Lord Vallance explains UK tech plan at London Tech Week

In the gov.uk transcript of his London Tech Week speech, Lord Vallance began with an old story from Birmingham’s Lunar Society: inventors, industrialists and thinkers meeting under the full moon and swapping ideas. He was not using history as decoration. He was making a point that still matters now: big economic change tends to happen when science, business and public policy stop working in separate rooms. That gives you the thread for the whole speech. This was less about flashy gadgets and more about the system behind them: how the UK funds discovery, how it turns research into companies, and why ministers think faster growth depends on doing that better.

He argued that the UK starts from a strong research base. Using figures in the government’s published speech, Lord Vallance said a country with less than 1 per cent of the world’s population produces 6 per cent of research papers and 12 per cent of the most highly cited papers. Those numbers are meant to show why science and technology sit so high on the government’s growth agenda. The useful reminder, though, was that discovery does not move in a straight line. A question asked out of curiosity can look obscure for years and then suddenly matter to medicine, energy, defence or manufacturing. **What this means:** ministers are trying to protect basic research while also pushing much harder on what happens after the breakthrough.

That split shows up in the money. Lord Vallance said the government has committed £86 billion to research and development across the spending review, even though wider budgets are tight. He put UK Research and Innovation, or UKRI, at the centre of that plan. According to the speech, £14.5 billion is for curiosity-led research, £8 billion for more applied work tied to public priorities, £7 billion to support innovative companies, and £8 billion for skills, infrastructure and facilities. He also said a further £1 billion is going to ARIA, the Advanced Research and Invention Agency. It was one of the sharpest parts of the speech: politicians, he argued, should not be hand-picking the basic questions researchers ask, but government should build a stronger route from idea to impact.

Set inside the wider 10-year industrial strategy, the tech plan focuses on six areas where ministers believe the UK can still compete seriously: advanced connectivity, AI, cyber security, engineering biology, quantum and semiconductors. Lord Vallance said £4 billion has been invested in those frontier technologies over the past year, alongside a sovereign AI venture fund. If you are trying to read the policy mood, this matters. He stressed that science and technology are woven through the industrial strategy rather than tucked away in an appendix. The speech was not only about inventing new things. It was about who develops the tools, who trains the workforce, who buys the first products, and whether growing firms stay in the UK instead of moving elsewhere when they need bigger backing.

Quantum got the longest and most detailed section, which tells you where ministers see a possible prize. Lord Vallance argued that years of coordinated research spending have moved quantum from a mostly scientific question to an engineering challenge. That sounds technical, but the point is simple: the field is now close enough to real use that government wants companies and customers preparing before the machines fully arrive. He announced a new Quantum Growth Alliance bringing together major firms including HSBC, Barclays, Standard Chartered, GSK, BP, Rolls-Royce, BAE Systems, BT, Vodafone and QinetiQ. He also pointed to a £1.2 billion future commitment to procure scaled quantum computers and said a £12 million funding pool for hybrid quantum algorithms would follow later in the week. In the speech, quantum was linked to drug discovery, sustainable materials, diagnostics, navigation and critical infrastructure. **What this means:** government is trying to create demand as well as supply, so UK quantum companies can see a home market rather than only a research grant.

Engineering biology was presented as the next test case. If the term feels slippery, it helps to think of it as designing with biology: writing DNA, automating research, improving biomanufacturing and combining biological data with AI models. That can shape everything from medicines to materials and cleaner industrial processes. Lord Vallance announced a £45 million Engineering Biology Value and Sharing Growth Fund to strengthen those foundations. He said that sits alongside £196 million for research and innovation in engineering biology and £184 million for scale-up infrastructure. The lesson running through this section was easy to spot: science money matters, but it is not enough if companies cannot manufacture, test and grow at the pace a new sector needs.

One of the most revealing parts of the speech was not about discovery at all. It was about the UK’s scale-up problem. Lord Vallance said the country is much better than it was a decade ago at producing spin-outs, but still too often loses momentum when firms need larger finance rounds, clearer regulation, early customers and specialist staff. If you are new to the word, a spin-out is a company built from research, often at a university. He tied several policies to that bottleneck. The British Business Bank, he said, now has £25.6 billion of permanent capacity and aims to mobilise at least 10 new growth funds by 2030. He also pointed to pension reforms meant to bring more long-term investment into this space, and said the Global Talent Fund had helped draw people to the UK. You can hear the message underneath all of this: starting a company is not the hardest part any more; helping it stay and scale is.

Regulation and procurement were treated as growth tools, not just background admin. Lord Vallance said the Regulatory Innovation Office is trying to remove barriers to the safe adoption of new technology, and he used a new regulatory sandbox for AI drug-safety prediction as his example, describing it as a global first of its kind. The idea is to test whether AI can help identify safety risks faster, speed up access to treatments and reduce animal testing, with around £70 million going to regulatory innovation in this spending review. Then there is procurement, which may sound dry until you hear the number. Lord Vallance said government buys about £400 billion of goods and services each year. If even a modest share of that is used to back innovative firms, the state becomes an early customer rather than just a distant funder. **What this means for you:** when you hear politicians talk about a science-led economy, do not only ask how much grant money is available. Ask who will buy the product, who will regulate it, and whether a young company can survive long enough to become established.

Taken together, the London Tech Week speech was a case for a more joined-up approach to innovation. Lord Vallance wants the UK to keep backing curiosity, put serious money behind frontier technologies, and use finance, skills, procurement and regulation in a more deliberate way. For students, founders and researchers, that is the practical lesson: a good idea rarely succeeds on brilliance alone. It also needs rules, buyers, staff, facilities and time. There is also a simple media-literacy point here. Speeches are promises, not proof. The figures in this one were large and the ambition was clear, but the real test comes later: whether the money arrives, whether departments buy differently, whether regulators move quickly without weakening safety, and whether more science businesses truly stay and grow in the UK. That is the part worth watching after the conference lights go down.