Daniel Zeichner

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Ms Vaz. I congratulate the Chair of the Select Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne Central and West (Dame Chi Onwurah). I have three quick anecdotal points and then a question for the Minister. Data sovereignty has been part of my life. I started my career as a trainee computer programmer at Shire Hall in Cambridge. My prime job was to carry the punch cards to the punch room to make sure that payroll ran properly. Anyone who dropped them was the least popular person in the entire institution, and at that time, the idea that that could be triggered by someone from elsewhere in the world would have seemed fanciful. A decade later, I was working for a major insurance company. We were struggling to deal with multiple records for the same clients, and we brought in the Americans. They were big people from Texas—really big people. When they went to the coffee machine, they came back with two coffees and two bags of crisps. But they could not solve the essential problem, and the question still remained: who was in control of the data? Fast-forward two further decades, and I am MP for Cambridge. A major American software provider came to talk to me about the cloud, and the same question arose again. I asked, “Where is the data?” They said they would build more data centres in the UK. I know that it is more complicated than that, but the question of sovereignty and independence is also partly about people. We have to maintain our own workforce. Let me quickly raise with the Minister an issue that has been coming up very strongly to the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee: funding changes at UK Research and Innovation. I think that this is an unfortunate unintended consequence of a laudable attempt by the new regime to implement the goal, set up a decade ago, to use resources more rationally. UKRI has fallen foul of the existing research council structures, meaning that even though the Government are putting more money in overall, people in the particle physics, astronomy and nuclear physics sector are facing 30% cuts. That cannot be UKRI’s intention. I hope that the Minister can confirm that it is not the Government’s intention, and that he will use his influence to get a rethink. Our technological sovereignty will not be secured if we are closing doors to future researchers and putting a key part of our research sector at risk.