Science, Innovation and Technology Committee

Oral evidence: Science diplomacy, HC 838

Tuesday 2 December 2025

Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 2 December 2025.

Watch the meeting

Members present: Dame Chi Onwurah (Chair); Emily Darlington; George Freeman; Dr Allison Gardner; Kit Malthouse; Samantha Niblett; Martin Wrigley; Daniel Zeichner.

Questions 122 - 206

Witnesses

I: Manjari Chandran-Ramesh, Partner, Amadeus Capital Partners; Jessica Wade, Associate Professor, Imperial College London.

II: Jonathan Legh-Smith, Executive Director, UKQuantum; Duncan Jones, General Manager, Quantinuum.

Examination of witnesses

Witnesses: Dr Manjari Chandran-Ramesh and Jessica Wade.

Chair: Welcome to this, the third session in this Committee’s inquiry into science diplomacy. Today, we are going to be examining the UK’s quantum environment, from research to investment and commercialisation. It is a technology where we have made positive initial steps, but there is a risk that we lose this progress. For our first panel, we are joined by Jessica Wade and Dr Manjari Chandran-Ramesh.

Q122       George Freeman: Good morning, both. In every sector, but perhaps none more than quantum, we are in a global race for sovereign industrial advantage and investment. I wanted to ask you both, Manjari first from a commercial investor point of view and Jessica from an academic point of view, to describe that global race. Who is winning it? Who is doing what? China, we hear, is doing a lot. There is the US, obviously, but also Germany, France, Sweden and Canada.

Where do we fit in, Manjari, commercially in setting our £2 billion, 10‑year programme? It seems to me that we have to really focus on where we have a USP. I am keen to hear commercially where you think that is. Jessica, academically, which labs are really leading and where do you think the UK’s real academic strengths are in that global race?

Dr Chandran-Ramesh: For the purpose of the Committee, I am Dr Manjari Chandran-Ramesh. I am a partner with the global investment firm Amadeus Capital Partners. We have invested globally, for the last 30 years, into deep tech, and of course quantum forms a big part of that. For completeness, we have investments into individual companies, such as Photonic in Canada, Riverlane in the UK and Nu Quantum in the UK. One of our companies in France got acquired by SandboxAQ and hence we have a shareholding there. My first investment into quantum was in 2017 and I have seen this right through the last so many years.

With that initial £2 billion investment, the UK has punched above its weight and set up a brilliant ecosystem within the UK. There has been phenomenal research that has led to a really high-quality set of start-ups that are in the process of scaling up. They have a global presence and are respected globally. More importantly, the entire ecosystem has attracted not just talent but also companies from outside of the UK to come and set up here. I do not think that a lot of countries could say that. There are, of course, programmes in France and Germany, as you mentioned. Japan is the latest to announce a huge sum of investment. There is a race, but currently the UK is very well positioned to take advantage of where we are.

Q123       George Freeman: As an investor, do you only invest in the UK, or do you invest internationally?

Dr Chandran-Ramesh: No, we invest globally. Photonic, for instance, is in Canada, so we see deal flow across the world.

Q124       George Freeman: On your quantum investments, can you talk about where you are wanting to deploy money and where you are seeing countries building ecosystems? Where is that competitive opportunity for you and issue for us to be aware of?

Dr Chandran-Ramesh: Interestingly, I am not actually looking at it geographically, because we want any deep-tech and quantum company that we want to invest in to be global. It almost does not matter where it starts; what matters is where it has the most impact. Whether that starts in the UK, such as the Riverlane and Nu Quantum investments, or indeed elsewhere, we are looking much more at, “Is this differentiated technology? Does this have a great team that is going to be able to make an impact globally?”

The UK itself is very well placed to create those companies and have them get that seed and series A investment. Where I worry about UK companies is having to get that scale-up investment. It is really hard for companies here to get a lead investor at the series B, C and D stages, which then means that they have to go outside of the UK. That is not necessarily a bad thing, because it means more investment into the UK, because these companies are based in the UK, but it is a huge time sink. They have to go and spend several weeks while they are not building the business. The CEOs have to go and spend several weeks in the US or elsewhere in the world to get that lead investor. There is that chance that those investors have pull and may want to have these companies move away from the UK.

Q125       George Freeman: The danger is that other countries buy our well‑incubated companies and make them the anchor of their sovereign programme, so we lose them. Jessica, you are at Imperial, which is a powerhouse. We have others. Where do we fit in the league table in terms of patents, discovery and deep research?

Jessica Wade: I am Jess. I am a research fellow at Imperial. Absolutely, we are completely world-leading in quantum research. We are one of the first national quantum programmes. The vision of Sir Peter Knight has been emulated worldwide in trying to set up a connected quantum ecosystem. There is the model the UK has of these quantum research and innovation hubs centred at universities and distributed regionally. There is fantastic national coverage of our quantum programme that connects Scotland, Wales, England and Northern Ireland.

That vision of connecting people through these hubs, aligning them and focusing efforts through quantum missions is the envy of the world, and people are trying to replicate it all around the world. When I speak to other relatively early career researchers who have gone internationally, they always want to come back to the UK because they see it as a space where it is a fantastic place to develop your career, an amazing place to conduct fundamental and translational research and an incredible place to try to build a company. There is that cross-Government support to not only support fantastic ideas in quantum but to get them out of the lab and into the real world.

When you go internationally—I was at a big quantum industry-focused meeting in the States a couple of weeks ago—they look at these missions around computing, networking, sensing for the NHS, sensing for infrastructure and sensing for transport as a fantastic way to concentrate effort and resource. When you look at academic publications, the UK consistently ranks incredibly highly globally. When you look at the quality of the students we create and the training that we provide them with in our universities or national labs, we rank incredibly highly. When you look at the translation of that research out of universities through the UKRI quantum hubs, it is extraordinarily successful as well.

Q126       George Freeman: Can I ask about China? It is pouring billions into it. When I went to see Gilles Brassard, the future Nobel Prize-winning scientist, I am sure, he said that China is doing extraordinary things and it is not that transparent. How aware are you, at a leading international research centre, of what they are doing in China around quantum?

Jessica Wade: China obviously has gigantic strengths and huge public and private investment into quantum. Our UK quantum programme has pledged £2.5 billion. Its is over $15 billion and that is what we are aware of. It is hugely strong in particular areas, such as quantum communication. It has an incredibly robust encrypted network for sending quantum information and securing all its data transfer. It is starting to build activity around sensing as well.

The UK still has gigantic strengths compared to China, in that we are so collaborative. We are so connected. We make use of these huge regional strengths, such as Scotland’s photonic cluster or Wales’s semiconductor activity, to do things that are truly innovative.

One challenge that we face and something where more Government guidance could be useful is on that own-collaborate-access framework that was proposed previously and actually getting a bit granular about what that means in the development of a quantum technology. What part of a supply chain should we own? Where should we collaborate and what should we be accessing? That would help researchers and innovators. At the moment, a lot of people are trying to develop quantum technologies that could have some potential sovereign purpose, but that is tricky if you do not have a really clear framework.

Another challenge we have, particularly in higher education when it comes to international competition, is that it is extraordinarily expensive to teach people subjects such as physics and engineering, which are obviously very important for developing quantum technologies. As a result, universities subsidise the expense to teach home students with international student fees. That is going to get harder with the student fee levy.

Q127       George Freeman: That is a familiar systemic problem. I know that there are others who want to ask questions. I will just flag that, when I was doing the quantum moonshot missions, it seemed to me that we are in a very serious security race with China in encryption. If it wins it, it will put a coach and horses through all of our cyber-security. There, my advice to Ministers would be that we need a Five Eyes quantum encryption programme with trusted allies. You make an important point: we could incubate China’s quantum threat to our economy.

Jessica Wade: The National Cyber Security Centre has incredibly good guidance for SMEs and companies around the UK on engaging with post‑quantum cryptography. The onus is on us to start shouting and singing about that and getting people to engage in it, because it is incredibly clear. Again, it is a world first. It is world-leading, but I do not think companies know that they should be looking at that to prepare themselves for this PQC world.

