Science, Innovation and Technology Committee
Oral evidence: Commercialising quantum technologies, HC 1812
Wednesday 6 September 2023
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 6 September 2023.
Members present: Greg Clark (Chair); Aaron Bell; Dawn Butler; Tracey Crouch; Rebecca Long Bailey; Stephen Metcalfe; Carol Monaghan; Graham Stringer.
Questions 1 - 87
Witnesses
I: Professor Sir Peter Knight FRS, Emeritus Professor, Imperial College London, and Chair, Quantum Metrology Institute, National Physical Laboratory; and Dr Michael Cuthbert, Aegis Professor, University of Bristol, and Director, National Quantum Computing Centre.
II: Louis Barson, Director of Science, Innovation and Skills, Institute of Physics; and Kimberley Brook, Head of Enterprise, University of Bristol, and Head of Programmes, Quantum Technologies Enterprise Centre Bristol.
Written evidence from witnesses:
Witnesses: Professor Knight and Dr Cuthbert.
Q1 Chair: The Science, Innovation and Technology Committee begins to take oral evidence for its inquiry into commercialising quantum technologies.
We are pleased to have with us in the room Professor Sir Peter Knight, FRS, chair of the UK National Quantum Technologies Programme and chair of the Quantum Metrology Institute within the National Physical Laboratory. Thank you very much indeed for coming, Sir Peter.
We hope and expect that Sir Peter will be joined by Dr Michael Cuthbert, who is having some transport difficulties. I shall introduce him now so that we are not distracted later; we expect him to arrive shortly.
Dr Cuthbert is Aegis Professor at the University of Bristol, and Director of the National Quantum Computing Centre. He previously held positions within Oxford Instruments, a commercial company.
We are grateful to you, Sir Peter, for coming to brief us. May we go to basics? Tell the Committee and those watching what quantum technologies are. What do we mean when we refer to quantum technologies?
Professor Knight: “Quantum technologies” is a phrase that has been around for a decade or so. We live in a quantum-enabled world. Quantum mechanics started, near enough, 100 years ago, looking at the behaviour of matter and light at the microscopic level. Understanding that led to semiconductors, superconductors, lasers and so on.
That all depended on the fact that, at the quantum level, energy came in discrete lumps—you could go from one place to another in discrete stuff. That is how you get lasers and semiconductors to work.
That enabled the world economy to flourish—you could call it quantum 1.0, if you like. People started to look at what happened when you sensitively control quantum matter to exploit a different part of quantum physics that is really counterintuitive: you can put quantum mechanical into a superposition. They can be here and there at the same time. Once they are in superpositions, this coherent superposition enables you to do things you could not have done otherwise.
Around a decade ago, we started to look at how scientific insight had developed over about 20 years and how it could be used to transform the way in which we use it.
You do not see superpositions in the everyday world. You’re either there or you aren’t there. The reason is that they are incredibly fragile.
That is a real bonus if you are building a sensor, because it senses that external world. That fragility is an ally in a quantum sensor, but it is our enemy when we want to build a number of these things for information processing. We have got to beat that one. In the quantum computing world, they are exploiting the fact that you can put these things into a superposition.
That is an enormous challenge for us. Quantum computing is long term. The journey to controlling lots of these quantum bits—qubits—is a long one, but it gives you things that you can utilise almost immediately.
I am pretty sure that all of you will have used GPS today or in the past few days. GPS looks at a constellation of satellites that get their timing from atomic clocks—little atomic spins in superpositions of this state and that state at the same time.
You use it all the time. That is an easy one. It is an enabler of so much that we want to do in the world economy. Think how reliant we are on GPS. One of the major planks of our programme is working out what to do if it falls over. What are your substitutes for GPS?
Looking at coherence, the other phrase that is bandied about is exploiting entanglement. I could take two quantum systems and correlate them in a way that is way beyond anything you can do classically—this thing is correlated to that thing incredibly strongly.
That sounds like a philosophical thing with which you could amuse people over coffee. If we have a chance, I will tell you how it is improving the resolution of oncology imagery.
Q2 Chair: We will come to some of those applications. Thank you for that introduction.
Dr Cuthbert, as you probably inferred, Sir Peter was giving us a basic primer on what we mean by quantum technologies. You are very welcome. I have introduced you to the Committee and to those watching. There will be some questions to you very shortly.
Sir Peter, you mentioned one application of the technologies. Is there a way of thinking about what types of technologies might be available through quantum? Are there certain things rather than others, at the very high level?
Professor Knight: Looking at the application space for quantum, do not forget that we are in the 10th year of our UK programme. We got into this game before anybody else in the world. We built this ecosystem, asking: “We have these amazing scientific insights. What are they good for?”
An obvious one is in timing—the atomic clocks that I spoke of. Another is in sensing—sensing what is under your feet, and so on.
In imagery, it is looking at ways in which we can use correlations to get interesting new insights that are valuable and needed by people. One of the applications is: what is under your feet? Half the holes dug up in London are in the wrong place. We do not know where the pipework is. If we can improve the sensitivity of gravity sensors by a factor of two we can save billions.
Sensing, imaging, timing—communications. How can we provide a secure metro network to transfer data by quantum mechanical means? Working with our industrial partners—Toshiba Cambridge Research Laboratory, British Telcom and EY—we are building a metro network between data centres in London.
The big challenge is building a quantum computer. We have a huge number of applications in mind even for the intermediate scale machines that I am sure Michael will talk about.
Let me give you a sense of scale. As we can put these things into a superposition, they have an amazing ability to do things you could not do classically. Imagine I had 300 qubits under complete control. The state space that I can use to manipulate things and move around information is two to the power of 300.
Let us say I have 301 qubits under control—two to the power of 301. Classically, if I add one bit, I increase the capability of a machine by 0.3%. If I add one qubit to a quantum machine, I double the size of the machine—a great acceleration of capability. Two to the 300 is larger than the number of particles in the visible universe. You are never going to get a classical machine to match that. That is our aspiration: to get 300 bits under control. That is our 10-year vision.
Right from the beginning of this programme we have tried to avoid using the “quantum” word. We talked about: “What is it good for? What can we do with it that people need?”
Q3 Chair: You try to avoid the “quantum” word because people do not understand it?
Professor Knight: It frightens people. If I had said at a party 10 years ago that I was a quantum physicist I would have been on my own in the kitchen. It is changing. We can talk about the enablers that people need, which makes much more sense. It makes it much easier to work with our start-up community—the primes, and so on.
Q4 Tracey Crouch: I use GPS to track personal performance in running and cycling. I am grateful for the fact that in future I shall be able to blame quantum technology rather than my own personal performance for any failure.
Will you give the Committee and those watching your thoughts on the current state of quantum science in the UK and how it ranks internationally?
Professor Knight: Let us go back to some basic numbers. The UK has about 0.9% of the world’s population but it generates about 14% of the world’s highly cited papers. If you have ever wondered whether the UK is a science superpower, we are a science superpower. We are working on being a technology and innovation superpower to move that great talent into things of economic benefit.
In quantum, we are second equal in the world for quantum publications.
Q5 Tracey Crouch: With whom are we second equal?
Professor Knight: We are equal, in terms of high-impact papers, with China and we are second behind the US.
We are second for start-ups—the volume of investment in start-ups—and again second only to the US.
We have about 45 or 46 quantum technology start-ups in the UK, which have raised a vast amount of money themselves. All the indicators are not only that we have a great science base but that we have put in place the move towards commercialisation and exploitation and it is working.
Q6 Tracey Crouch: Will you outline for the Committee’s benefit the estimated economic value of quantum science?
Professor Knight: It has a wide range of applications. We use McKinsey a lot to get some prediction of the size of the market. You must have a degree of caution as some of them have error bars on them. The market—in imaging and sensing, for example—is in many billions. Michael will tell you a bit more about the market in computing as he has more up-to-date figures than I have. The market is substantial and we are in a world race.
What will we do in the future, facing worldwide competition? China currently invests twice as much as the rest of the world put together. It has some extraordinarily talented people—Jian-Wei Pan, for example.
The US also has tremendous capabilities, although—this is being recorded, so I shall be careful—there is a degree of fragmentation and competition, which we have worked hard to avoid as we build the co-operative ecosystem in the UK.
We are in good shape on all these things to see the economic return on them.
Dr Cuthbert: Compared with other nations, the UK is very strong in having a supply chain for quantum technologies, from technologies that have developed since the 1960s—things like photonics, laser systems, cryogenics and high-performance, high-speed electronics. Those are the building blocks you need to make a system for trying to develop these technologies, whether it is in computing, sensing or communications.
We have over 40 mature companies in that space, in the landscape of start-ups, that are also participating in the collaborative programmes, feeding into the overall collaborative environment.
Q7 Tracey Crouch: You both seem comfortable and confident with the general health—fine; colleagues will pick up some of that, I think. You seem to have a positive outlook on where we are currently.
Professor Knight: I am pretty confident of where we are. What I want to do is make sure we reap the benefits. That involves having a really clear strategy on growing and scaling up the activity. That requires a great deal more attention than we are currently paying.
A lot of our innovative companies that have come out of this programme have raised a lot of money from series A, series B. To grow will require substantial, probably private, equity. I am quite cautious about VC investment in start-ups if they want an exit strategy and return while we are still trying to grow the company in the UK.
We must make the UK a place for the field to grow, not just to initiate—hence my caution.
Q8 Chair: You say that we need a clear strategy. Is the implication that we do not have one?
Professor Knight: It is evolving.
Q9 Chair: We will go into a bit more detail in the questions. If we miss anything out, perhaps you will come back to it before we conclude.
Professor Knight: On whether we are in a good position to exploit this stuff, the largest laser company in the world is Coherent of Santa Clara, California. It decided a few weeks ago entirely to relocate its factory and leadership to Scotland because of the strength of photonics, which underpin so much of what we are doing in the UK. The largest laser company in the world has confidence in what we have been able to do in photonics in the UK.
Chair: Our colleague Carole Monaghan follows photonics very closely, so I am sure she will have some questions, but let me first go to Graham Stringer.
Q10 Graham Stringer: I accept that we need to have a strategy. What are the strategic choices. Strategy implies that you will take some decisions to go one way and not go another way. What are those choices?
