too, welcome the initiative from the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron. I have just finished her book, and it is a good read, but I have only one niggle: I really gasp at the cost of hardbacks. Maybe I am stingy, but they told me it is a whole year or so until there is a paperback so more people can read it. That was just a thought-I digress and should get back to the point. I welcome my noble friend the Minister back to her place, and I am happy that she can continue her work in this important area. Digital sovereignty means agency. It is such a profound thing: the capacity for we in this country to make choices about everything, from the online safety of our children to the smooth running of our economy. That is a vast area in which to have damaged sovereignty, or a sovereignty gap. Yet, we are now in the simple position whereby a handful of US firms own the digital infrastructure the UK economy runs on, including search browsers, the cloud, app distribution and business software. As my noble friend said, those same companies are now also monopolising the AI stack. In simple terms, this leaves UK firms, public services and consumers dependent on suppliers who are governed elsewhere. That is a very profound thing. We need to understand it, but the more difficult part is how we deal with that reality. This process did not begin with this Government-it is of neither their making, nor the last Government’s, nor the Government before that. It began in one country in the...
My Lords, it is a pleasure to take part in this debate. In doing so, I declare my relevant technology interests as adviser to the Crown Estate and to Simmons & Simmons LLP. I must start by congratulating my friend, the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, on her brilliant and blistering introduction to this debate. The noble Baroness is having quite a month of it: this debate today, a new book out and a fantastic White Paper published just last week. I know it is only a matter of time-and quite right-before moviegoers will be treated to “Baroness Beeban: The Biopic”. I will be speaking with Christopher Nolan later today. The departmental chairs have been rearranged. What does this mean, though, for digital sovereignty? Yesterday, the Minister, Jonathan Reynolds, described the new department as a “genuinely new beast”. Make of that what you will, but largely, the technology industry was dismayed that DSIT is no more. I ask the Minister: can they all be wrong? We also have GDS on the move. Rather than being the positive, impactful, cross-departmental force, it will now be within DCMS, so it will be part of a department, giving a departmental view with a departmental Secretary of State, seeking to influence other different government departments. How will this play out? Similarly, we have the separation of AI sovereignty and digital infrastructure, now relying on co-ordination where before we had effective oversight. How will this benefit digital sovereignty? We have the AI Security...
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, and I thank him for all his work. Echoing all the praises, I, too, express my gratitude to my friend, the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for her very powerful leadership, including in this debate. My contribution today is framed in the context of having organised numerous discussions and meetings in relation to the APPG on digital transformation, of which I declare my membership, and policy on technology as it affects society. In this context, sovereignty is a matter of national security, and promoting our national security is an absolute objective for all Members of the House of Lords and across the other House. For their support, I acknowledge the Library briefing, ControlAI, and Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh for her ambitious efforts in relation to advancing sovereign AI stack, which I will make some reference to later. I also thank Dowshan Humzah for his precious time, wisdom and foresight. Sovereignty used to be visible: in borders, laws, currency and armed forces. Today, much of it is indiscernible: it sits in cloud contracts, chips, codes, data and algorithms. The question is not whether Britain can govern Britain; as the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, said, it is whether Britain can still choose when the systems supporting our public services, businesses and families are designed, owned and operated elsewhere, outside our legal reach. Digital sovereignty is therefore not technological isolation. Britain cannot, and...
Excuse me.
I am finishing. We must do everything we can to ensure that AI does not become sovereign over Britain. We cannot wait for others to determine the future of our citizens and our children.
I must ask the noble Baroness to conclude her remarks, please.
We must invent it with honour and dignity for human lives.
My Lords, I remind some Members that the speaking time limit is six minutes for Back-Benchers. I urge all noble Lords to keep within that limit so that the debate may conclude within the time allowed, without cutting short the Minister’s remarks.
My Lords, I declare my interests as a science entrepreneur and, in particular, my roles as chairman and shareholder in Locai Labs and Freevolt Technologies. I add my congratulations to the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, on securing this debate and, frankly, her outstanding impact in campaigning against the harms of big tech, which were brilliantly set out in her recent book. On tech sovereignty, the public are well ahead of Westminster. On AI, they are both alarmed and impatient. Polling published last month found that 80% of the UK public distrust our Government’s ability to control AI at all. The dependency they sense is real and structural. US hyperscalers dominate the UK cloud market. Despite us being a leading nation in AI science, the UK has failed to invest in the infrastructure needed to enable our science to scale a modern industry. It has allowed the infrastructure it does have to be controlled by US companies. This risk is not hypothetical. Under the US CLOUD Act, American authorities can compel a US-owned provider to disclose data held anywhere in the world, including data held in its UK-resident data centres. Asked under oath by the French Senate whether he could guarantee that French citizens’ data would never be handed over, Microsoft France’s legal director answered: no. When Washington sanctioned officials of the International Criminal Court, its chief prosecutor lost his Microsoft email and a Canadian judge lost her Google and Amazon accounts. Yet in this...
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Drayson. We share our views on the Science and Technology Committee. I know his passion and commitment for British technology. I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for securing this debate at this crucial time, and declare my interests in supporting British tech businesses VE3, Great Wave AI and Automated Analytics and as a co-founder of the Business AI Alliance. Future generations will look back at this period of the 21st century as the moment we unlocked the next stage of human potential. Through our advancements in science and technology, we stand on the cusp of dramatically accelerating change in our lives, our societies and perhaps even our politics. In a relatively short time, we will see legions of driverless vehicles, flocks of flying taxis, oodles of agentic digital money, armies of personal robots, precision preventive medicine, and wearable and even bionic enhancements. I believe we shall solve some of the greatest challenges of our age. We shall redefine what we mean by work and leisure. We shall create, discover and travel further than we have ever travelled before, even to the stars. This is all to come but at this still early stage of our technological evolution, we must think carefully about the foundations upon which these extraordinary achievements will be built. Beneath the excitement lies a rather traditional contest between nation states for technological supremacy. That brings me to the...