Q128       Emily Darlington: I wanted to talk a bit about whether we are at the right funding level, both in research and into those companies. Jessica, do you think that £2.5 billion is the right amount for the UK to be funding in terms of quantum? Obviously you will always say that you could have more money, but, in terms of being the international competitor and being internationally competitive, how much should we be investing? What is the step change that we may need to see in quantum funding at the academic level?

Jessica Wade: Manjari is much more expert in the incorporation of private money into that. The public research money is pretty fantastic in the UK in quantum. Of that pledged £2.5 billion, we have not seen the full £2.5 billion yet. One challenge, or a huge opportunity, in the UK ecosystem at the moment is that the majority of money has gone towards compute, so quantum computing. It would be fantastic to see that widened to other areas where the UK is incredibly strong, such as quantum sensing, quantum imaging, navigation and timing, because these could deliver commercial revenue at much quicker timescales than computing currently can.

There is an opportunity to think a little bit about the funding and how it is distributed in the UK. As I mentioned before, this network of quantum hubs facilitates and supports a huge amount of research, and from a relatively small investment. It is about £100 million going in to support these industry-academic partnerships that are spread around the UK. It starts as something relatively small, but after that it catalyses much bigger opportunities. EPSRC and UKRI have also supported these centres for doctoral training, recognising that need to upskill the next generation of quantum researchers. There was a real focus on quantum CDTs within the last announcement. What we are doing is incredibly positive.

Should we expand beyond computing? Yes, probably. There was a recent announcement of £14 million towards a quantum sensing primer. That was a handful of companies doing really innovative things in quantum sensing for medical diagnostics, infrastructure or transport, but we could open that a little wider.

One thing the UK has got right is the need for this long-term investment in quantum. The National Quantum Computing Centre, which is a kind of testbed for trying out different quantum hardware for computing, has had a 10-year commitment. It is the first of its kind to get that 10-year commitment. That is not just a physical space or a place to plug in your quantum computer. It is actually the people and the expertise there.

That is the first in the world to give that long-term investment, but we should see that for these other hardwares as well. You need a testbed centre for sensors. You need somewhere where we can take these quantum timing systems and make sure they are as accurate and robust as they can be. We are doing great, but we could expand it a lot further.

Q129       Emily Darlington: How much engagement does the academic community get from Government Departments through their R&D budgets, in particular when you are talking about sensing, Department for Transport, NHS, Department of Health and Social Care, MOD or some of these cyber-security areas? How much is there? Do you feel that you get a look into those budgets and that those Departments understand and have created those pathways from funding to adopting?

Jessica Wade: It is a brilliant question. At Imperial, we run a course called quantum fundamentals, which is introducing civil servants to quantum technologies. It is every Friday morning for three hours. It is brilliant and we have about 35 civil servants from across Government. They are quantum enthusiasts in different Departments.

As you mentioned, the Department for Transport is very active. The Department of Health and Social Care is very active, and even places such as DESNZ and the Department for Education. We have had huge cross-Government enthusiasm for not only funding and supporting these ideas but for really understanding how they impact end use cases. We ran a quantum for health workshop at Hammersmith Hospital a couple of weeks ago and had the Department of Health and Social Care come and go through the 10-year plan for the NHS and where quantum fits.

How much cross-Government support there is for it is a massive global strength of the UK, both in fitting it into their missions and visions and in helping quantum researchers connect with end users. You do not want it to be a case where there is too much science push rather than NHS or end-user pull. You need that co-creation. It is a really incredible opportunity for the UK, but one where we are already really strong.

Q130       Emily Darlington: I had not appreciated quite how far that had gone, and that is really quite reassuring. Is that translating into Government contracts for the spin-out companies?

Dr Chandran-Ramesh: No, not quite. To follow on, it is great that there is a lot of cross-Government support for research, but it is still very hard for start-ups and spin-outs to actually access this. The SBRI has been a great contractual piece of work. It has really helped, but it has been very specific towards particular missions, as it should be. We probably need more of those. We need Government to continue as a procurer in a very concentrated manner to help the other areas of quantum, rather than just computing. That is important.

The other thing to flag also is that there is a reason why a lot of investment, especially venture investment, has gone into computing as opposed to navigation, sensing or timing. It is a little bit more difficult to get the venture-style returns that a lot of venture capital funds would be looking for in these other quantum sensing and imaging areas, even though the technology readiness levels are much further along and you can almost see the use case in a way you cannot see it in quantum computing because it is still simulation. Because there is not as big a market as there is in quantum computing, the case to make a venture-style return is a little bit harder. You have a smaller pool of venture investment that can go into these companies. That is all the more reason why Government as a procurer is needed to give that use-case validation for those companies.

Q131       Emily Darlington: If the Government were using their procurement power better, it would make it easier to get that external funding and growth external funding for those key ventures with a Government contract. Is that what you are saying?

Dr Chandran-Ramesh: It would be easier, but it is much more in terms of getting faster to that commercialisation, almost independent of requiring too much venture capital funding, because these are not necessarily structured for venture.

Q132       Emily Darlington: Presumably the use case and funding case for Government would not be around its economic value, but around the value to the UK citizens of being able to use sensing, whatever that would be. That is the use case, rather than economic growth.

Dr Chandran-Ramesh: It is infrastructure play, yes, towards the UK. I am sure that there is an economic growth argument as well. It is not to the exclusion of economic growth argument, but definitely in terms of infrastructure.

The other point I would like to make with the research funding is that I agree that NQCC was one of the first here. It was then copied by other countries as a concept to have testbeds. One thing that the US has done really well is to task its national labs to look at problems that are affecting the whole industry and research on those problems. Currently, what is happening is that certain research divisions within universities do brilliant work. They then spin out. That is great, but there is a portion where industry-wide challenges can be taken up by the national labs here. There can be a solution that benefits the whole industry. I would go one step further and almost say to make that IP on preferential terms for those who are willing to commercialise within the UK, so that you can retain that IP here.

Q133       Emily Darlington: My final question is about collaboration. Quantum sovereignty, especially in cyber, is very important. George has mentioned working across the Five Eyes. There are also some of the adoption cases and, quite frankly, the size of our population. Should we be collaborating more across Europe to give that market size and to share some scientific value? How do we, in that process, retain the sovereignty that we require for some of these technologies in order to keep them secure, particularly around cyber, space or defence?

Jessica Wade: Perhaps this comes back a little bit to that own-collaborate-access framework. If we had that really well defined for different quantum hardware or applications, it would be a really good tool to help navigate these complex decisions.

We collaborate hugely internationally. Quantum is an absolutely giant endeavour. As Manjari mentioned, the challenges scientifically and in infrastructure and skills are ones that the whole world is facing. Coming together and speaking about how we deliver that more effectively is important.

There are lots of memorandums of understanding between the UK Government and different countries with which we share values and want to collaborate. That has enabled lots of fantastic research and innovation with Japan, Denmark, the Netherlands and the States. There are other levers within that. The new UK-US tech prosperity deal laid out a whole plan for quantum, through which we can collaborate around algorithm challenges and entrepreneurship development.

There are fantastic little pockets of collaboration. Bristol has a collaboration with Colorado to work on quantum engineering and innovation ecosystems. Scotland has a photonics collaboration with California to work on optics and photonics for quantum applications. You do not have to look too far to see where these really important international partnerships are.

We have strong connections already to Europe. Imperial certainly is incredibly tied to our European colleagues. We have a co-research centre with CNRS, the French research agency. Accessing ERC funding and things like that will be incredibly important for the quantum sector going forwards. Given the scale of the quantum challenge and this need to leverage UK strengths, but also benefit from international strengths, there is a lot we are doing and a lot we could do.