Professor Knight: One of the choices, which I think we will hear about in the next session, is: where do we get the people from? We have in the strategy the idea that we will train 1,000 PhDs in quantum. At the same time, we will need technicians. I know that my colleague Louis Barson will tell you more about the options in that space.
The strategy has to be: how do we engage not just with DSIT as the sponsor organisation, but with the Department for Education about community colleges, technician training and all the rest. That means we have to try to work out what proportion of the resource that we may have available goes to the skills side so that we can continue to nurture it in the UK.
Another part of strategic decision settling is that in quantum computing there are about five attractive platforms that might be the engine for our computer. It is pretty early to say which is the prime leader. Over the next two or three years we will have to say, “Those probably still live in the research space, but we can start these to scale.” We can shift resources in a pretty hard-headed way to say, “That one fits the opportunity space that that platform offers and where the industrial strength is in the UK to do it.” That choice has to be made in the next two or three years in my view.
Q11 Graham Stringer: What you said in your introduction, and the implication of what you are saying now, is a 150-year-old problem in this country. We are brilliant at pure science—chemistry, physics, biochemistry—but the United States, Germany and China make money out of it. You say that we are at that stage now with quantum technology. How do we avoid whichever country is developing it and making oodles of money?
Professor Knight: By having the right engines to engage with industry as it starts to build up. For the past five years, the central element of our national programme has been the challenge fund—industry-led projects where industry works with the very best researchers to generate solutions of consequence. The largest part of the second phase of our quantum programme—we are coming to the end of it now—has been through the challenge fund. We invested £175 million in the challenge fund but generated more than £400 million in investment from companies eager to take part. Some of it has translated into major success. The metro link, one of the data centres, is an obvious big one.
Making sure that we keep in place the translational vehicle that came out of the industrial strategy challenge fund is absolutely essential. It is not just a matter of saying, “We have great researchers; let’s support them,” and hope someone picks this stuff up. You must have that translational vehicle. We have built one in the UK that is the envy of the rest of the world. That could retain stuff, at this stage, in the UK.
Q12 Graham Stringer: You mentioned the benefits of quantum technology and GPS. Are there other areas where we will see major improvements and changes from quantum technology in our critical national infrastructure?
Professor Knight: The most obvious and immediate stuff we are working on in C&I is to provide a resilient timing backbone in the country so we have access to resilient timing, no matter where you are. We are building through the National Timing Centre distributed atomic time to industrial users in a network around the UK. It is mainly distributed by optical fibre, with some by satellite, to ensure that we are not wholly dependent on satellite clocks. That will enable people to have confidence in back-up systems. If I were a main board member of a major company, audit and risk should be asking, “How resilient am I to a CPS outage?”
We commissioned London Economics to survey what would happen to the UK economy in a 24-hour GPS outage. It is catastrophic. That immediately affects C&I. Position navigation and timing is a huge part of where we want to go next.
In terms of sensing and the environment, and of game changers and so on, there are many others. Medical applications may be one of the quick wins for the UK. We have an active research group in Nottingham. It commercialised its work into a company, Cerca Magnetics, with a thing that looks like a cycle helmet and is used for functional brain imaging. Instead of putting a child into a scary superconducting tunnel detector, the child wears a cycle helmet and can run around. It has already been used in hospitals around the world. The company is selling to SickKids in Toronto, to the Boston kids’ hospital and to Great Ormond Street. It is fantastic and is a major success story. It is one of the few start-ups—and it is an early start-up—that is making money.
I mentioned oncology. Ghost imaging gives incredible accuracy in the imaging of oncology samples.
Healthcare may be the transformative quick win for the UK over the next few years.
Q13 Stephen Metcalfe: You mentioned the National Timing Centre. How accurate does time need to be? Is it something that is nice to have, or is it absolutely critical? How do you distribute time, accounting for the fact that it still takes time to distribute it, if you see what I mean?
Professor Knight: Yes, I have got it. It is a really great question.
We send coded blips, which give you a link immediately to UTC and right back to the primary standard. It is absolutely authentic. The way in which we position and code the blips means that that knows you are talking to that.
The timing accuracy has to be reasonably good—better than a microsecond—and distributed. The ancestor of the quantum technology programme was timing in the financial markets. I used to sit on the National Security Council’s S&T sub-committee. We got a request: “How do we stop automatic trade, because of the flash crash?” My response was: “Forget it. Beating latency is the name of the game.”
You need engines within the entire network that time stamp transactions so that you know who did what and in what order. That was the ancestor to the quantum programme. I got about £3 million to work with industry on ways in which we build secondary clocks into the network. That was in 2011.
Q14 Stephen Metcalfe: How accurate was it?
Professor Knight: We can do much better than that. If you go from a fraction of a microsecond down to a nanosecond you can start to do some other things relating to positioning and so on. The market is looking closely at it.
I hesitate to say what I am going to say next, but I am going to say it anyway. We had two committed major partners, one of whom was the BBC. It needs that precision in its data centre at Broadcasting House to turn on all these programmes. You will see in the basement at Broadcasting House vast numbers of stuff, including atomic clocks. That is a good story.
A bad story is that another customer is NATS. We will work on that.
I shall start with a quick question for Sir Peter and then come to Dr Cuthbert.
Sir Peter, you talked about using funding for skills. We shall talk in detail about skills, but may I ask a quick question on this? Is there complacency among quantum companies that somebody else has to produce the skills for them?
Professor Knight: Not that I am aware of. From what I can see, a lot of the quantum companies have been prime movers in working groups with us on how to map out what might be needed and how it will change year by year.
Q16 Carol Monaghan: Are they training young people?
Professor Knight: Yes.
Q17 Carol Monaghan: That has been carried out.
Professor Knight: Yes. One of the things we need to be able to do is not just the PhDs. We need to be able to ask, “Where do we get the technicians from?”
Q18 Carol Monaghan: That is the area I am talking about.
We have trained a reasonable number of technicians, but we need to engage with—I am still America-focused—community colleges, or whatever they are called locally. I am still a professor at Rochester in upstate New York. Community colleges in the US are great at training that range of people. The problem is how we reassure local authorities, which often maintain community colleges, that we are in it for the long haul? If they start to hire people who can teach these technicians, it is not a flash in the pan.
Q19 Carol Monaghan: Dr Cuthbert, I want to ask about the National Quantum Technologies Programme. Will you highlight some of the strengths and successes of the programme?
Dr Cuthbert: First and foremost, building back collaborative communities. Collaboration was the rule of the game, right from the very start, and that created highly collaborative efforts.
There was some pent-up demand at the start of the programme. Nevertheless, the number, rate and diversity of spin-out companies from universities’ research excellence to translate technology have been a big success.
There remains a challenge: what is the road map to revenue for start-ups not just in the UK but around the world, given that the level of R&D investment and amount of revenue is small by comparison?
The doctoral training centres have been a success. We perhaps underestimated their impact on having a cohort of students going through together on a variety of different projects. Rather than their working on their own, they are able to learn from each other as well as from their professors.
Peter mentioned the industrial strategy challenge fund programme, which drove collaboration but had a keen focus on commercialisation of technology from the outset as its purpose. That enabled many companies to step closer to revenue faster.
Q20 Carol Monaghan: Sir Peter mentioned that the commercialisation aspect is perhaps a weakness or something that requires more attention. Do you agree? Should we focus more on it?
Dr Cuthbert: We have had a keen focus on commercialisation but less focus on market-making and who the customers are. Given the maturity of the technology, who are the customers right now? I think that there is an opportunity, and certainly the National Quantum Computing Centre is starting to drive the activity of government as a user, not just government as a funder, and where government can be an early customer, testing some of the products and companies and their capability to deliver a product and service rather than a collaborative research programme.
Q21 Carol Monaghan: Perhaps we should have started with this question. The quantum computing centre is part of the quantum technologies programme. What else do we have?
Dr Cuthbert: We have a network of research hub infrastructure around the UK. There is a hub on the different technology areas that Peter mentioned, on communications, on sensing, on imaging and on computing and simulation. Those are very much research-focused.
There are other national laboratories and research organisations, such as the Fraunhofer Centre for Applied Photonics in Glasgow, the National Physical Laboratory, the National Quantum Computing Centre and others. They are working in quantum technologies, either in partnership or running their own programmes.
Q22 Carol Monaghan: We are hearing that collaboration across the quantum network in the UK is better than that in other places. How do we compare on, for example, getting things to market?
Dr Cuthbert: Of the 46 start-ups that Peter mentioned, roughly half are in computing. A relatively small number are delivering products rather than working on prototypes, either in software and applications or in full stack computing provision. Those companies typically provide a service through cloud access rather than hardware to the customer.
We currently have an open call within the NQCC that is seeking to drive early deployment into the NQCC to provide test beds of early hardware that we can make available to researchers and developers and to provide verification and benchmarking of one modality to another, in order to understand the real maturity, given our independent status, rather than the marketing position of any one company.
Q23 Carol Monaghan: Sir Peter, how are we collaborating? How is the quantum technologies programme collaborating internationally? Does it? How does that happen?
Professor Knight: There has clearly been a long history—many years—of fruitful collaboration around the world in quantum. The largest single part used to be collaboration across Europe in the framework programmes. An inhibitor for us at the moment is the fact that we still do not have clarity on Horizon Europe.
We do have a vehicle by which we can do early stage collaboration across Europe, QuantERA—an all European nations collaboration. Funders put an amount in. The UK is a strong partner, and I chair the QuantERA board.
We have the mechanism for early stages, but when we start to think about the bigger stuff across Europe we have an issue.
We have a degree of comfort in our relationships with at least two of the European countries that we engage with—the Netherlands and Denmark, which have comparable programmes that, although not as big as ours, have comparable aspirations.
We have had funded collaboration with Canada. It has been a good test bed of what we can do, working between our start-ups or comparable research-focused innovation places in Canada. That is a good proof of concept.
Australia is dead easy, through AUKUS. There is an awful lot of what we are doing in emerging technology and its effect on resilience through AUKUS.
On the United States, we have what I keep being told by DSIT is not a memorandum of understanding—I can never remember the technical word—on collaborative ventures, on skills and training and on standards and so on.
The US side of it is there. We are always slightly cautious because they have an incredibly active IT major presence. We quite like to be cautious about keeping our crown jewels to ourselves.
