Minister on a mission to bring tech billions to UK regions

Peter Kyle, the science secretary, said he would be selling the merits of cities such as Birmingham on a visit to Microsoft in Seattle on Tuesday, and other Silicon Valley-based tech giants later in the week, as part of efforts to attract billions more in technology investment to the UK.
“We do have the opportunity to incentivise investment outside of London,” said Kyle at the launch of Birmingham Tech Week. “As we start to announce policies, you will see incentives for regional investment will be baked into everything we do.”
Convincing overseas investors to look beyond the bright lights of the capital took “a lot more effort”, he added, because “people see London as a safe bet”. It would require the use of additional incentives, which will be set out in a series of policy statements by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) after the budget on October 30.
• ‘Innovate UK should invest in tech firms’
Kyle, 54, said a previous charm offensive among companies in Silicon Valley in the spring had borne fruit. “I said, ‘What would it take to unlock £10 billion worth of investment into Britain?’ They came back with [addressing] the price of electricity, planning reform and regulatory barriers.
“I made absolute assurances to them about what we would do with regulatory innovation, about planning — one [of the companies] had been told it would take eight years to get a particular data centre through planning and connected to the grid. They are not going to stomach that kind of delay for investment.
“I promised what we would do as a programme of government. And when they saw it [start to happen] in the first week of the government, that is what unlocked the £8 billion announcement from Amazon [Web Services]. Most of that Amazon money is going to be outside of London. That is not an accident — these things never happen by accident.”
Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of Birmingham Tech Week, Kyle added: “With me as secretary of state and Keir Starmer as prime minister you have a very, very genuine, assertive desire that investment benefits the whole country. And for those parts of the country that could benefit most from that kind of investment, we want to make sure we can drive it there.
“In the coming weeks you will see announcements from my department and elsewhere about exactly how we will be doing it: how we will make sure regions and areas outside of London are going to be front and centre of how we unfold our programme.”
BusinessLDN, a lobby group promoting the interests of businesses in the capital, warned that London should not lose out on its share of foreign investment. Muniya Barua, its deputy chief executive, said: “As an engine of growth for the whole UK, London has a key role to play in getting our economy firing on all cylinders so that the government can deliver on its missions.
“Boosting inward investment into the capital, as well as other regions, will be vital to increase productivity and living standards both for Londoners and people across the country.”
The prime minister pledged at Labour’s recent international summit to get rid of regulation that “needlessly holds back investment”. It followed the launch of a regulatory innovation office within Kyle’s department that aims to speed up approvals for new technologies in fields such as biotechnology and autonomous vehicles.
Kyle said the government did not have all the answers but had “agency” and that he planned to bring key private and public sector actors together, directing the conversations in a more “assertive and more active way” than the previous government had managed. “That is why I am going to Seattle and then Silicon Valley. The mood music around Britain right now is good. They recognise that nationwide we are stable, functional and ambitious.”
He told the audience in Birmingham that numerous challenges remained, however, and that Britain “desperately” needed more businesses that mature from start-ups into meaningful employers.
This shortfall would be addressed partly by increasing the availability of growth capital, particularly to businesses in the regions,” Kyle said. “Our economy is undercapitalised when it comes to investment into innovation. As a government we have to fix it.”
He said his department’s £9.3 billion-a-year funding of academic research at universities would not be affected by the focus on more applied research and the adoption of digital technologies by businesses in general. “It is all additional, it is not less,” he said. “Our funding for science and R&D [research & development] is going to be central to our department. We are taking on more [responsibilities].”
• Britain is ready for investment, say big banks and companies
Kyle, an articulate former aid worker who is dyslexic and secured a doctorate in community development at the University of Sussex, was elected as an MP in 2015 for the south coast constituency of Hove, which was renamed Hove & Portslade before the general election this year.
Since July he said he had expanded his department’s remit to include becoming the digital centre of excellence for government, with over 1,000 civil servants transferred from other departments.
He said he has also taken on the challenge of transforming Britain’s businesses and the public sector to provide more digital services and become more productive by harnessing AI.
“My department is now responsible for the diffusion of technology into the broader economy, so DSIT for the first time is directly interacting with the economy to get digital technology uptake increased,” he said.
“If you look at the smaller end of the medium-sized business area, we are not keeping up with OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] colleagues or the G7. What department is best to lead on that? It’s going to be DSIT. The Treasury doesn’t do that sort of hands-on work with the economy.”