I would add that it is not just about research but also thinking about how we upskill investors. Imperial, supported by DSIT, ran a fellowship for venture capital investors. Manjari was a guest on it. It was a VC fellowship focused on deep technologies, of which quantum was one, helping early-stage VCs better understand and feel more confident on investing in quantum. I have spoken about this quite a lot with international colleagues and they are so jealous that we are doing this in the UK, it is supported by Government and it is something that investors are really getting into. There are places beyond research where we do really innovative things in the UK, and we should be really proud to talk about them.

Dr Chandran-Ramesh: The Office for Quantum is already working on this quantum development group. I do not know whether that is common knowledge. That is a group. The UK is one of the founding members. It is a very influential member. Particularly looking at the investment space—I am working with DSIT on this—it is an idea of bringing in 13 countries, all across the world, to collaborate on getting that investment landscape a lot better. That is a very key aspect of this work as well.

Jessica Wade: I might add one more thing on collaboration, really quickly, about supply chains, which is massively important for developing quantum. The Royal Academy of Engineering has done a fantastic quantum infrastructure review, which, if you have not looked at it, is really worth reading. It maps out where we have gaps in our quantum infrastructure and how that impacts research in academia, but also SMEs and people trying to spin out.

We have a huge opportunity in Government, given the underpinning nature of some of these materials and infrastructure challenges to all of the critical technologies in the industrial strategy. The UK is laying out a semiconductor strategy, a quantum strategy and an engineering biology strategy. All those are underpinned by people, infrastructure, semiconductors and photonics. It should be more joined up to say, “We will not succeed in quantum unless we really understand the intersections of quantum and semi or the intersections of quantum and photonics”.

If you look at the documentation coming out of the semiconductor team in DSIT, the verticals and horizontals they discuss around photonic, radio frequency control systems, heterogeneous integration and chip design are common challenges to quantum as well. It is not just a challenge for the semi sector. We do not only need global collaboration. We do not just need academia and research. We need collaboration across government to say that, to succeed in any of these frontier techs, we need everyone talking to each other.

Q134       Emily Darlington: That investment into Newport into semiconductors was really important for quantum.

Jessica Wade: It was absolutely massively important for quantum, especially from the sovereign perspective. We can buy in, but it is better to make it.

Dr Chandran-Ramesh: The collaboration with Europe is going to be absolutely crucial for us. It is great that we have the tech prosperity deal, and that is fabulous, but it is going to be incredibly important for us to work a lot closer with Europe.

One thing that the UK Government could do is try to make it attractive for large corporates all across the world to base their quantum end use case teams here in the UK. That means that all the companies, the start‑ups and the spin-outs, from all across the world will want to come here, because it is a lot easier then for them to get that commercial validation if those teams are based here. That is something where the UK Government could have a huge impact. That automatically retains IP and talent because it is all happening here in the UK, as opposed to anywhere else.

Q135       Kit Malthouse: I had some questions for you about the scale-up challenge that you talked about. Before we get to that, I wonder whether each of you could give us a retail use case. We probably have lots of people watching this meeting online. When you explain to them that quantum science is based on weird variations of the laws of physics at an atomic and subatomic level, they are kind of, “What are you talking about? What does that mean for me?” If either of you have an exciting use case that our constituents might see and think, “Wow, this is exciting”, that would be really helpful. Dr Chandran-Ramesh, do you have a big investment that is going to change the way we do XYZ?

Dr Chandran-Ramesh: Because quantum computing is such a paradigm shift from anything in classical computing, any problem that scales exponentially will have an impact when quantum computers are here. The key thing is currently there is not a quantum computer that is actually working. When it is here, it will have an impact on anything that exponentially scales. This could be everything from fraud detection to new materials, drug discovery or your logistics problems. It could literally be anything.

Q136       Kit Malthouse: To put it in retail terms—you are probably not old enough to remember—going from a ZX81 to an Apple MacBook was one massive leap during my lifetime that took 25 or 30 years. When this comes, this is off the scale compared to that leap forward over the last 30 years.

Dr Chandran-Ramesh: Yes, I feel that it is definitely off the scale.

Q137       Kit Malthouse: It will be speed, accuracy and predictability.

Dr Chandran-Ramesh: It is a different sort of shift. This is not about your phone suddenly becoming a quantum computer. That is not what is being envisaged. Quantum computing will still be accessed largely on the cloud for very specific use cases, but it is going to help make the world a more secure place. You are going to have post-quantum cryptography. You are going to have PQC algorithms on your phone that make your banking more secure. You are going to get fraud solutions. That is the way it is going to impact the layperson.

Q138       Kit Malthouse: This is background tech. It is a bit like us saying to people, “The way your electricity is produced and delivered to your home is going to be super green”. They do not really know or care where it comes from, because it is electricity. They feel good about it. Is there a front end, such as a new material or something?

Jessica Wade: Manjari mentioned this potential to do completely transformative new approaches to drug discovery or designing better battery materials or solar panels using computational approaches we cannot do classically. AI is okay, but it is built on data that already exists. Being able to use that data to develop a technology is quite hard if the data is not accurate. Quantum can explore a huge parameter space incredibly quickly, identify a drug that we have never come up with using a classical system, model it and check whether it will work. Then we can go to synthetic chemists, who actually start to build it. It is a completely new approach to computing.

The shorter-term aspects that I mentioned in sensing and imaging, where the UK is incredibly strong, have huge transformative applications in medical diagnostics, so things such as helping the NHS. There is some really amazing industry tech coming out of the University of Nottingham with a company called Cerca Magnetics, which does optically pumped magnetometry, so a special type of magnetic field sensing using the quantum properties of rubidium. It can make these brain scanners that have these extraordinarily small quantum sensors at the end of fibre optic cables that can map out brain function in real time as people are going about doing their everyday tasks, and on people’s heads who do not fit in a conventional magnetoencephalography system.

When you do brain imaging at the moment, you have these absolutely gigantic systems because they are not very sensitive and you have to cryogenically cool it. The tech that Nottingham has created, relying on quantum phenomena, does this in a kind of helmet, which you can 3D print. You can put it on a child’s or adult’s head and they can go about their daily life while collecting this information. That is transformative.

There is some beautiful research from Imperial on quantum imaging for breast cancer diagnostics using entanglement. That is something that sounds bizarre and zany, but you can generate entanglement in special types of crystals. We can use that entanglement to image in the infrared but using visible light detectors that are a lot cheaper and do not need cooling to work really accurately. These are transformative technologies that will bring huge benefits to people and doctors across the UK, not that doctors are not people.

Q139       Kit Malthouse: There we go. It is miniaturisation. We could all have real-time body monitors within our clothes that will sense what we are doing and tell us on our watches if we are about to have a stroke.

Jessica Wade: They could also inform your doctor about what is about to happen and make it possible for them to treat you

Dr Chandran-Ramesh: For the man or woman on the street, it is immaterial that it is quantum mechanics that is playing a part in this.

Q140       Kit Malthouse: I understand. I just wanted to get some use cases. I want to ask you about this scale-up problem. There are two things. At the moment, does it feel to you as if, with all the advances, our ingenuity and all the rest of it and the Government funding that is going in, we are effectively creating an incubator lab for the US economy? They have just bought Oxford Ionics. We are creating this fantastic technology. As you say, Jessica, we are world-beating. It gets to a stage and then it all heads off to the west coast.

What would need to change structurally, not just in terms of mentality, the Government funding or whatever? Dr Chandran-Ramesh, you are an investor. Are there tax changes? Are there regulation changes? Maybe it is just a cultural thing. Is there a risk-reward equation that is not working for us but is working for the States? What sits behind this inability to raise—I do not know—a billion quid for a new unicorn?

Dr Chandran-Ramesh: First and foremost is the lack of growth-stage investors that are able to lead. Most companies are able to get the lead investors in the US. Then there is a lot of capital that gets crowded in, quite often from the UK, but it is all follow-on capital, which means that the board seat goes to the lead investor.