That is the international background. It is not bad. We do not spend a lot of money, and where we do it is to provide an exemplar that could be built on. For example, we have a satellite communications project with Singapore. It is not much money, but it could give us the ability to distribute quantum information intercontinentally. If that one flies, you can see that comms companies will jump in and say, “Okay. We now see what you can do.”
Internationally, they are the nations that share our values and we feel comfortable with. There is a lot of work on trusted research, for worrying about people who may not share our values.
Q24 Dawn Butler: I visited a round table organised by British Patient Capital in regard to one of the quantum computer companies in London. It is fascinating that we are right up there with the very best, although we do not invest as much as we should in quantum computing.
How do we ensure that we continue this investment and that it does not impact on our ability to meet our net zero target? Is that in-built into the programme of expansion?
Dr Cuthbert: In computing, there are two aspects in thinking about net zero. As quantum computers develop, how can we use them better to understand battery technology or simulate chemical processes that enhance our understanding of the technology we can use in our striving towards net zero?
The other aspect is understanding how much energy we are consuming in the computing industry generally and how we deploy that more effectively. It is dominated by data storage, which is dominated by consumer access and social media. Nevertheless, thinking about the development, design and deployment of quantum computers that would be a match to, say, exascale classical computers where we start to think about 10 MW to 30 MW of power required just to keep the systems running, that has to be part of our strategy, and it requires a rethink. Just assuming that we can make larger computational devices, consuming more power, is not the right answer. In my view, we need to harness the technology in a much smarter way.
As Peter mentioned, the challenge of scaling quantum computers is still at a very early stage. These noisy qubits do not have a particularly long lifetime, and we have relatively small numbers. We might project forward 10 or 15 years to think about computational devices that will perhaps have 1 million or 10 million qubits, really understanding what the architecture will be—the control electronics and how the systems will operate—and the classical compute resource that will sit alongside them, also consuming energy to provide the calibration and the control system. Once we get from hundreds to millions of qubits, its control architecture will have to be completely automated.
Q25 Dawn Butler: Is that already integrated into the programme, or is that another avenue of thought still being thought through? Is it considered, or not considered?
Dr Cuthbert: It is a growing area of study and engagement. It is a problem to be solved in the future rather than really being solved today.
Professor Knight: There are elements in the programme, though, where net zero is a governing principle. Michael is addressing the quantum computational one, but, remember, we have all the stuff on imaging and sensing, as well, where an immediate engagement with net zero is essential.
One of our best start-ups is QLM, from Bristol, with a methane gas sensor that has been deployed to look at gas leaks in pipelines. It is horrifying how much gas leaks out of pipelines. That company has built the most terrific cameras to sense this, so that the gas pipeline people can use it. Schlumberger has immediately jumped in, saying, “This is what we need, and we have got to have it.”
That is for methane. If we ever go to a hydrogen economy, we have to sense hydrogen, which is really hard. Building a camera that can see it is important, so we have an engagement with British Petroleum, which has a hydrogen programme. As some of you may know, a hydrogen filling station in Scandinavia exploded. We had better know where that hydrogen is; so we might need a camera in the filling stations—there would be millions of them—but you might need one in your hydrogen-based car to know whether it is leaking. QLM is for methane, and a group in Glasgow is looking at hydrogen, so within the sensing and imaging net zero is right at the heart of the programme. Remember, we have this breadth of technologies.
Chair: We need to speed up a bit if we are going to ask all the questions that we have in mind.
Q26 Rebecca Long Bailey: Professor Knight, you mentioned briefly concerns about how venture capitalist investment sometimes imposes undue pressure on emerging start-ups. As a counter to that, how has the national quantum technology programme supported the commercialisation of quantum technologies without this immediate investment return pressure?
Professor Knight: Of course, through the challenge fund, we have been able to work out ways in which we could build those partnerships. We would put money in, and they would put money in: the rigorous review process that we put it through means that people have confidence that it is a goer and other people then invest.
That is part of it, but the other part—we have heard about it already—is the British Business Bank. The British Business Bank and its associates have been really good in working out where there are emerging technologies that we want to keep going at this early stage. In particular, NSSIF has been extraordinarily powerful in enabling some of those companies to survive. NSSIF works with a relatively modest budget, and through the British Business Bank it is an investor. Then they can pull in other investors, so you end up with a fund of funds.
I think that there are vehicles that are worthy of exploration to expand through that. What we need for quantum computing is patient capital.
Q27 Rebecca Long Bailey: More broadly, what role would the National Quantum Technologies Programme play within the Government’s national quantum strategy ambition to be a leading quantum enabler by 2033?
Professor Knight: I guess we have all been active in generating that strategy. Many of us spent most of a year working on it, in fact. I should say that the strategy was developed with the community and has the community’s full support. As a basis, we had lots of community workshops, engagement, and write-ins. That strategy was not imposed from above. We all regard it as our strategy.
Dr Cuthbert: The national programme provides some framework and structure within the wider national strategy. I think that it is particularly important for the research community to have well-identified roots, both for funding and for collaboration.
As to seeking project partners, from an industry perspective I certainly observe strategic alliances starting to evolve out of some of those collaborative projects where like-minded companies have worked together under the auspices of a funded programme but have then realised that they have a lot more synergies.
I think that there is also maturing happening over time; people are recognising that they cannot do it all themselves. They may have made an investor pitch in the early stages that garners a great deal of excitement about how they are going to change the world, but, actually, it is really difficult technology and there is a lot to be done. Finding the right partners through some of the collaborative programmes has also been important to accelerate those industry partnerships.
Q28 Rebecca Long Bailey: Finally, I have a brief question for Professor Knight. Dr Cuthbert mentioned the importance of hubs. What discussions has the National Quantum Technologies Programme board had with the Government, surrounding the £100 million outlined in the national quantum strategy for the hubs?
Professor Knight: The funding for the current four hubs that have been supported for the past nine-and-a-bit years comes to an end in the autumn of next year. We are looking at ways in which we can refresh them.
Something else has emerged, since we started this, that really should somehow be accelerated: what about new people that have come in—new leaders, and so on? We have a competitive engagement with the community and bids for new hubs, building on the collaboration. The outline bids came in—13 of them. Nine of them were asked to develop a full business case for new hubs. They have a deadline of 5 October to produce those. Suddenly, I am their best friend; 5 October, maybe not. Then we will peer-review them.
That £100 million that we have pretty much guaranteed could fund up to five hubs. Our strategy is that, given that the quantum strategy emerged after that, with a 10-year commitment of £2.5 billion, it would be crazy to be fixated on five hubs and £100 million. We should have peer review. We should identify the strengths and, based on that, have the right negotiation with UKRI and DSIT about what can be done. I have no doubt whatsoever that we will have more than five really strong bids. My job is to provide the persuasion and evidence about why we could enhance it.
It would be simply crazy to say, “Those five are in; you are not,” and, in a year’s time, “Oh, we have a lot more money. Could you come back with some ideas, please?” We are not doing that. It is joined up, but it will give a whole raft of people the ability to come up with new consortia that will address the bigger issues.
I should not really speak about the ones that I can see in progress, but one is focused on the impact of quantum on healthcare, for example. We will look at that: peer review is looking at it.
I think that through this basis we will continue this co-operative thing. We will still have hubs. Remember, the hubs are only the headquarters. There are 30 universities currently involved and over 100 companies. That will not change. The way they fit together might change a bit. Some of the focal points might change a bit; but there is a lot of confidence in the community that we are in it for the long haul and that it is not a flash in the pan. Hubs are really important in making sure that we have that entrepreneurial research vision.
Q29 Aaron Bell: I am going to try to focus on quantum computing a little, so I think most of my questions will be for Dr Cuthbert.
We heard quite a lot from Sir Peter about the many societal benefits of quantum. What do you see as the societal benefits of quantum computing? Are they going to be revolutionary or evolutionary, in terms of the experience of the man on the street?
Dr Cuthbert: I think they are likely to be evolutionary at this early stage. It is quite a challenging sell to the general public, as a consumer, because most of the applications are currently focused in areas where there is already the use of high-performance computing, which is typically not used by the general public; but we do feel the impact of things like machine learning. Whether it is a database search optimisation or things like Google Maps, the enhanced machine learning that sits behind those applications is what people will touch and feel.
The areas where I think there is the strongest uptake and the greatest level of interest right now are in financial services. Understanding of things like risk optimisation, portfolio optimisation, scenario mapping and market modelling is an area that is already well developed, using high-performance computing. Already within some of the major banks there are quantum teams that are shadowing the classical compute teams in moving from R&D towards operational deployment. It is still at a very early stage, but that is where the initial areas will be.
Q30 Aaron Bell: Did the banks build those teams, or was it in collaboration with the sector?
Dr Cuthbert: I think it is in collaboration, but many have built the teams initially themselves, often spurred on by an in-house enthusiast or advocate. Some have been driven by a board-level enthusiast or advocate.
One of the things that we have been working with in the programme is the concept of quantum readiness: how do we communicate and make people aware, across a range of industries and not just in financial services, although we have done a lot of work with them—chemicals, pharmaceuticals, life sciences, energy and other sectors—of the power of quantum computing? How do we give them hands-on access to quantum compute resource and technical support—and the networking opportunity to come together to share best practice and learn from each other, to start to become advocates for and users of quantum computers?
In the early stages, we found that people were rather hesitant to collaborate. We have broken that down. Rather than focusing on individual competitive advantage with any bank or oil and gas company, recognising that there are systemic benefits across the sector that people can work on together has started to drive collaboration where normally we would not see that sort of collaboration.
Q31 Aaron Bell: You are obviously the director of the National Quantum Computing Centre, which is dedicated to addressing the challenge of scalability. The Committee has had written evidence that there is real disagreement about the timeline for practical quantum computing. We have had estimates ranging from 10 to 30 years and some suggesting that it might never happen. Potentially, are we looking at having another nuclear fusion on our hands—something that is always on the horizon but ever ebbing away from us—or do you have confidence that we will address the challenges and have practical quantum computing at scale within 10 or 20 years?
Dr Cuthbert: We have to differentiate practical advantage—does a quantum computer do something useful?—from the real rigorous computing science definitions around the mathematical structures of how we outstrip classical performance.