My Lords, I too begin by thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for once again bringing us together for this important conversation at a moment in time when AI is emerging as the operating system of all our lives. In May, I cautioned this House that frontier AI systems were shaping our world, that we were being controlled by an extraordinarily narrow concentration of power, capital and data, and that most nations were not participating in that process but inheriting it. I return to that argument today because it is no longer a forecast. It is now a fact pattern. Frontier AI capability sits overwhelmingly in the hands of a few companies headquartered mainly in the United States and China. Every other nation participates by permission, not by right. That permission can be withdrawn arbitrarily in an instant. We saw this explicitly on 12 June, when the US Department of Commerce directive forced Anthropic to suspend access to its most advanced model, Claude Fable, for foreign nationals worldwide, including its own foreign national researchers. They were unable to touch the model they had built because of the passport they held. Access was restored on 1 July. However, sovereignty was not. The UK has no seat at the table. Taken together, this incident, along with this week’s reports of an autonomous AI agent powered by OpenAI models escaping its research sandbox and interacting with the Hugging Face open-source repository, illustrate a profound shift now under way. Our security...
My Lords, it is a real honour to take part in this debate, and I join others in thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for her penetrating analysis. In the words of our new Prime Minister on the steps of Downing Street a few days ago: “Britain needs to show the world that we can regain our stability once again”. Stability is a deeply Christian virtue, as well as in many other world faiths. The psalms speak of God as a rock, our refuge and strength, and our very present help in times of trouble. The rule of Benedict, with his emphasis on stability and faithfulness, underpins many of our institutions, from schools, hospitals and universities to our great cathedrals. In recent years, new technology has become one of the many factors at work in undermining our stability as a nation. There are many gains from technology, but as we know there are existential risks to mental health, our climate, cohesion, truth, relationships, community, patterns of work, the distribution of power-which affects every part of society-and the international order. The risks inherent in AI are, in part, a product of its accelerating speed of development. Many speak now, and the language has been properly used this afternoon, of a race to artificial general intelligence and frontier AI. The speed of change and the significant power unleashed make this revolution distinct from other technical developments in the past, because there is a risk that the speed of change will itself undermine the very...
My Lords, I declare an interest as a consultant to DLA Piper on AI policy and regulation and as chair of the board of the Authors’ Licensing Collecting Society. I join other noble Lords in congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Lloyd, on her reappointment, but the bed of nails that is having a debate on the last day of term comes with it. It is both a privilege and a sadness to follow the right reverend Prelate in his valedictory speech. Before turning to the substance of this debate, I hope that the House will allow me to say a brief word about him. He has, unusually, served both as a Bishop of Sheffield and of Oxford in this House, the latter for exactly 10 years this month. Bishop Steven has been an influential and instrumental voice on artificial intelligence in this House, a member of our original House of Lords Select Committee on AI and crucial in developing the principles for AI development set out by the committee. We just avoided designating them our 10 AI commandments. He was a founding board member of the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation, and is someone who has always put the ethical and human dimension of these technologies-dignity, trust, the value of work and human flourishing-first. He was a co-founder member of the House of Lords Select Committee on the Environment and Climate Change. He anticipated the NEETs and AI human flourishing debate by emphasising the importance of adequately preparing young people for changing economic and technological...
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...
My Lords, I welcome the opportunity to respond to this debate and I, too, thank the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for bringing forward the discussion on this significant issue. Despite the fact that we discuss the important issues of AI once or possibly twice a week, I always find that noble Lords raise additional points for thought and reflection to discuss with colleagues afterwards. I will endeavour to respond to the points made today, and if I do not, I will follow up afterwards. To respond immediately to the questions on the publication of a digital sovereignty strategy, we have heard this request from one of the committees and from your Lordships and are reflecting on it, but I cannot at this stage confirm that we will be publishing such a strategy as proposed by a number of your Lordships today. This debate raises fundamental questions concerning our economy, society and national security. The question of how we ensure that the remarkable capabilities of modern technology work in the interests of society, support economic strength, protect citizens in the UK and around the world, and remain rooted in British values is incredibly important. As many noble Lords have mentioned today, the UK has huge strengths: subsea cable connectivity; telecoms companies investing in and connecting citizens throughout the UK; our world-leading universities; and incredible companies involved space, autonomous vehicles and chips. As the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford, reminded us,...
My Lords, I start by disappointing the noble Lord, Lord Holmes: there will be no biopic about me, but Oxford University is currently building a “Baroness Bee” chatbot that might help my productivity. I apologise for the cost of the hardback book, but let me say that I have donated one to the Library; that is the importance of culture and sharing in our communities. I am very often met with a level of surprise at the sophistication of this House on this subject. There are a lot of people inside and outside the technology sector who do not quite believe that there is such a depth of knowledge and passion-I mean that in the best possible way-on this subject. Today’s debate is indicative of that. A number of noble Lords used the words “full stack”-we do not have enough capacity to do the full stack. Then I realised that I had written it down as “full-fat” sovereignty. I think we can all agree that we are not going to have full-fat sovereignty, but there were so many ideas in today’s debate that it adds up to a strategy. I say to the Minister, with deepest respect, that the list that she was asked to give us is a series of activities. Some of them are very important and some are very welcome, but it is not yet a strategy. Across the House, there were only two disagreements. The first was on whether “Take back control” was a good slogan. I think we can leave that to one side. The other was on whether we should have open-weight models and regulation, or just open-weight models. We...
Motion agreed.