Q141       Kit Malthouse: As a UK-based company, why are you focused on the stage you are focused on and not on that stage? At that stage, presumably, it has been de-risked to a certain extent.

Dr Chandran-Ramesh: To an extent it has. We have a growth-stage fund, but anything that we invest in from the growth stage we cannot lead in our early stage. We are one fund, which is sort of good. We would love to set up many more growth vehicles, but there are not that many growth vehicles in the UK and that is a huge problem. Mansion House was really good at trying to get pension money, but that is going to take a very long time.

Q142       Kit Malthouse: What could happen to encourage more of those funds to set up? Is it a tax thing? We saw in the Budget that there was a kind of VCT thing, but VCT is never going to be on that scale. You have a retail fund. What needs to change in the tax or regulatory environment to encourage institutional investors into that kind of fund?

Dr Chandran-Ramesh: I do not think that it is necessarily a tax issue. I do not think so. EIS and VCT have a part to play and that is great, but that is much more in the earlier stages. There needs to be a lot more education. There also needs to be a lot more LP education, rather than even investor education, because this is considered so risky and long term that they find it difficult.

Q143       Kit Malthouse: Do they have that education in the United States? Is that why they are leading?

Dr Chandran-Ramesh: Yes, there are a lot more LPs. A lot of the endowments, for instance, in the US are very happy to invest into venture, and not just venture but deep-tech venture. How many of our endowments decide to invest in venture?

Q144       Kit Malthouse: Yes, it is true. Is part of the difference also that it has an investment scale that we do not have? If you are running—whatever it is—a $100 billion fund, making a $1 billion bet is 1%. How big is your fund?

Dr Chandran-Ramesh: We have multiple funds, but we deliberately do smaller funds. I am not sure that having a bigger fund is necessarily the answer. Yes, there are the exceptions, but, for the most part, data from Oxford professors, as well as, across the pond, various venture capital professors shows that smaller funds give better returns.

Q145       Kit Malthouse: I am sure they do, but a bigger, wider, deeper pool of capital is more willing to take risk. A $1 billion bet for $100 billion is 1%. A $1 billion bet for a $10 billion fund is 10%.

Dr Chandran-Ramesh: You would think so, but if that $1 billion bet meant it was going to B2B SaaS, which was potentially a very short timeline at a fantastic multiple, why would that investor not put it there? It requires a different kind of risk profile.

Q146       Kit Malthouse: I guess that this is what we do not really understand. It is not just this area but across life sciences and elsewhere. We hear that scale-up is the problem, but these are all fantastic businesses. They do not have a problem raising money at the risk end, at the seed end or just post seed. It is once they want to raise £15 million, £20 million or £100 million together that it all evaporates and goes to the Americans. Beyond education—you would assume that, in a sophisticated financial services environment such as London or the UK, you would not need that much education because everyone is trying to make a buck—we cannot quite see where the discontinuity is.

Dr Chandran-Ramesh: This kind of risk is a very different kind of risk to your B2B SaaS plays, hedge funds or investment banking. This kind of risk is much more long term. Even though it is de-risked, it is going to take longer. There is still risk. There is still massive technical and scale‑up risk. The number of investors that are comfortable with that sort of risk at a series B, C or D is lower. The number of LPs that are okay to invest in such funds is also considerably smaller. If we look at LPs, we are having LPs from Japan, Korea and Asia rather than the UK.

Q147       Kit Malthouse: The way you make people more comfortable with risk is to entice them with a better return. If, as part of that return, there is less of a Government imposition on the return, whether that is tax or whatever it might be, presumably you could shift the equation.

Jessica Wade: To add one thing, there are a huge number of companies that choose the UK to settle and grow in. Oxford Ionics is keeping a huge part, if not all, of its research base here in the UK.

Q148       Kit Malthouse: That is a different question. Oxford Ionics has now become a huge funnel for UK currency back to the US. It will be remitting the money and capital it earns back into the US, fundamentally. It will not stay in the UK. These things are about advancing science and humanity and fantastic changes in all our lives, but in the end we would quite like to make some dough too.

Dr Chandran-Ramesh: The other key aspect is not just the funds. It is also making UK and Europe a big enough market. It is not as big as the US. If you want to grow your revenues, you have to go to the US. Why not attract more larger corporates to be based in the UK? Why not have more connections with Europe?

Q149       Kit Malthouse: I very much agree, if there was a strategy for that, but again that is about tax and regulation. On the Oxford Ionics thing, the world is littered with companies that were taken over by the Americans who made promises about things staying in the UK. Ask Cadbury. Where do you think your Flake is made now? It is certainly not in Bourneville, Birmingham or wherever it was, I am afraid. Fingers crossed.

Dr Chandran-Ramesh: Fingers crossed, yes.

Chair: We need to move on to skills now, because we only have a few minutes.

Q150       Martin Wrigley: I have a very quick question. Following on from what Kit was saying, and what Emily was saying about Government procurement, Government do investment in early R&D stages. Pre-commercialisation it is difficult to get involved in procurement. What opportunity is there for Government intervention in those earlier phases before you get to some of those larger investments that we are talking about? What should Government be doing?

Dr Chandran-Ramesh: The UK Government have done very well already with their SBRI scheme in terms of procuring. Several of the companies have already benefited. We are seeing that in quantum is the one place where a lot of Governments are procuring. We have not had this kind of investment worldwide from Governments. What is it? It is $50 billion or so across the world. We have not had this happen in a number of other technologies. Quantum is the one place.

That is helped by the geopolitical situation and the fact that there are security concerns. Everybody wants to have some kind of a sovereign capability. The key thing is to join forces, which is why I am so excited about the quantum development group. Beyond the Five Eyes, we need to collaborate with key partners and keep that commercialisation, procurement, etc, together with that group.

Q151       Chair: On that, does the UK have a scale-up problem or a deep tech scale-up problem?

George Freeman: It has a scale-up problem.

Dr Chandran-Ramesh: I invest in deep tech and I would say that it has a deep-tech scale-up problem, for sure.

Q152       Chair: Could a catapult for quantum help address some of the commercialisation and testing issues you raised earlier?

Dr Chandran-Ramesh: I am not sure that it necessarily needs a catapult. A catapult could not hurt. BT and HSBC are doing work. The Government should be encouraging much more through procurement and partnerships. They should be encouraging a lot more corporates to get involved in use cases.

Q153       Chair: Let us talk about skills. You have mentioned skills already. Do we have the skills we need to develop and commercialise quantum?

Jessica Wade: The skills needs of the quantum sector are evolving. There is a fantastic DSIT quantum skills taskforce report that maps out a lot of engineering skills that are needed to scale a quantum company. If you look at the way that we teach quantum within universities and colleges, it is primarily in physics departments. It is not so much in engineering. It is a little bit in computing, but not really in life sciences.

Taking quantum out of the remit of natural sciences and putting it into engineering will be really key. You are starting to see that. There are really great master’s programmes popping up to teach quantum engineers. There are these doctoral training centres that are focused on that interdisciplinary aspect. We will need a lot more people who are engineering-focused, who can go and scale and build quantum hardware. There are great things happening across Scotland and the north-east on thinking about how we get people who are engineers to specialise in quantum.

The Royal Academy of Engineering has a new skills centre or skills taskforce where it will be exploring things such as micro-credentials for emerging tech. As someone who trained in engineering 10 years ago, how do you become ready for engineering biology or quantum? That is a really exciting opportunity where quantum industry should come in and say, “These are the engineers we need. Can you help us upskill them so they are quantum enthusiastic or quantum-literate?” That is one part.

We do a lot around thinking about other routes into quantum training. One challenge the quantum sector faces from a skills perspective is that quantum is remarkably non-diverse. If you think that some parts of physics and engineering are non-diverse, quantum is basically the worst of all of them. If you look across the quantum leadership in the UK, it is pretty homogeneous. We need to do a huge amount more, as with other technologies, to get young women excited about quantum and particularly to get more black quantum researchers and industry workers to start thinking about how we build these technologies that are equitable.