If we can deploy even modest-scale quantum computers that consume less energy or perhaps have higher-quality data—not necessarily faster computation—that will still be of benefit in the early stages.
Benefits to come from the technology development activity will enhance the other areas of quantum technologies and feed the supply chain. It is not just about building a single monolithic quantum computer of the future.
Q32 Aaron Bell: It is a bit unfair to ask you to pin yourself down, but, on the timeline, do you lean towards the lower end of the 10 to 30 years, or—you said there would be benefits along the way—do you think that is the middle of it?
Dr Cuthbert: Improved performance at the level of hundreds of qubits is in the next two to three years. At a scale of millions to tens of millions of fully automated qubit architectures, in my view, is—without a significant paradigm shift—still 15 to 20 years away.
Q33 Aaron Bell: We have also heard concerns about potential issues with cryptography and the potential advantage of quantum computing in breaking the current cryptographic standards. Is that a real risk, in your view?
Dr Cuthbert: I will comment and let Peter follow up. It is a real risk. For the algorithms that are well established, the current resource estimations are of millions of qubits, with error correction. We should not be complacent about assuming that that will be the case forever. As algorithms develop, resource estimates change, and perhaps that would come to a much smaller platform.
Professor Knight: Sadly, I invented this horrible phrase, “crypto-apocalypse”.
Aaron Bell: I was about to use that. You have beaten me to it.
Professor Knight: We have to assume that a large-scale cryptographic machine—a quantum machine of cryptographic significance—will be generated in the order of a decade, or maybe 15 years. It may not be done by us. Therefore, we have to assume that we need to re-tool all our cryptographic primitives in time to prepare for it; so instead of using RSA and Secure Shell and the rest of it we have to replace all that with what is called post-quantum, or quantum-secure, cryptographic primitives.
Q34 Chair: Will you pause for a second, Sir Peter? For people who are watching, the proposition about the risk is that there are various encryption technologies, and quantum technologies can, as it were, crack the code through sheer volume of suggested combinations.
Professor Knight: A quantum machine can change how we describe the hardness of a problem. It can take a hard problem and turn it into an easy one. Mathematically, that means that things that might be exponentially difficult turn into things that are polynomially difficult. At the moment, our cryptographic security is based on the hardness of factoring large numbers. That is RSA. It was invented at GCHQ by Clifford Cocks, but never mind.
We have to replace all of that with things that are immune to the quantum attacks. Two algorithms are relevant and one is Peter Shor’s on factoring, which changes exponential to polynomial, if you can do this in a fault-tolerant way.
The other is Grover’s algorithm, which can be used, for example, for password searching and which gives a polynomial advantage.
How long does it take to engineer a replacement for all the cryptographic premises? It is about a decade. That process is already under way. We have a thing that we are instructed not to call a competition, led by NIST in the United States, that we are all participating in, looking at candidates that are quantum-safe. Those are mathematical encryption schemes that are not susceptible to the quantum attacks that we are aware of. So, quantum readiness means: build a machine and what will its impact be? Secondly, it means running, in parallel, this resilience so that you are not dependent on stuff that, downstream, may be easily crackable.
Q35 Aaron Bell: So you think we will be able to develop quantum-safe cryptography, but we are not there yet. Surely there is already a pre-existing problem that all the stuff that is going around at the moment can be collected, and people can hold on to it and wait for the moment when they can crack it.
Professor Knight: Good points, Aaron. There are two parts to what you have said. One is how, if we have a quantum-safe methodology, we know it is safe. Where is the security proof? That is something we have to work on.
The second part is the store now, decrypt later challenge. No one is going to worry about trying to work out, in 15 years, your PIN on your bank card; but there are extremely sensitive things for which you might want a cover time of maybe 40 years. Part of the quantum readiness programme is doing the right sort of analysis of what is already out there that may have been stored to decrypt later and is sensitive. There is not much you can do about it but you can at least be aware of it.
Q36 Aaron Bell: Finally, Dr Cuthbert, how will the National Quantum Computing Centre use the £20 million of additional funding that you have been given over the next few years, as outlined in the national quantum strategy? How, in particular, will we get industry to engage with the community and to explore use cases?
Dr Cuthbert: I mentioned that we are running a call currently to supply test beds. We originally had £15 million available through the technology missions fund, which is part of the programme announced at the beginning of March through UKRI. We have supplemented that with an additional £15 million from the £20 million that was outlined in the strategy, so we have £30 million available to run projects. We think we can run around five projects with £30 million to co-locate test beds into the National Quantum Computing Centre so that we can provide access to the state-of-the-art hardware to our user community.
We did an expression of interest call over the summer, to see what the appetite was. We were four times oversubscribed. We had 27 proposals, many of which came internationally, as well, so there is an appetite to drive this type of activity. We believe we would be a fairly unique centre around the world in having different modality platforms on premises where our research team and researchers from around the UK can come and not only have cloud access but get their hands on hardware, and run and develop new protocols.
We are still working through the other £5 million with UKRI. Our intention is to focus on nanofabrication and device development. A strategic decision was made with the NQCC that we would not have clean rooms in our facility and that we would leverage the clean rooms and nanofabrication capabilities already funded in other parts of the UK. This was really to drive that programme of collaboration, and access clean rooms elsewhere in the UK across a variety of modalities—not just in semiconducting devices but in superconducting, and for trapped ions and others.
Q37 Aaron Bell: As we move forward, how do you see the balance between public and private investment changing in funding these schemes in the next five or 10 years? Do you think more private money will come in, or will there be an ongoing demand for more Government money to continue to back up the research?
Dr Cuthbert: I think it will be both. We have started working on our next-10-year vision. We believe that it is still vital for the NQCC that we remain independent and a trusted authority. That will therefore primarily be driven by core Government funding. As the technology matures, I think that commercial partnerships that provide the funding into the NQCC will become a much easier route to follow. In this initial stage I think that independence is important, because we are still testing prototype devices rather than fully commercially available devices.
Q38 Aaron Bell: Thank you. Do you want to add anything, Sir Peter?
Professor Knight: It is worth bearing in mind that in the second phase of the programme—the five years that are coming to an end now—the private investment is already larger than the Government investment. So we will continue that journey.
Q39 Aaron Bell: You described, contrasting favourably with the US, our very collaborative approach. At some point you will want to harness the power of competition, as well, though. You do that, obviously, with bids and competitions. At what point do you think the industry will be mature enough? Is it when we move past prototypes to commercialisation that you would expect to see a slightly more competitive landscape, rather than what you described earlier?
Professor Knight: I am sure that is already happening. I see signs already that people with their favourite platforms are working out where their edge is, compared with others. At an early stage, a lot of the nanofabrication is going to be in common, but there are people thinking, “Actually, my platform, using that nanofabrication—I don’t need to talk to those guys any more. I can do this.” We see signs of that already.
Aaron Bell: Thank you both. It is fascinating.
Q40 Chair: I have a slightly self-serving question for Sir Peter, on what you said to Aaron about the private sector funding: I, in office, set up the industrial strategy challenge fund, and I seem to remember that one-for-one matching was required, so it is unexpected that there is more private funding.
Professor Knight: What we promised you, sir, was that if £175 million was invested, in return we could guarantee at least £205 million to you. I cannot remember why we came up with those numbers, but we did.
Q41 Chair: What is it looking like at the moment?
Professor Knight: It is more like £410 million or £420 million.
Chair: You have more than met the deal.
Q42 Stephen Metcalfe: I should have declared an interest. I, too, am an officer of the photonics and quantum APPG.
Is it important that the public and wider industry—not necessarily the quantum sector—understand this conversation that we are having, or do they just need to understand the applications and how they might be able to benefit in the future?
Professor Knight: They have got to understand it, because it is going to transform their lives. We have to get the excitement, and the capabilities that we are interested in, into the curriculum in schools—get kids involved in these things. We already run all sorts of boot camps for kids, and so on. It is fantastically energising to see how enthusiastic they are. We could do more of that. They are the taxpayers. We are trying to work out how they are going to benefit with high-value jobs for their kids and their grandchildren—so getting the general public involved.
We have all sorts of really great ambassadors out there who do not have grey beards. Young people working in our project through a thing called Quantum City go out and do this stuff as our ambassadors. They had a whale of a time this year at Glastonbury talking about quantum. We could do more of that, because I think this is so exciting that we need to share that with everyone. It is their journey as well.
Dr Cuthbert: Absolutely. It is important that we communicate to wider industry the opportunity of quantum technologies. For some businesses, it will not be relevant, but they need to work that out for themselves, and we need to support them in that process.
For the general public, I think we are not going to succeed in trying to convince people, or preach to them, about quantum mechanics and the underpinning physics. But we can energise them, as Sir Peter mentioned, about the potential and the applications, and where the benefits and the impact will be in their ordinary lives.
I think there is an important aspect that we have seen recently through all the media interest in and scrutiny of AI—the ethics behind the deployment of quantum technologies and the trust that we, not just as scientists but as a wider public, have in a new technology that could be, or is advertised as, transformative. People need to have a sense of trust that that is for the common good. That has to be about communication of the power of the technology and what it will do for people.
Professor Knight: Yes, a big part of our responsibility is to bust hype. There is an awful lot of rubbish out there. I had my Christmas blown away by an idiot paper that was published on breaking RSA, even with noisy, intermediate-scale machines, using—I swear I am not making it up— Schnorr’s algorithm, not Shor’s. I had to spend a lot of my Christmas briefing people in Whitehall, and saying, “Relax. It's dud. It’s a fake.” You see a lot of complete nonsense in the media and it is our duty, I think, to engage with really great journalists to say, “This is what we can do; this is what we can probably do; and here is realism in this one.” Hype around any emerging technology is dangerous.
Q43 Stephen Metcalfe: So where you see that misreporting and inaccuracy—it often captures headlines—do you feel that you get a fair crack of the whip when it comes to putting the record straight? Reality is probably not as exciting as the fantasy world in which journalists sometimes wish to live.
Professor Knight: Because we have been going for 10 years, we have built a network of sensible journalists that we can engage with. Pallab Ghosh at the BBC was one of my tutees years ago, and there is Jason at The Economist, and so on. We have built a network of sensible people who will come to us and ask, “Is this real, or is it a dud?” I think this is part of what we need to be: we need to be the trusted authority to say, “This is sensible, this might work; here are the risks; this may not work.” Being a trusted authority—NQCC on quantum computing, and the National Physical Laboratory on a lot of other things: does it do what it says on the tin?— is really important. Otherwise, we could get into a catastrophic state of infinite expectations and zero delivery.
