Sovereignty in the Age of AI

Chair: Cllr Jon Ball; Aide: Duncan Brack; Hall Aide: Charley Hasted

Submitted by: 12 members 
Mover: Victoria Collins MP (Spokesperson for Science, Innovation and Technology) 
Summation: Helen Wood

Conference notes that:

1. The UK is a global powerhouse in the tech sector, and a world leader in artificial intelligence, with the third largest market in the world.
2. The UK’s academic and research foundations are worldleading, with the UK ranking first among all G7 countries for field-weighted citation impact in science and technology research.
3. That 71 per cent of UK businesses cite unclear rules as a barrier to adopting AI, and 57 per cent of the banking sector cite regulatory uncertainty as an investment barrier.
4. That 93 per cent of seed-funded startups fail to access follow-on funding in the UK, creating a severe scale-up funding gap.
5. That a stark AI skills divide is growing in schools, with state school teachers half as likely to receive formal AI training as private school teachers.
6. 55 per cent of central government organisations host over 60 per cent of their digital estate on clouds supplied by just two US-based providers, making critical digital infrastructure vulnerable.

Conference believes that:

1. Only a distinctly Liberal approach can empower people to seize the benefits of AI, balancing innovation with holding powerful big tech companies to account.
2. Britain has the talent, research base and skills to lead the world in responsible AI, and needs a government willing to back that ambition.
3. Deep public and business trust is the essential engine connecting technological adoption, regulatory certainty and long-term commercial investment.
4. AI investment must be integrated directly into an industrial strategy to solve real problems across priority sectors like healthcare, energy and manufacturing.
5. Digital infrastructure expansion must be sustainable, strategic and purposefully planned to ensure that people benefit directly from investment in their communities.
6. Education must focus on enduring, foundational skills like critical thinking and problem-solving, rather than merely tool-specific knowledge that transforms rapidly.

Conference reaffirms Liberal Democrat pledges to:

1. Increase research budgets with inflation and move towards multi-year funding settlements, and commit to introducing a national and international science and technology strategy that raises R&D spending to 3.5 per cent of GDP.
2. Quintuple proof-of-concept funding to £200 million across five years.
3. Create a network of regional innovation centres across the UK, ensuring that every nation and major English region can support university-industry collaboration with stateof-the-art research facilities.
4. Introduce government-backed seed funding loans for companies born from university research, and expand the definition of commercialisation so that university-derived SMEs and student startups are eligible.
5. Attract international talent by reforming visa processes to replace arbitrary salary thresholds with a flexible meritbased system and allowing Masters and PhD students to found startups during their studies.

Conference calls on the UK Government to back British innovation and remove barriers to financing by:

1. Closing the scale-up gaps by reviewing the £250,000 Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme limit and creating a scientist-led upfront pre-clearance system for R&D tax reliefs.
2. Prioritising world-leading British tech in public contracts and trialling a 30 per cent 'social value' requirement for the procurement of digital services.
3. Integrating AI into industrial strategies under a new Department for Growth, and extending Treasury and OBR forecast horizons to assess long-term technological impacts and provide certainty to investors.
4. Creating ‘AI Sandbox’ programmes in partnership with local authorities, where startups and local SMEs can test new AI service models in small-scale realistic settings.
5. Developing an AI Compute Foundations Strategy prioritising domestic strengths in low-power inference, chip design, and edge AI.

Conference also calls on the Government to build trust amongst the public through empowering individuals to use AI by:

1. Establishing a National People’s Strategy which integrates AI skills into the curriculum, and continuing training throughout an individual’s professional life with an AI training guarantee for adults.
2. Widening the scope of the AI Security Institute to include ethical considerations, ensuring that AI systems are developed to use data responsibly and do not entrench existing inequalities.
3. Securing international leadership by upholding the Council of Europe AI Framework Convention and using it to pioneer enforceable multilateral standards for democratic AI governance.

Conference further calls on the Government to ensure that communities can benefit from AI opportunities by:

1. Developing a comprehensive digital sovereignty strategy using strategic sovereign procurement policy to protect critical public functions from total foreign dependence.
2. Requiring all new AI infrastructure to meet community benefit standards, ensuring local populations directly gain from new developments through local jobs, skills training and directing their waste heat to district heating networks or to generating electricity.
3. Confronting the AI energy dilemma by commissioning independent demand assessments and establishing regional data clusters and AI Growth Zones, designed alongside industry and connected directly to target sectors.
4. Ensuring rural and remote communities can fully seize the opportunities of the AI age through a national commitment to roll out gigabit broadband to every home and business, while embedding access and upskilling hubs in local libraries and community centres.

Applicability: Federal, except for a) which is England only.

Mover: 7 minutes; summation of motion and movers and summation of any amendments: 4 minutes; all other speakers: 3 minutes. For eligibility and procedure for speaking in this debate, see page 10 of the agenda. You can submit a speaker's card online here or in person.

The deadline for amendments to this motion is 13.00 Monday 7 September; see pages 11-12 of the agenda for more information.

Those selected for debate will be printed in Conference Extra and Tuesday’s Conference Daily. The deadline for requests for separate votes is 09.00 Monday 21 September; see page 9 of the agenda for more information.