If we are having a quantum sector that has huge career prospects and very well-paid jobs that are really exciting, how do we open that opportunity to everyone? If we have these challenges around engineering, scaling, investment and connecting to end users, those challenges are ones where, if you have a diverse cohort of people working in the sector, you will identify solutions faster. We are going the right way on skills, but there is a huge amount more to be done on making sure that that quantum door is open to everyone.

Q154       Chair: I asked about quantum generally and you responded about quantum just as quantum, but we have talked about quantum computing, quantum communications and quantum sensing. Does your response apply to all of those?

Jessica Wade: If you imagine a triangle of building a quantum company, you have a handful of quantum specialists at the top who are the physicists who come up with the idea of how you build a quantum network or the quantum computer. Then you have a bunch of engineers underneath with different levels of quantum depth to their knowledge. You have people who can do the engineering hardware to make a superconducting qubit or whatever.

Under that, you have RF control systems, microwave electronics, nanofabrication, photonics and optics. They are just general high-tech engineering skills, which will be transferable across all of these different hardware platforms. By upskilling our engineering community with them, they can move between AI, engineering biology and semiconductors.

You will need some quantum specialists, which the UK is remarkably good at producing. Our research-intensive universities generate people who come up with these fantastic ideas. Under them, you will need people who are physics and engineering keen and willing to take this jump into this quantum sector. I would say that my answer applies to all these critical technologies.

We could probably do a little bit more on quantum algorithms. If you look at our computing courses in colleges, apprenticeships and university degrees, we do not have a lot of quantum computing algorithm development. That is partly because it is so hard to keep quantum computing academics in universities because they can get paid so much more to go out. How do we do that getting people really savvy about developing algorithms? That is probably by working with industry to better inform our curricula. You could get a lot of SME input to PhD, undergrad or sixth form college design so that we had more quantum algorithm specialists. From the hardware side, we could do more to get our engineering community into quantum.

Dr Chandran-Ramesh: Beyond researchers and indeed engineers, the whole product management side of things is hugely crucial. Ultimately, the best effects we are going to get is when these things actually become products. A lot of product engineers tend to look at it and go, “I have no idea about quantum. Why should I look at it?”

Q155       Chair: There is a lack of diversity in quantum engineers and physicists. I find it hard to believe that it can be even less diverse than physicists generally. Is there a danger that we see a bias in the applications that are commercialised, given that there is a lack of diversity in those who are developing these sciences and technologies?

Jessica Wade: It is a fantastic question. You have a real risk, like you saw with AI, that if you do not have diverse people developing the technologies, they are not technologies that benefit the whole of society equally. There is a need.

There is recognition of that. The Royal Society has a special ringfenced fellowship scheme now called the career development fellowship for black scientists. The Royal Academy of Engineering has a mentoring programme if you are from a group that is historically underrepresented. Riverlane, which Manjari mentioned before and which is a fantastic UK quantum company, has a focused programme for women in quantum computing. Places are starting to do these extraordinarily transformative ringfenced schemes to diversify it. There will be a time lag before those people enter the sector. You are entirely right. We need diverse teams of people from an equity perspective, a tech design perspective and a fairness perspective when developing a technology.

Dr Chandran-Ramesh: The only other thing I would add is that at Amadeus we are very lucky, in that we see a lot of women and people from underrepresented groups who decide to get companies. Both Nu Quantum and Photonic have women founders, which is rare. We have been lucky enough to be able to get these companies up and running.

Chair: Perhaps you could write to the Committee with the examples.

Dr Chandran-Ramesh: Yes.

Q156       Chair: As we know, quantum is incredibly important from a national security perspective as well as an economic prosperity perspective. In terms of the skillsets that we have—Jessica, you spoke about the way in which universities use international students to cross-subsidise our research funding—what proportion, in your experience or roughly, of the students studying quantum at different levels are British nationals and what proportion would you say are foreign nationals?

Jessica Wade: I would have to write to you with the exact statistics, but if you look at physics or engineering undergraduate degrees in the UK, they are quite internationally diverse. That is a huge strength to the UK. We need different ideas and ways of thinking to be able to solve these big problems, but as you progress through a research career or go into industry, there are more home students due to various regulatory requirements, particularly in these areas where you want sovereign capabilities.

We have mechanisms to bring in international talent. The challenge is that we do not have enough home students, and particularly enough women, choosing to study subjects such as physics and engineering. If we restricted on that basis when we are recruiting to quantum research positions, we would be quite limited.

There are very good regulations and checks in place to ensure that there is a trusted research ecosystem in the UK. UKRI is really good at helping the research community look at the sources of their funding, identify any risks and start to think about doing research in a way that protects our ideas and makes sure we do not have a spillover of UK innovation into potentially difficult situations where you do not want it to be applied. We do have really good guidance on that.

We do not have enough home students choosing to study physics and engineering in the first place. As this is a global endeavour, there is a huge need to attract international talent. There could be changes to the global talent visa to make it easier for people to remain in the UK. We do not just want to get them here and take them for three years; we want them to set up a life here and use their ideas to build these fantastic companies.

I could certainly send some data later about particular aspects of it and where we see a drop-off of home students or home researchers.

Q157       Chair: It sounds like we may have a challenge in terms of having the homegrown experts we would need for a security supply chain.

Jessica Wade: Certainly, we have a talent pipeline issue. This is a timing issue as well. At the moment, delays to things such as ATAS or people getting visas and the huge costs associated with them make it incredibly hard for quantum researchers to hire at the rates they need to to be able to deliver the innovative things to prove to investors or industry. There are such delays on getting talent in or training that talent that we cannot deliver the innovations that we want in timescales that are internationally competitive.

Q158       Chair: There is an issue with the international challenge, but I am asking about the issue with the British national talent that is required to support the security services, for example.

Jessica Wade: There is a challenge with that, but I am saying that, in the short term, we cannot fix that challenge. We need to train people. I am 100% that we need to keep training them. In the short term, we hire internationally. There is a time delay.

Q159       Chair: In the short term, then, we may have a security issue with regard to support for quantum security in defence.

Jessica Wade: I would not want to say anything as prescriptive as that. There are huge regulatory checks that are trustworthy and secure to make sure we hire people with whom we share values, but, yes, there is a potential issue that we do not have the talent that we need right now and we have to hire internationally.

George Freeman: It would be very interesting to know the nationality of all the international researchers working in quantum. To Kit’s point, there is a danger that we are educating the next generation of quantum scientists for China and other countries who are not here to help grow British industry.

Chair: If you have information that you can share with the Committee about the nationalities in quantum, the Committee would find that really helpful.

George Freeman: That would be very helpful.

Chair: Let me just say a huge thank you to both of you. It has been a great panel. You have been very well informed. Thank you for responding to all our questions. We really appreciate your contribution here today.

Examination of witnesses

Witnesses: Jonathan Legh-Smith and Duncan Jones.

Chair: Welcome to this, our second panel in the Committee’s session on science diplomacy.

Q160       Samantha Niblett: Hello. Thanks so much for coming in to see us today. I am really keen to hear from you on how you would describe the UK’s current position in quantum.

Jonathan Legh-Smith: Thank you very much. I shall kick off. I am Jonathan Legh-Smith. I am the executive director for UKQuantum. We are the association for the UK’s quantum industry. You have probably seen the stats about the UK’s position in terms of funding, start-ups and what-have-you.

If I were to characterise it, I would say that the energy and potential of the UK’s quantum ecosystem is genuinely second to none in the world. The evidence that I would offer would be referring back earlier this month to the National Quantum Technologies Showcase, easily the largest on the planet in the quantum industry. There were 2,500 attendees and over 110 exhibitors from 24 countries. They all came not to participate in the conference or a trade show, but to celebrate the UK’s ecosystem. All those numbers were geared around what is going on within the UK. Countries from around the world were coming to visit us to talk to us about how we can collaborate both commercially and academically. That is why I would say, positioning the ecosystem, we are extraordinarily strong.