Q44 Stephen Metcalfe: A lot of this is to do with engagement—with the public but also with business. Will you briefly talk about how the national facilities that exist go about promoting their work to small and medium-sized enterprises, to make sure that they are aware of their existence?
Professor Knight: Having community meetings where we go through where all the capabilities are and what their bandwidth for engaging is, and so on, is really important. For example, I am going to pick on Glasgow—not just because Carol is sitting there: at the University of Glasgow there is the James Watt nanofabrication facility that can make things. Over at the University of Strathclyde there is the Fraunhofer centre, which is an incredibly good bridge between research and industry.
Companies can say, “Right, I need to provide a little bit of common sense. Is this going to work or not?” Then it is an attractor for other people to get engaged. A Norwegian company called Alter, working with the Fraunhofer, thought, “Oh, very interesting, we had better be here and invest, because we then have that trusted authority to say, yes, it does what we are doing.”
We have a lot of work under way already on what infrastructure is necessary to support quantum. That is work in progress. We have asked the Royal Academy of Engineering to do a deep dive on what is needed in, for example, silicon down at Southampton, 3-5 semiconductors in Sheffield, compound semiconductors in Cardiff, and the whole photonics axis in the central belt of Scotland. The Royal Academy of Engineering is doing a really detailed study, led by Frances Saunders, to find out what capability there is, and where the gaps are.
The big gap that we already know about is that we do not have a substantial foundry. Building things at scale, at the moment we are going to be dependent on people like GlobalFoundries, either in Germany or the US. We know that that will be an issue. It is part of the semiconductor strategy for the UK as well. Foundries are very expensive. Working out a comfortable, secure supply chain relationship with a foundry is going to be essential.
Q45 Stephen Metcalfe: When you use a word like “foundry”, do you mean what I am envisaging in my head as a foundry, or is the use of the word appropriated from doing something else?
Professor Knight: A semiconductor foundry is making a wafer—it could be this big. You put all your microcircuitry on that wafer and dice and splice it to do something. We do not have a UK foundry of that size.
Q46 Dawn Butler: Picking up on what you said in regard to foundries, and on data centres, I am back to the environment again. We need water to cool data centres. How much water do you need?
Professor Knight: In a classical machine, a very great deal—or you use a lot of gas that you shove through the system. Some of the data centres have been transformed by the application of machine learning. Very large data centres have seen something like a 40% drop in their energy consumption based on machine learning—optimisation of which cores you turn on, in what order. That has been a huge advantage. It has been completely eroded by the fact that data centres have got bigger. There are ways and means in which a classical data centre could be dealt with differently.
You have to think of a quantum machine, in many of our applications, as an add-on—an accelerator. We do not have a quantum machine doing it all on its own: you can imagine a high-performance computing machine with a quantum accelerator doing what it does best, just as a GPU does at the moment. You take a video chip and it will be a graphics accelerator. You probably know the story about the fastest, more than petawatt-scale machine that was built by taking a raft of Sony PlayStations, gutting them and using the graphics accelerators in them. It beat the largest petaflop machine in the world. I love that story.
Q47 Dawn Butler: When you say it is a lot of water, that will mean different things to different people, so can you quantify that? What is a lot of water?
Professor Knight: Again, they are already looking at where they will position a major data centre. It is quite sensitive, actually. I wish I had shares in Greenland, for example, at the moment. It is a lot of water, but that is kind of a neighbour of the quantum programme.
You have probably seen in the media pictures of the various superconducting quantum machines that we currently have. They look like chandeliers. The Google machine, which demonstrated the first quantum advantage, managed to solve in about 200 seconds a routing optimisation problem that they reckoned the largest supercomputer in Oak Ridge would have taken thousands of years to do. Providing you set the problem right, the machine usage to solve that problem with a quantum machine could be many orders of magnitude less, simply because it is not running through that whole parallelisation, cores, transmitting, receiving, sharing and so on. A quantum machine could, for the right problem—not every problem—give you that huge speed-up. That is where the words “quantum advantage” work.
Dr Cuthbert: I could add that maybe speed is one aspect but those equivalent machines are also 50 kW of power, compared with 5 MW to 15 MW of power. So it is not just about speed. You are actually using significantly less power to run those types of protocol.
Professor Knight: Yes, you plug one of our superconducting machines into a three-phase mains. If you want to run a data centre, you had better have a power station nearby.
Chair: Thank you very much. I think Carol had a question; then, finally, Graham Stringer.
Q48 Carol Monaghan: Sorry, I thought I was after Graham, but that is okay. I am going to ask a question and it will be difficult for you, Sir Peter, because I am going to ask for a quick answer.
Professor Knight: Apologies—I am an enthusiast.
Q49 Carol Monaghan: That is all right, but I have managed to persuade the Chair to let me have a question, so I need some co-operation.
We have heard a lot about what is good and what improvements can be made. We are getting a fairly positive picture of the current landscape but possibly some question marks are hanging over the next phase. We are obviously going, at the end of the inquiry, to make recommendations to Government. If each of you had one recommendation that you wanted to see in our report, what would that be?
Professor Knight: First, being an early-stage customer within government for some of the hardware, it is agile procurement. I mean agile; I do not mean three years of faffing around with a contract.
Secondly, it is about clarity around export regulations. If we are going to build stuff in the UK, where can we sell it so that naive export regulation stuff does not interfere with that process?
The third one is making sure we have that patient capital.
Q50 Carol Monaghan: I asked you for one and you gave us three. Well done, Peter. I expect nothing less. Dr Cuthbert?
Dr Cuthbert: Peter has stolen my first two. I would refer to that continued long-term vision. This technology is developing rapidly, but it will not happen overnight, so we need to continue that long-term sustained vision.
Q51 Carol Monaghan: Again, think beyond the first decade.
Dr Cuthbert: The decade vision within the strategy is right. We need to ensure that in the delivery of that we do not get bound up by spending review cycles and stop points when we know that programmes will continue. Maybe we need a little less risk aversion and more optimism about the continuity of those programmes over time.
Q52 Graham Stringer: Professor Knight, you said that this country will not necessarily win the race on quantum technology, particularly quantum computers. You also talked about countries that do not share our liberal values, by which, I assume, you meant China. What are the consequences of coming second in that race with China?
Professor Knight: Coming second to China will still give us an opportunity space in a wide range of technologies that we know we are able to exploit for the UK economy—look at other areas where China put into its investment plan the need to dominate, for example, solar energy and solar power.
Q53 Graham Stringer: By dominating the supply chain?
Professor Knight: By dominating the supply chain. Nevertheless, there is an extremely active renewable energy industry in the UK that has prospered despite the fact that it is second to China in things like PV panels and so on.
There is always space. China focuses very much on the security and defence implications of quantum computing. We will see immediately that we will want to be able to move into areas where we know we have a talent—for example, drug discovery, quantum chemistry and so on—where not only do we have an appetite to do it but have engagement with companies like GSK.
Q54 Graham Stringer: I have put the next question I am going to ask to lots of witnesses over the years. You may be the first witness to answer yes; nobody ever has. Is the funding for the quantum infrastructure adequate?
Professor Knight: Yes and no.
Chair: That is progress on the others, Graham.
Professor Knight: Yes, for a great deal of what we want to be able to do; no, in the sense that we need to deal with the whole business of infrastructure and fabrication, and that will require how quantum sits in the wider arena of technology and the semiconductor strategy. That is the “no” bit in that one. Through the quantum focus, we cannot address all the semiconductor needs of the nation. That is my “no”.
As for “yes”, we can do it. Having for the first time DSIT and an Office for Quantum gives us the ability to talk across government. The Office for Quantum now has the duty to start talking with the Department for Transport on the implications of this, and to the Department for Education about curriculum development, technicians and all the rest of it. The Office for Quantum situated in DSIT may give us a real edge. We see that that team is already pretty energetic in engaging with the rest of government, and that will perhaps help us in the business of agile procurement.
Q55 Graham Stringer: When we have had pure academics here talking about their research, we have had long discussions about how in getting funding they measure the impact of their research before they have done it. As for the “no” part of your answer, can you quantify the benefits as well as any increased cost? You have talked quite recently in general terms about what is possible to develop. Is it possible to quantify those benefits in commercial cash terms?
Professor Knight: We are keeping account of how many new high-value jobs we are creating in the UK. It is growing; it is already reasonably large, so in that sense—an immediate impact on the economic value to the nation—high-value jobs are an obvious measure of which we can keep track.
You have to be really careful to avoid double counting: is that really photonic rather than quantum, and so on? We are cautious about that one. We are evaluating those and you can see a very rapid expansion in the employment figures in the UK. That is one of the immediate advantages we have from that investment.
The other part of it is looking at the way inward investment is moving into the UK because of the quality of the programme, its ecosystem and so on. The leading Japanese company in quantum technologies is Toshiba. It decided quite a long time ago that its worldwide centre for this would be in Cambridge because of the excellence of work. Toshiba came with research labs. Next week, or the week afterwards, the president of Toshiba is unveiling its new labs in Cambridge.
On inward investment, there is Toshiba. Hitachi is in Cambridge. I mentioned ALTER and Coherent’s relocation to Scotland. That already impacts the economy because it is a welcome flow of stuff into the UK. It is not an outward flow of ideas exploited elsewhere but an inward flow because of the talent we have here.
Chair: Tracey Crouch is inspired to ask another question inspired by your evidence today.
Q56 Tracey Crouch: We are about to come to a session on teaching and training. In your opening remarks you said that you had removed the word “quantum” because it is scary, and it is. How do we get people interested in quantum—I am thinking particularly about primary school age—without using the word “quantum”, or how do we demystify quantum? I just read an article about Australia, which is using Nerf guns, marbles and everything to explain quantum physics as part of its Einstein-First project. How do we get primary school kids interested in physics, particularly quantum, if we are not using the word “quantum”?
Professor Knight: I will back away from my “don’t use ‘quantum’”. I do not use the word “quantum” when I am talking to BAE Systems, for example. They want to know what it is good for and what it can do that they need but cannot get anywhere else.
If I am talking to school kids about correlations and entanglement, their eyes light up. Therefore, you do use the word “quantum” at that stage and start thinking about some of the oddities. We have to be careful because I am sure that some of my colleagues in the next session will talk about that kind of engagement, but it is easy to enthral people about this stuff because the ideas are counterintuitive and fascinating.
Chair: Thank you very much, Professor Sir Peter Knight and Dr Cuthbert, for kicking off our inquiry this morning. You have given great advanced billing to our next set of witnesses.
Witnesses: Louis Barson and Kimberley Brook.
Thank you very much, both of you, for listening to the previous panel of witnesses. You will have heard the references made to the importance of skills. I shall start by asking Ms Brook for her assessment of the current level of training and provision of skills. Is it appropriate?
Kimberley Brook: I think that in some ways, yes, it is. There is a lot of effort in science training. There are lots of good PhD researchers in the centres of doctoral training. As mentioned previously, there are two. They are currently up for review and are at the rebid stage, so I do hope there is more funding available for those DTCs going forward.
When it comes to training in business skills and upskilling researchers to enable them to create new start-ups and spin-outs, unfortunately the programme I used to run, the Quantum Technology Enterprise Centre, which helped to create a third of the funded quantum start-ups, has now closed because of a lack of funding, and some of the restrictions in finding the next place of funding have prevented us from continuing that programme.
Q58 Chair: Where was that original funding from?
Kimberley Brook: From EPSRC. It is a UKRI-funded programme for the skills and training hub.
Q59 Chair: For how long did that training last?
Kimberley Brook: It was five years initially and we got a no-cost extension that let us finish the programme last year. Since then, we have seen a decrease in the number of new start-ups coming out of the quantum programme from about seven to nine per annum to only one to two now.
Q60 Chair: Do you have any insight into why that funding was not renewed? There has been a huge increase in science funding during this Parliament, as we know, so it is not that there have been cuts; there has been an abundance of science funding. What reasons were given for that programme to be withdrawn?
Kimberley Brook: I am hoping that as part of the next phase of funding there might be another call, but it is just a shame that it did not come at the end of the existing programme. Essentially, the programme ended and the hopes were that there would be a continuation of that funding. The budget reviews and the delay in announcing the next phase of quantum funding meant there was a drop-off in that funding.
Q61 Chair: It seems very concerning. I have no reason to think it is not a good programme. If the EPSRC thought it was not succeeding, that is a different matter, but given that the funding is there for the science budget and is increasing and it has been committed for several years in advance, it would not seem, on the face of it, that there should be any gap there. Do you understand the reasons for that?
Kimberley Brook: I do not understand the full reasons for that. I completely agree that it is concerning. Considering the drop-off in the number of new start-ups, it shows the impact that that has had on the national programme.
Q62 Chair: Let me understand the purpose of that. You talked about doctoral training centres, so it is not that. Describe the people who were being trained through that programme.
Kimberley Brook: Unlike traditional centres for doctoral training, which are more about research and giving researchers skills in science, the centre that I ran, the Quantum Technology Enterprise Centre, was almost like an NBA-style programme for scientists. The idea was that we were upskilling scientists and engineers who have ideas from their own research at universities and enabling them to become the CEOs of their future businesses.
A few of the companies mentioned by Sir Peter came through the quantum technology programme, such as QLM and others, and are within the sector at the moment. It is giving them the skills to be the CEOs and take the technology from the research labs in universities into the real world.
Q63 Chair: We have talked about doctoral students. This is helping academics in other disciplines to be, as it were, relevant in quantum. What about the technician side—people who do not necessarily come up with the ideas but will be working with the originators of ideas? Where are they trained?
Kimberley Brook: Sir Peter mentioned that there is some training. I am not aware of the training programmes that are going on in the technicians’ area. There are a number of programmes already running around science skills. The NQCC has a couple of excellent courses, but they are really geared to people with a STEM background. There is a quantum information and computation course led by the University of Bristol in conjunction with the NQCC. They are excellent programmes in helping people who already have degree in maths and engineering to understand quantum.
There are some basic-level courses. There is a company called Qureca, which has a basic understanding of quantum computing and quantum courses that are really great to get a low-level understanding of quantum, but I do not know where it is filling that gap.
Sir Peter mentioned the community college aspect. Something like that is definitely needed to give people an understanding about whether quantum is applicable and useful to the quantum sector, but not necessarily as intense as maybe having to undergo undergraduate, postgraduate and PhD training.
Q64 Chair: We will come to some of those questions in more detail.
Mr Barson, does the Institute of Physics have any insight into why the EPSRC-funded programme that Ms Brook talked about was stopped?
Louis Barson: It is a very good question. Kimberly mentioned the range of different skills needed to support the industry at different levels of specialisation. She talked a little about PhDs. There is a great commitment to 1,000 over the lifetime of the strategy, which represents roughly a doubling of current numbers and is achievable.
Q65 Chair: I am talking specifically about the programme that was continuing but has come to a stop, and there may or may not be a hiatus before it starts again. If it does start again, it seems unsatisfactory that it should founder temporarily. As director of skills for the Institute of Physics, are you aware of this, and do you have a view on it?
Louis Barson: I know of the programme and its successes. I am aware that it has been supporting a number of significant start-up and spin-out successes in the UK, but I am not involved in the specific conversations around the funding for that programme.
Chair: Obviously, we do not have anyone here from UKRI or EPSRC in that sense. We will make sure they have a chance to give their explanation.
Q66 Tracey Crouch: Mr Barson, the Institute of Physics calls on the Government to create an integrated national skills programme. Why is this needed, and what would be included?
Louis Barson: That is an excellent question. I start by saying a few words about physics to put quantum into context.
As you will appreciate, physics has underpinned successive industrial revolutions: mechanical, electrical, the first quantum atomic revolution—some of us will have seen “Oppenheimer” over the summer break, to put it into perspective—and, indeed, the digital revolution. We have talked a lot today about semiconductors. Therefore, it has a broad underpinning role, including supporting various branches of engineering, mechanical, electrical, aeronautical and automotive.
Unlike some other areas of science, it has real breadth and depth throughout the economy. It should not be a surprise that physics overall contributes, we think, about 11% of UK GDP and about 10% of employment, as well as being responsible for about one third of business R&D in the UK. The quantum sector is a great example of that, with skills being the limiting factor.
Turning to your specific question around the need for an integrated programme, it is clear that there is a strong and direct need for PhD training to support the growth in companies that are right at the cutting edge of technology development. We hear some strong messages from companies. For instance, individual companies tell us that they can employ the entire output of the UK PhD training programmes at the moment.
We are seeing rapid growth in many of these companies, often fuelled by large contracts from Government procurement in the UK or internationally, but it is clear that that is not the end of the story. This is an industry that will grow and mature and, as it does, the skills needs will change and become more regularised and less specialised. That is reflected in the numbers we see around the quantum industry compared with the wider physics-based industry.
At the same time as thinking about PhDs, we need to think about technical training: T-levels, apprenticeships, graduate-level applied courses to support the training of people with aligned skills; master’s courses for retraining those with some of the requisite skills but not all of them; and, reaching back to the early stages of the education system, thinking about how we tackle this in secondary schools and whether we have the right pipeline of people coming through the secondary education system—I have to tell you that there are some significant issues there that it might be good to come back to—and trying to ensure we are doing as much as possible to generate those domestic skills, at the same time as looking internationally and using the excellent fundamentals that we have in the UK to create that pull factor.
Q67 Tracey Crouch: My colleague Rebecca Long Bailey will talk about the national curriculum, so you can pick that up after this.
The national quantum strategy committed to work with professional bodies such as yours. Has that engagement started yet?
Louis Barson: Yes, I think, is the answer. We worked actively with the team in the run-up to the development of the strategy. We put together the vision document that I hope people have had a chance to have a quick look at—consolidated input from across the community. More than 100 experts in science and business contributed to that document. We were really pleased to see so many recommendations reflected in it.
It is worth emphasising that the strategy is a good start. It is ambitious, long term and is backed by the significant investment needed to unleash the potential. We also like some of the specific commitments within it—for instance, those around the idea of a skills taskforce. We would be very ready and keen to contribute to that moving forward.
One thing I would say at this point is that having the strategy is not enough. Sir Peter and Dr Cuthbert talked a little about implementation. The implementation of it is key and it should not be underestimated. There is a £2.5 billion commitment over 10 years, which means more or less £250 million a year of well-targeted, high value-for-money policy initiatives. That is no mean feat. I am sure this Committee will have an important role over the longer term in trying to ensure that commitment is followed in a value-for-money way across successive Parliaments and careers, but to have that vision is absolutely fantastic and it is important we keep track of the implementation.
Q68 Tracey Crouch: You referenced the skills taskforce and said that it is yet to be assembled. This is your opportunity to highlight for the Committee what you think the taskforce action plan should specifically include.
Louis Barson: Thank you for the early opportunity to say something about that. It is clear that to be sustainable the quantum sector will need to expand its workforce as it grows. The scale of the challenge is clear. Eighty-five per cent. of quantum innovators whom we surveyed said they had stopped or slowed R&D over the past five years because of a lack of access to skills. That is a much higher proportion than you would see in the wider physics sector, where it is roughly two thirds.
I think there are good starting points in the strategy around specific talent and skill initiatives. The PhDs are a great example of a flag in the sand and something we need to follow through. It is a great statement of ambition, but it will not be enough. We need to keep track of the development of skills within the quantum sector and ensure that the policy is keeping up with that as it changes and develops.
We may talk a bit about this later, but diversity and inclusion in the sector are important where the skills taskforce could have a key role. There needs to be a clear plan on how we will make this maximally open to people from all kinds of backgrounds, not least because it is the fair and right thing to do but because it is the economically efficient way of generating the maximum number of skills to support this sector.
That is touched upon in the strategy but is not gone into in any great detail. That needs to be further drawn out. To give some specific examples, we gave evidence to this Committee's inquiry into diversity and inclusion in STEM last year. The general recommendations that we made at that point apply also to the quantum sector: creating more inclusive learning spaces by mandating whole-school equity plans and ensuring there are implementable codes of conduct; recognising best practice in diverse leadership; and supporting diverse academic and business cultures.