Duncan Jones: Thank you, Chair and Committee, for the opportunity to speak today. My name is Duncan Jones and I am a general manager at Quantinuum. We are one of the larger quantum computing companies building these machines and solutions that we have been talking about so far today.

I would say the UK is poised in a very good position today. We have heard already this morning about how strong our national strategy has been in this area. The national quantum technologies programme has really set the global standard for what excellence looks like. A number of nations have looked to emulate this as they have built up their quantum strategies.

Quantinuum began its life in a small office above the union in Cambridge and thoroughly relied upon this programme to get us to where we are today. Because of this, the UK has a strong leadership position, especially in quantum software and algorithms.

I should maybe state that, coming from a quantum computing company, I am going to mostly talk about computing and less about sensing or communications. Quantinuum has 200 people in the UK who are predominantly focused on the software side of quantum. We have other companies, such as Phasecraft and so on, that are globally recognised for their skills in this area.

We find ourselves at a really exciting inflection point because there are several technologies coming together right now, quantum being one of them. Quantum is an enabler for what we are seeing happening in AI and high-performance computing. When we look at some of these exciting use cases that we hope quantum will unlock, such as in genomics or drug discovery, those technologies working together will get us there.

The UK is well positioned on the software side to capitalise on that and well positioned in these adjacent technologies to lead. Where we need to focus the opportunity is around how we can support more on the hardware side so that the UK also has that part of the equation covered.

Q161       Samantha Niblett: We heard in the previous panel some of the challenges to quantum. It is pretty clear to me that we are a world leader certainly in R&D and everything that we are doing within quantum, but it appears that there are also some challenges when it comes to scale. Is it fair to say that right now we are quite strong in our leadership but, as quantum develops and we are another 10 or 15 years down the line, we run the risk of slipping back because some bigger competitors have investment that we do not have in this country?

That links into my second question. What should the UK’s long-term ambitions in quantum be? What might impinge on those ambitions?

Jonathan Legh-Smith: If we think about some of the challenges we have had, we have heard about skills and scale-up funding. Just to touch on that, there is one specific intervention that we should think about. If there is the capital available, we do not have growth-stage funds with the technical ability to lead the investments in our businesses. We do have specialist quantum funds at the start-up phase. Arguably, the solution to scaling up our quantum businesses is to scale up our specialist quantum funds, which do exist but do not have the finances to play at the higher levels.

The main risk that we have at the moment, though—this is corporate life or start-up life—is that, if you have a vision and ambition, you also need to articulate the plan and execute on the plan. The issue that we have at the moment and have had for the last year and a half is that we do not have visibility of what comes next and what our real plans are going to be to deliver.

I absolutely believe we have the potential, but since the announcement in the industrial strategy around the computing mission, which was very welcome but happened in early summer, we have had no sense of what is coming next. That is a real issue for CEOs who are looking to plan their strategic future, especially if they are looking to raise funds. We have a number of very promising companies out there looking to raise considerable amounts of money. Without a clear statement on what comes next, they are really struggling. There is now speculation in the industry press around what the UK is going to be doing.

Q162       Samantha Niblett: Do you know what it is going to be doing?

Jonathan Legh-Smith: I have a sense of it because I am fortunate enough to sit on the strategic advisory board for the national quantum technologies programme and a few other things. I have a sense of what is coming next, but the industry at large does not. Remarkably, my reassurances are not always enough.

Q163       Samantha Niblett: Is not it a case of, “Build it and they will come”? Much like politics, so much is smoke and mirrors. If you say it is so, it becomes the thing you said it was going to be. Is it a lack of confidence?

Jonathan Legh-Smith: No, it is just waiting for the right moment. It is literally about the right moment. I am confident that we are going to hear something in the next few weeks. It had certainly better be before Christmas. That is not what industry sees. What industry sees is nothing. We have this issue right at this particular time about not having real clarity on what the plans are five or 10 years out.

Q164       Samantha Niblett: When you say “hear something”, who are you going to hear that from?

Jonathan Legh-Smith: Government, I hope. I am dealing with what I have been informed about, not what the industry has been told about.

Duncan Jones: I would echo Jonathan’s point around a desire for more clarity on how and when funding will be released on these programmes. It is exciting to know the total amounts that are going to be invested through the national quantum strategy, but, speaking as a company potentially looking to engage in that process, yes, we are sometimes reliant upon rumours about what may or may not emerge and what scale of funding is going to emerge.

It is important to recognise the scale of funding that might be required. To give you an example, Quantinuum to date has invested capital of just shy of £2 billion to get to where we are. We are currently in a leadership position on hardware and software, but it required that amount of investment to get there. When we are looking at how to nurture sovereign compute capabilities, we are not going to move the needle with £10 million here or £20 million there. We need to recognise that.

A critical conclusion that one draws from that is that we should look at our long-term plan for where we want to get to—the national quantum strategy says we want to be a world leader across these technologies—and be realistic about what the next five to 10 years look like. It looks like acknowledging that we need to invest in providing access to the best-in-class computers, wherever they are in the world, so that our researchers can remain at the forefront of developing these solutions.

Q165       Dr Gardner: I am interested in looking at the UK’s sovereign capability. We have touched on scale-up and access to funds. I went to a defence technology meeting a while back that was talking about quantum technologies. They mentioned that we are due to have our AI moment in Mersey, and it is going to get really big very fast. It is literally within the next few years, a very short timeframe. As well as the scale-up of funds, I am quite interested in what the time constraints are so that we are not caught out and left behind when that explodes like AI did a few years back.

My question is related to that. In relation to sovereign capability and national security, what are the risks in the event that we do not move fast enough? Are we going to be left behind? What are the time constraints?

Jonathan Legh-Smith: The primary risk will be not having access to the capability. We are talking specifically around quantum computing when we talk about national security. It is not having access within the country to the kind of quantum computing facilities that adversaries may well have, if that is what the issue is.

That is why we should not just focus on a few bets that we are going to place; we need to make sure we have a real sense of what the emerging and developing technologies are so we are able to focus down very quickly on, “Okay, these are the ones we need to down-select on and make sure that we have”.

Q166       Dr Gardner: Do the Government have a sense of urgency that we need to get this right?

Jonathan Legh-Smith: Yes, I do. We see that from the NCSC in terms of its preparations with post-quantum crypto. It really is understood within the quantum computing community and implicit within the remit of the National Quantum Computing Centre to make sure that we are prepared.

Q167       Dr Gardner: In the previous panel, it was mentioned that there are gaps in quantum infrastructure globally and within the UK. In particular, we are looking at supply chain resilience with critical materials. I am also quite interested in critical minerals. Could you expand on that? Is it important that we try to on-shore as much as we can to ensure our national security and sovereign capability? Where are the gaps in that supply chain? I am quite interested in which critical minerals might be really of value. Rubidium was mentioned earlier. Duncan, you are smiling so I shall go to you.

Duncan Jones: That will teach me to smile. It might be unrealistic to strive for an entirely sovereign supply chain. Today, we would not be able to point to a single country where it would be economically viable for them to source everything that they need for their quantum ecosystem.

When we think about our security and our resilience, what is going to be important is to build strong ties with like-minded allies and ensure we have redundancy in those arrangements. We do not want to be sole‑sourcing and then get into a problem like the one we have seen with global chip manufacturing.

It is worth noting that the UK has some cards to play here. We are very strong in some areas that are important to quantum, such as photonics or cryogenics. These are areas that we excel at. These are bargaining chips and strategic cards that we can play over time as well.

You are right that in some areas exotic materials are needed. They vary quite a bit depending upon the type of quantum computer that you have. There are half a dozen ways that you can build a quantum computer. They vary wildly in how they are constructed. I am afraid I do not know enough about where each of the particular critical minerals come from, but we need a strategy to ensure that we have access to those from more than one ally or from ourselves.