There are also quantum-specific initiatives we can look at—for instance, showcasing some of the diverse leaders in the sector, of which there are already excellent examples that are ripe for showcasing across business and academia; supporting initiatives that target fellowship support in diverse groups, such as the IOP’s Bell Burnell Graduate Scholarship Fund, and creating a monitoring and evidence base that allows us to understand the make-up of diversity within the sector and to act on the basis of firm evidence. We suggest that all of this could be usefully co‑ordinated with UKRI’s wider work in fostering inclusion across the research and innovation space.
There is more I could say. There are some important things that need to be done around linkages with industry and communications, but we may touch on those in other questions as well.
Q69 Rebecca Long Bailey: Mr Barson, you mentioned issues with secondary education. Do you think there needs to be a rethink of the national curriculum to integrate quantum concepts across school teaching to address that?
Louis Barson: That is an excellent question. The curriculum has not been looked at for quite a long time. It is probably the right time to think about looking at the curriculum again. We have developing thinking at the IOP about some of the major themes that could be addressed as part of that: the big ideas of physics that could be better brought to the fore in the curriculum.
There has to be an opportunity to draw on some of the excitement of the cutting-edge aspects of physics, such as quantum technologies, as well as the concrete contribution that physics can make to solving some of our greatest challenges, such as climate change. We need to do that in a sensitive way.
The maths involved in studying quantum physics at the cutting edge is very, very difficult and we need to introduce concepts sensitively, but there has to be a way to capture some of that excitement and fire children up about what potential careers could look like in the quantum sector and other leading physics-powered sectors as part of curriculum reform. At the appropriate moment, that definitely should be looked at.
Q70 Rebecca Long Bailey: Ms Brook, in terms of industry being developed in order to provide support and training, do you think it is developed enough at the moment to be able to provide sufficient apprenticeships in quantum?
Kimberley Brook: There is a long way to go on apprenticeships, but I think the appetite is there. A number of start-ups we are working with are looking at the idea of quantum apprenticeships as something viable for them. The University of Bristol is working quite closely at the moment in exploring an apprenticeship programme with the western training partnership network, looking at how we can enable some of our businesses to do quantum apprenticeships. There is a lot of appetite in that area.
Apprenticeships are not necessarily the only route. There are probably access programmes, working with other training providers that might work in diverse communities to understand how we can encourage them to think about quantum as an area they might want to explore.
As Mr Barson says, there are areas which are very complex and will require somebody with an in-depth knowledge of maths to undertake those careers, but there are other parts, like the technicians we spoke about earlier, which could be done by people who do not necessarily have a background in a STEM subject but could be upskilled to have the skills they need to join those positions.
Q71 Stephen Metcalfe: As new technologies emerge and develop—AI, quantum, etc.—we get excited about them, but sometimes we forget about the societal and ethical impacts that they might have. What is being done to help ensure that those who are receiving training and working in this area are considering the societal and ethical aspects of quantum technology?
Louis Barson: It is a really good question. This was looked at early in the national quantum technology programme’s development. It is a vital issue to consider, and it also came up in our vision community work as an important one to look at.
There are ethical issues associated with the development and delivery of any powerful new technology. I suppose the key question is: to what extent are the issues around quantum technologies sufficiently unique to warrant specific focus, or can they be dealt with through the general mechanisms we have in the research councils, which are currently being drawn on?
There are important lessons to draw from how ethical considerations are treated in other high-technology centres and other emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, and key questions about whether quantum technologies should be treated in isolation or together with those other approaches where you have, for instance, a centre for data ethics and innovation within the artificial intelligence policy framework.
It is probably too soon for the IOP to be definitive on this issue, although we recognise it is a complex issue that needs further evaluation. We ourselves are considering ethics as part of our future work on physics in society in our new strategy development and draft economic and societal governance framework, which will shortly be considered by our council. We would like to ensure that this is considered and kept under review, and we would be keen to be partners in a conversation around how it can be better addressed moving forward.
Kimberley Brook: In addition, all the companies we work with undertake ESG training because there is such a requirement nowadays, especially for those who might be seeking VC funding, about those responsibilities. At SETsquared there is an ESG impact workout. There is also sustainability training and a lot of different courses available for the businesses we work with to ensure they meet their ethical and social goals.
Q72 Stephen Metcalfe: Ms Brook, changing the subject slightly, what support do start-ups and academics need to develop their ideas into commercial applications?
Those soft skills are really important, and there are the business skills themselves. What is the market? What is your value proposition? How do we get all that information together? How do you do your cash flow? Those are all the business skills that are needed to get to the point where they are investor-ready.
You cannot underestimate leadership skills. For those people who want to become CEOs, it is important that they are confident enough to stand up in front of a company, or whoever they are talking to, and be the CEO of that business and lead that venture.
Those were the main skills that were needed. I would definitely not underestimate funding. The Quantum Technology Enterprise Centre essentially bought out the salaries of those individuals for a year, which allowed them a year’s runway to explore what their business was going to do. That helped to de-risk the whole process for them. It meant they could focus on the actual business, not just research, for that full year. By the end of that programme the hopes were they would be investor-ready and have a viable company to take forward.
Q73 Stephen Metcalfe: Have there been any notable successes from the enterprise centre?
Kimberley Brook: Yes. Sir Peter mentioned a number of them. QLM was one of the biggest successes from the national programme, with QuTech in year one; KETS Quantum Security; Quantum Dice; New Quantum; and CQ, a quantum computing company. There are several really large companies that are part of the programme that came through QuTech itself.
They came through the fellowship programme, but on top of that we did a number of support programmes. We ran investor showcases, such as the UK and France quantum showcase in 2021. That supported a number of ventures that were not just from our incubator but from the wider national programme team.
Q74 Stephen Metcalfe: Are there any particular barriers stopping the enterprise centre expanding? Is it literally just a question of ideas and people coming through?
Kimberley Brook: Funding is the main issue. I managed to secure the training programme and move it into an online programme, which will enable people to access it in their own time. However, it means that researchers who might be paid by their universities will have to do it outside work. That will delay how quickly they can accelerate their ventures. If we were able to fund an enterprise fellowship in the way we did previously, it would allow them to accelerate the venture a lot quicker and mean that there would be more companies being created within the national programme.
Q75 Stephen Metcalfe: As for the companies that have spun out or been created and are now deemed to be successful, at the point at which they make money is there any obligation to put money back into the centre to fund the next round, if you like, of businesses?
Kimberley Brook: Currently, no. For the companies that have been created, their revenues are not high enough yet, but there is a lot of appetite from the founders we have worked with previously to give back. We have had to foster that mentality in the people we have worked with, but I think a lot of them would do that; it is just that it is not written in stone anywhere.
Q76 Graham Stringer: Should the global talent visa network be expanded to include more than India and the USA?
Louis Barson: As I mentioned, international skills are a key part of attracting international skills. It has to be a key part of the UK’s strategy for developing a sustainable skills base.
We work collaboratively with multiple partners on quantum technologies. Sir Peter talked about a few of them—for instance, Canada, Singapore and others. As for Japan, that was a big announcement around the strategy itself. I think it would be worth considering that.
International skills are only one part of the picture. We need a co‑ordinated domestic skills development strategy; and we need diversity and inclusion to help the industry to widen the pipeline of people coming into it. We need that industrial engagement. Sir Peter talked about it earlier.
Engaging big business in the UK in the quantum scene is absolutely vital in ensuring its continued growth. Other countries have IT majors, particularly in the US. In the UK, it is about taking companies on a journey and helping them to understand what quantum technology could do and de‑risk some of the earlier applications. An architecture of various organisations is doing pieces of that—the hubs and the NQCC itself—but it is worth considering whether a front end can engage industry, a little analogous to the advanced manufacturing infrastructure and how the AMRC and catapult centres front it up.
Can we bring that together into something a little more accessible to industry? That is important, not just in engaging them in developing some of the cutting edge R&D that will be important in proving the concept within the companies, but also in making them see the value of investing back into that skill system, sponsoring industrial studentships and helping build the overall skills ecosystem that we need in the UK.
Lastly, specifically on the international point, the communication strategy is absolutely vital. We now have a great opportunity with an industry that is thriving and is second in the world by many measures, with a strategy that is ambitious and long term in its vision. We can be shouting domestically and internationally about what a great quantum system and plan we have. That will be needed to bring the skills in domestically to excite people and get them involved, but also to speak to international businesses and leading international researchers, whom we want to draw into the UK system. I think we would want to do that in a very general way, but we would also do it in a specific, targeted way around key international players whom we might want to draw into the UK ecosystem to augment it.
I think the answer to your question is: absolutely. Visas are an important aspect in this systemic approach and we should think about broadening that out, but it has to be done alongside a number of other levers that need to be pulled in tandem strategically.
Q77 Graham Stringer: You mentioned two, maybe three, countries: Singapore, Canada and a third one, which I have forgotten. Are there any other countries that should be considered?
Louis Barson: It is worth looking to our natural partners in security terms: Five Eyes nations. We obviously work very well and collaboratively on security issues. Sir Peter alluded to significant security considerations around some of these technologies. I think that working with some of the nations with which we have good and well-developed collaborative relationships would be a logical starting point.
Q78 Tracey Crouch: As a follow‑up to Graham’s point, we have received quite a substantial amount of evidence about the current UK visa system. It is clear that if we are to be a superpower, as is the Government’s ambition, we need to reform some of these areas and in particular make this an attractive place for people to come and work. Do you think that the interventions the Government should be implementing, on which I am sure you have all been lobbying the Government, are being worked on quickly enough? Ms Brook, you are nodding.
Kimberley Brook: Some of the changes that are being made are very positive. There are still restrictions. People have to be individuals with high potential, leaders and a talent to go into scale-ups to get visas. It is hard for some of our start-ups to get secure visas for people they want to attract from other countries, because they are start-ups and they just cannot sponsor the visas themselves. That is a real challenge and something that can be worked on.
I would also look at broadening the workforce. We have mentioned a lot PhD studentships. Something that is woefully inadequate in this country is international studentships. This is not just in quantum but across the board in all subjects. Encouraging that talent at PhD level from overseas is really important. It is about broadening not only the work visas but the student visas and making sure there are also international studentships to enable people to come. I think that is really worth while.
Louis Barson: I agree with all those comments. One thing I would like to highlight—I am conscious that we may be approaching the end of the session—is the pressing domestic issue around school-age education. This was reflected directly within the semiconductor strategy but is equally applicable to the quantum strategy. I refer to the critical shortage of physics teachers in this country. There is a gap of about 3,500 physics teachers, which means that about 400 schools in England alone do not send anyone to physics A‑level, and about 70% of progression comes from about 30% of schools in the country, so you have a real postcode lottery.
That is a brake at the front end of the domestic skills development system and something that needs to be tackled urgently. We have been talking closely and actively with the Department for Education about this and have specific ideas on how to solve it. We will also be giving evidence to the Education Committee's inquiry on recruitment, training and retention of teachers in a couple of weeks.
It strikes me that this is an issue that should be talked about in the context of all the cutting-edge physics sectors that are developing domestic talent, and is a key issue for the implementation of the science and technology framework.
This is one of the limiting factors, alongside some of the barriers that prevent young people from choosing a career in physics. We know that physics is the second most popular subject for boys, but the 16th most popular for girls. That cannot be right. If we were able to equalise that, there would be 20,000 more young people joining the physics ecosystem. That would be transformational to the domestic skills development and cultures we create in the UK.
As a final point related to the specific visa question, we should not underestimate the extent to which the inclusivity and diversity of our UK culture is one of the key attractors for international talent into our system and one of the reasons that make people stay. For instance, we have evidence that LGBT+ young people in physics leave at about twice the rate of non-LGBT+ young people, except when they are within a really supportive and inclusive and diverse environment, which we have done with the Royal Society of Chemistry.
Providing those cultures is as important as providing the ways in that allow people to join the system to ensure they stay and contribute.
Chair: We turn finally to a former teacher of physics, Carol Monaghan.
Q79 Carol Monaghan: I did 20 years as a physics teacher. I still like to think of myself as a physics teacher. Maybe when this nonsense has come to an end I will go back, but we will see.
Mr Barson, you said we need people to fire children up. You also said that the entire output of PhDs can be snapped up by industry. We could apply that to undergraduates. You said we were 3,000 short in physics teachers. Do we need to stop messing about and pay physics teachers?
Louis Barson: It is a really good question, and you have cut to the heart of it. So often, people with physics qualifications have many options open to them. I guess that sectors like quantum are leading the way in presenting attractive opportunities to those who are qualified in physics. We need to make sure that teaching is also an attractive career.
Q80 Carol Monaghan: It is short-sighted by the industry. I do not blame the industry. They have all been snapped up, and then we complain that we cannot get the skills for others. It is a chicken-and-egg scenario.
Louis Barson: We need to do both. We need to scale the system. It is fantastic that industry growth has a demand for these people, but we need to make sure there are enough to train the pipeline to supply that demand.
I guess it is a question of industry slightly running ahead of the training and skills system. The ideas we have been discussing with the Department for Education are around whether we can deploy an intelligent approach to retraining teachers who have many of the requisite skills from other sciences to become as qualified as someone who has gone through that physics pathway.
Given the scale of the challenge, given the fact that the Department for Education recruited only 17% of its target for physics teachers this year and given that this has been going on for almost a decade, we feel that transformational ideas like that, alongside when you push us on recruitment and retention of those teachers, are absolutely necessary.
Q81 Carol Monaghan: You might be the wrong panel to ask, but I am a quantum company and I want a smart young person to join my company. Do they need to have a PhD? Indeed, do they need to have a degree in physics? If they are smart enough and have a technical brain, can we be looking elsewhere?
Louis Barson: Absolutely. Quantum companies should be, and are, training bright young people to be able to make valuable contributions to companies. The fact is that the quantum sector is at a very early stage of development, so much of what companies do is genuinely advancing state-of-the-art understanding of science, engineering and applications.
Those PhDs will play an important role for a number of years moving forward. A good example might be ORCA Computing, which supplied the first quantum computer to the Ministry of Defence in the UK. It has been scaling up incredibly rapidly and now employs 50 people, of whom 75% are PhDs. That is just reflective of the stage of development of the industry. We need to be investing in that now.
Q82 Carol Monaghan: Thinking of ORCA Computing in 10 years’ time, when it is probably more established or mature, should there be a role for companies to take some responsibility and say, “Rather than taking PhDs, we are going to be taking a 17-year-old who has an A-level or higher in physics,” as we have in Scotland, “and is very technically minded, and we can train them”?
Louis Barson: Absolutely, and we are already seeing signs of that. Sticking with ORCA, we are partnering with it to deliver a hackathon on quantum computing, which is becoming an annual event for A‑level students who have some understanding of and interest in quantum.
Q83 Carol Monaghan: What is the outcome of that? Is the outcome that they get a prize and get excited, or that they get a job?
Louis Barson: I suppose the outcome is to get them excited in the industry and broaden that pipeline for this specific initiative, but, as the industry develops and matures, you are absolutely right: we should be seeing companies stepping up and doing more in contributing to that skills pipeline; and we should be seeing more big businesses getting engaged and partnering with smaller companies and the research base to boost the landscape of training and the funding pool that is available. At the moment, it is putting the fundamentals in place for that PhD architecture—master’s, degree level, cueing up the longer-term technician level and, below, business skills training for the longer term, recognising that there is a significant delay in skills initiatives resulting in people who are ready to join companies. We need to be able to do that stuff now and plan for the 10 years ahead and put in place some of those longer-term initiatives alongside developing the here-and-now talent that the industry tells us it needs, which is more at the higher end of skills.
Kimberley Brook: There are internship programmes that a lot of start-ups do. They are not necessarily internships or PhD students; they might be for undergraduates. There is probably a long way to go in supporting some school-age children to do those internships. As Mr Barson said, the PhD students are really required for that in-depth R&D.
There are a lot more jobs within the quantum sector that are beyond that. You can then get the 17-year-olds who might be able to do some of this to do continuing professional development training and upskilling courses to get them to the point where they are trained to do a job, not necessarily the R&D jobs within those organisations.
Q84 Carol Monaghan: I wonder whether there is a place for taking a bright 17-year-old who does not want to pay £9,000 a year to go to university but has the brain and capability to be taken on by a company that will do degree apprenticeships in quantum.
Kimberley Brook: There are organisations looking at apprenticeships. NPL is already doing that, for example; the University of Bristol is also doing them.
Q85 Carol Monaghan: Ms Brook, you referred to your CDT. I was really interested in that. I have some knowledge of CDTs, but yours sounds quite interesting. It is almost business skills that have been targeted. Do you see some sense in having, as part of a CDT programme in quantum or photonics, for example, some business skills as part of the training that is undertaken, alongside the very technical training?
Kimberley Brook: There are two parts to that. The Quantum Technology Enterprise Centre is a skills and training hub rather than a CDT, so it was not the doctoral training available to students and researchers.
There is a centre for doctoral training at the University of Bristol; there is one in quantum engineering. It is the fundamental first-year course, which is where they do a lot of their training on quantum principles. Alongside that, they do business training. Yesterday, I was training a CDT at Bristol on what is enterprise and how to build your own businesses. They do that as part of it.
I think the CDTs are really well served in soft skills, business, enterprise and leadership training. The big risk is that traditional PhD students do not get the same level of training. I think it is those students whom we need to be working with, because they do not necessarily get the same service from their universities as CDT students. For me, that is where we should be focusing our attention.
Q86 Chair: Mr Barson, you have a very unusual background. I understand that you are a fluent Japanese speaker and studied Japanese philosophy in the Universities of Tokyo and Kyoto.
There are two aspects to that. First, you are someone in the humanities and in physics who has combined the two. Has that been straightforward? Do you think that is more open than is typical?
Secondly, I assume that you continue to have good connections with Japan. Both from that and from being there, do you see anything that they do from which we could learn?
Louis Barson: You are very well informed. It is an excellent question.
I have a slightly non-traditional background, perhaps even more non‑traditional than it sounds, in that I did not go to school; I was home educated until 16, so I have had a rather unusual route into physics and philosophy.
My view is that philosophy and physics are quite closely connected, in that they ask big questions about the fundamental nature of reality. Of course, there are more answers in physics than perhaps philosophy. That was the reason I found myself heading in that direction.
In quantum physics, in particular, the question is about interpretation. What does quantum physics say about reality? Ultimately, what reality looks like is still very much an open question, and there is some important philosophical work going on around the different competing interpretations of quantum physics—for instance, whether it means that things are fundamentally waves of probability or there are multiple worlds and the universe forks every time a quantum event takes place.
These are genuine questions that arise across the cutting edge of physics and philosophy. I think that is really important and interesting. Perhaps it has given me a slightly different window on the world from people who came from a traditional physics background, in that I am very interested in those questions.
One approach that has been taken to these questions is called the shut up and calculate approach, which essentially says we should leave to one side questions about what reality really looks like and focus on what the numbers tell us and what we can do with them. That is one approach.
Ultimately, my view is that we need to think about what cutting-edge physics tells us about the way the world is, and which interpretation is right is genuinely an interesting and important question that needs to be solved at some point. That perhaps differentiates me a little bit from some others.
I have close connections with Japan. I had the pleasure to work under the Secretary of State for a number of years in setting up the AI policy framework prior to joining the institute and setting up the first iteration of the quantum policy team. We also looked at areas such as robotics and brokering collaborations with nations such as Japan. I am pleased to see that those have developed and been brought forward. There is now quite a strong robotics collaborative relationship between the UK and Japan.
Q87 Chair: Do you think there is anything Japan does strikingly different from the UK that we should emulate?
Louis Barson: One lesson I would take from Japan, although I am not sure it is entirely transferable, is the relationship it has with large business. In Japan, the Government and large businesses work closely and actively together around major research challenges. That is partly because of the zaibatsu tradition of how those accrued conglomerates came about. Their relationships with government have been very influential from the get-go, but there is probably more we could do in the UK, particularly in quantum, to be brokering relationships with large businesses, making it easy for them to understand what there is to offer and to ask questions about the quantum system to enable solutions to be developed.
There are lots of individual ways in which that can happen, but in terms of having an accessible front end that is probably a little bit of a gap. That level of conversation and ease of accessibility for businesses is probably one lesson I would take away from the Japanese system.
Chair: Thank you for sharing that experience. I thank Mr Barson, Ms Brook and all our witnesses for their evidence today.