Q168       Dr Gardner: That links up with another comment from the previous panel about linking up all these different but related strategies. Jonathan, do you feel that we are going to do that, or do we need to make sure that that is done better?

Jonathan Legh-Smith: We need to make sure that is done better. In fact, for quantum specifically, we need much more focused activity on understanding what the real supply chain is and where the critical points and opportunities for the UK are.

We have done little bits of work and had discussions, but we have not had a proper sit-down focused activity around understanding what this means to us and the sovereignty issue of, “What is important?” I have participated in task and finish groups in the past. I do not know whether there are other mechanisms, but I would certainly consider that sort of route to understand what the answer to the sovereignty question is and therefore what capabilities are required in the supply chain.

Q169       George Freeman: This is part of our diplomacy inquiry. We wanted to look at it because quantum is such a hot global race. I want to ask you both this question. Jonathan, you are a leading quantum key opinion leader and policy-shaper. Are we actively—are you and is the quantum programme leadership group—looking at the security and sovereignty race globally and asking not just whether we have an active and healthy academic ecosystem but how many of our researchers are overseas? How exposed are we to incubating other countries’ quantum programmes that may not be in our interests? Are those questions being asked? Where does that sit in the own-collaborate-access framework?

Jonathan Legh-Smith: I do not believe we are looking at it as rigorously as you have put in those questions. It is certainly a consideration. If I think about international Government-to-Government MOUs, MOCs and what-have-you, they certainly take into account the core nations where we feel we have shared values and indeed shared interests and complementary skills. That has certainly formed the basis for those as well. We need to see them developed into actual plans that help facilitate engagement, but I do not believe we have actually studied what is going on and where the skills are to the level that you just asked.

Q170       George Freeman: Duncan, you have touched on where we might use procurement and Government levers to build those applications. Do you see an ambition, through the moonshots, to make the UK a safe place for you to develop those technologies in a Five Eyes or secure sovereign supply chain?

Duncan Jones: Certainly, it has been positive to see concrete agreements coming together. The tech prosperity deal was just mentioned. That certainly touches on a number of areas that we think are critical to do collaboratively. For example, an open challenge right now that no one nation can solve is how we assess the power of a quantum computer. It is such a simple question, but there is not one view on that. There are areas where we need to collaborate to make progress for ourselves.

When it comes to this sovereignty topic, my main concern—I do not think this will happen to us, but we need to be cognisant of it—is that we do not focus too much on that and, as a result, lose our ability to innovate particularly around use cases and algorithm development.

Again, coming back to my earlier point, what that really means is that, while we need to support and grow our local compute capabilities—that must be part of the strategy—we cannot only do that. We need to acknowledge that we have to work with others.

Q171       George Freeman: They are interesting questions and replies. Thank you, Chair. On the one hand, this is a global race and we have hostile actors who want to win the race for quantum and put a coach and horses through cyber-security and drive incredible sovereign advantage. Duncan, on the other hand, we are building an academic system and you want it to be as open as possible.

The reason that we are having this discussion is to ask how to reconcile those two. How do we make sure we do not incubate our competitors’ and sovereign hostile actors’ quantum programmes and have very little left to show for it? Are there any recommendations that you would suggest we raise with Ministers to get that balance right?

Jonathan Legh-Smith: There are two things here. You started talking about the hostile actors of which there are few, I hope, and we understand who they are. I am sure we can contain that. We can ensure that businesses are mindful of who they are working with and understand the constraints. Sometimes it would be useful to be told what you can and cannot do and where the warnings are.

Putting that to one side, the global competition race is another matter. That is with our allies. Industry is best placed to do that. If we recognise that there will be global supply chains, our businesses have to be able to work with and access the best global suppliers in order to build their products. I would probably focus on how we can help British companies work with the people that they want to work with to build their products. They are the ones who are really competing for us.

If we have international partnerships and we understand what we want from them, we need to be facilitating that and helping our companies reach out and work with their partners.

Q172       George Freeman: It sounds like you are both quite relaxed about it. We should be partnering with Huawei and encouraging companies to work with anyone out there who will fund research and be open and relaxed. Our invitation to take a slightly different approach, given the global race, is quite antithetical to the way that the UK normally does it.

Jonathan Legh-Smith: The adversaries bit and the competition bit are two separate things. You mentioned Huawei, which is Chinese, of course. In telecoms, it fits into the adversary camp. I do not know if anybody is collaborating with Huawei. I would certainly advise against doing that sort of collaboration.

It is more about how we ensure that there is healthy competition that we are able to benefit from with, for example, the European Union and its member states, with the US and Asian countries, for example.

Q173       Martin Wrigley: I will have to reframe my question now because George has asked a number of the things that I was going to ask. It sounds to me like we need to reframe this idea of sovereignty. This idea of sovereign AI and sovereign quantum capabilities is something relatively new. We have not worked on this way for 35 years. When I was in industry in telecoms, we bought Huawei kit because it overperformed and was a fraction of the price. It was a no-brainer. In industry, you go for those global positions that give you that benefit within the company that you are working in.

We think of ourselves as a world leader because we have some great start-ups in the early days. We are currently selling some of those start‑ups. Oxford Ionics has been talked about a number of times. What should we be looking at? What does good look like? Is thinking about sovereign capability the wrong way of looking at things? Are we fooling ourselves to think we can even anticipate getting there?

Jonathan Legh-Smith: It comes back to an earlier question in the previous session. What does own-collaborate-access mean? The question is, “What does sovereignty mean in quantum?”

I am afraid it is a question that I ask privately. What do we mean when we start talking about sovereignty? I would suggest that we need a proper study around what we think this means across the quantum technologies and the quantum supply chain.

Q174       Martin Wrigley: The thing that is exercising everybody’s mind is that, although we have world-leading science and research and this aim to be sovereign, we have a potentially unreliable partner that has the cash that we need to make it happen. How do we get around that?

Duncan Jones: There are some levers we can pull. As the UK, we need to decide what we can win over what timeframe. The levers that we can pull are to encourage the adoption of meaningful use cases. We need Government to be the first customer for these use cases and we need British businesses to lean into this even more so than they have today. I still believe we are poised, with our skills in pharmaceuticals, in areas like genomics. We see collaborations with large AI companies like Nvidia coming together. We are in a very strong position for winning to mean over the next five years or so that we maintain a leadership role.

We will do that by building more public-private collaborations and trying to drive British industry to be first adopters of this. If we focus a lot of our efforts in that direction, some of these problems solve themselves because we have become even more of a leading nation in terms of our adoption of these technologies, which brings the funding, which lessens some of the challenges you spoke about.

Q175       Martin Wrigley: Is the solution software and not hardware?

Duncan Jones: In the near term, possibly. We have to recognise where we stand today. On the software and algorithmic front we are particularly strong. We also have some great hardware companies that are coming along, but they need investment to help them. If they are going to succeed, it is because they can raise enough money to get there without, as you say, potentially taking that from foreign investors and then moving elsewhere.

Jonathan may have a different view because he represents a broader constituency, but I see it as, “Yes, let us win the battle in front of us, where we are already leading, while we try to support development in these other areas”.

Jonathan Legh-Smith: I certainly agree with that. Focusing on leading in adoption will attract and help accelerate our companies. In the case of quantum computing, that means focusing on the software side as well. That is how it gets translated into value for businesses. It is possibly an area where we are weak in terms of the strategy. I do not think we have a focused initiative around developing the algorithms and software that would embed this within businesses.

If I take the other quantum technologies, they are more hardware‑oriented. Duncan’s point about leading adoption and use still goes for them, but they are more hardware. I will just caveat that.

Q176       Martin Wrigley: I find it very tricky because it is the first time technology has moved beyond my university education of 40 years ago. AI today is what we learned about then; it was just theoretical. Quantum is now something entirely different. To me, the issue is, “How do you pose the problem to a quantum computer?” I can describe a programme in Fortran, C or any other language you like, but can I describe it in a way that would actually put it to a quantum computer?

Duncan Jones: We are trying to change that. This comes back to the skills discussion that closed the last session. If I can use a classical analogy, there was once a time where you wrote a computer programme with punch cards.

George Freeman: We are not that old.

Martin Wrigley: Excuse me. That is where I started.

Duncan Jones: It required you to have this very down-in-the-weeds knowledge of exactly how these things are built. For several years now, quantum has been in a similar state. It is emerging as a new technology, but it is moving along in leaps and bounds.

Today, you can program one of our quantum computers by writing pretty readable Python code. This is stuff that people are learning in universities and understand how to do. On top of that, we are building applications and libraries that demystify some of the tougher parts of quantum physics and allow people to start solving problems.

As a good example of the success of this, we recently ran a hackathon with the NHS up in Bradford. We had 400 people register for that. We had 20 teams in the final; five of them were from the NHS. Even though these machines seem very complex, people are able to imagine problems that they can solve with them. The winning solution was something around quantum-enhanced genomic sequence prediction.

We are already able to connect together these critical problems that we have today in areas such as genomics or healthcare and experiment with them today on quantum. We are bridging that gap, but, yes, there is a bit of a learning curve today.

Q177       Daniel Zeichner: Good morning. Apologies for missing some of the first panel. I wanted to follow up on some of the points that George was making about international collaboration. There is a very Cambridge-y set of questions coming up here. It has long been a dilemma about which countries we should be in co-operation with. I was looking back at some of the memoranda of understanding that the previous Government did with Australia, Germany, and Israel; this Government did them with Canada, Japan, the USA and the G7.

I just want a sense from you as to whether these collaborations have been chosen on the basis that those were the people that we happened to be talking to at the time or whether they were really important for the work that you are doing to solve some of the problems that we are trying to solve.

Jonathan Legh-Smith: Yes, I believe they were considered with care. There used to be a priority list of countries to reach out and engage with. We have moved beyond that. I say “we”—the Government have moved beyond that. There was consideration given to them. It is safe to say that people would expect the US and some of the other countries. The EU is the one we are still working on. We have strong relationships, new ones, with member states. It is the EU proper that we need to sort out as well.

Q178       Daniel Zeichner: From the point of view of individual companies, what do those international arrangements mean? What do they allow you to do? What do they stop you from doing? I will turn to Duncan.

Duncan Jones: That is an interesting question. I hope these collaborations will lead to it becoming easier for us to do business globally as a company. These collaborations can also help address, as I mentioned earlier, some of the problems in the industry that we cannot do alone, such as the development of standards or understanding how we benchmark these machines against each other. We need to have a framework within which to collaborate academically and to enable industrial companies to get involved in these programmes.

An example of one of these programmes that the US is running is the quantum benchmarking initiative, which DARPA has instigated. That has a dozen or so quantum companies working on whether we realistically have a path from here to a commercially relevant quantum computer in the near term. The answer is looking like yes, but that is an example of one of those collaborations that we need as an industry. We find that it helps us in terms of developing our business with industry and in furthering the standards that we need if the industry is going to mature.

Q179       Daniel Zeichner: As a private company, to what extent do you follow the Government guidance? The Huawei example is a bit of a vexed one in Cambridge. Only a few years ago, there were some very close collaborations. Of course, now it is completely inappropriate. How do we avoid getting into that situation again? How do you deal with that as a private company?

Duncan Jones: I am glad you have provided an opportunity to comment on that again. As a company, we are extremely selective about who we partner with, who we sell to and who we collaborate with. We work closely with the UK Government to understand their guidance on this matter. We work very closely with counterparts in the US as well. As an example, we do not do anything at all with Chinese organisations. There are further restrictions that we adhere to.

This is not an area of concern. The guidance is relatively clear on this front. We take it pretty seriously.

Q180       Daniel Zeichner: Is that the same across the computing sector?

Duncan Jones: I cannot really comment. Jonathan might be better placed.

Jonathan Legh-Smith: I could not give you a hard assurance, but, broadly, yes, my members understand the importance of considering who they are working with.

Q181       Daniel Zeichner: I have one final question, Chair. If it comes down to a choice between constraining your ability to make the kind of breakthroughs that you are trying to see and that sovereignty argument, how do you manage that dilemma, or do you hope that it does not come up and you can do it without drawing on talent and resource from places that are less friendly?

Duncan Jones: We can meet our goals without relying on anything that we do not want to rely upon. We have very strong collaborations and ties with countries that view things in the same way as we do. We need to build our skillset, but we have a strong sovereign capability. I do not worry about this. We need to make sure that we do not hamstring ourselves when it comes to progress, but we must never cross that line where we are working with people we should not be working with.

Q182       Chair: Thank you very much, Daniel. You have just said that you have a very strong sovereign capability. Do you mean your company has a strong sovereign capability or that the UK has one?

Duncan Jones: It is both.

Q183       Chair: How do you define “sovereign capability”, as you just used the term?

Duncan Jones: What I was referring to there is the fact that the UK does have and is recognised for having very strong skills in areas related to quantum technology.

Chair: Yes, we have talked about that.

Duncan Jones: Yes, that was what I was referring to there.

Q184       Chair: Having strong skills is not a sovereign capability, though. The Committee has found multiple definitions of sovereign capability from multiple Departments, but none of them was just about the skills that we have. Those skills need to be put into application; they need companies; and they need trade, businesses, etc. Do you want to come back and reformulate your phrase about our sovereign capability?

Duncan Jones: Yes, that was sloppy terminology. What I was referring to there was more the capacity in our workforce to deliver upon these goals. You are right. That is not the same thing as a sovereign capability.

Q185       Chair: Whatever sovereign capability is exactly, it is, according to the Tony Blair Institute’s recent report, “inextricably linked” to our national security specifically when it comes to quantum: “if the UK does not have the quantum companies to secure its sovereignty, its ability to protect itself in a post-quantum encryption world will be compromised”. Do you agree with that statement? You seem very relaxed about our sovereign capability or otherwise. Do you see the direct link with our national security and do we need to take steps to address it?

Duncan Jones: That particular statement blurs a couple of things. Statements in this direction often do. First, there is the capacity to perform quantum computations. Do we have access to machines? Do we have the machines? Do we have the people who can build machines to support a variety of use cases, some of which will be amenable to defence and security? That is a separate matter from whether we are prepared as a nation for the threat that advancing quantum communications will bring to bear.

That came up in one of the earlier discussions. That is more about our deployment of quantum-resistant technologies, which is what the NCSC has laid out a strategy for. There is a clear timeline by which the country needs to react to that particular threat. I am not relaxed about that, by the way, because that is an immense task that lies ahead of us. Perhaps we need to see more activities in that direction than are happening today. At least we now have a timeline from the NCSC to work to. British businesses should be adhering to that.

Q186       Chair: NCSC has it all sorted for us when it comes to national security.

Duncan Jones: Specifically when we are looking at the topic of how we adapt to remain secure from a cyber perspective when quantum computers emerge, the NCSC has given some very clear advice on this. They have given a timeline. If we can meet that timeline, it is adequate to keep us safe, yes.

Chair: That is specifically on cyber.

Q187       Kit Malthouse: Presumably, though, sovereign capabilities are about a lot more than that. There is a big question about whether we are renters or owners. In the end, we have no large data processing sovereign capability, so we all get screwed by Oracle. The entire public sector gets screwed by Oracle every time there is a licence relet. There is a financial sovereignty issue there, is there not?

Duncan Jones: I am not sure I can comment on that.

Q188       Chair: Jonathan, you are looking at it from a cross-quantum perspective, at all quantum technologies: computing, communications and sensors. What is your view on our sovereign capability across quantum applications?

Jonathan Legh-Smith: Notwithstanding a hard definition of sovereignty, there are two areas where we would need to have the capability deployed. The first is in quantum communications to ensure that we have a secure communications infrastructure because that underpins everything. The second is having a quantum computing capability to hand. Whether having it to hand means it was built here or bought and deployed or built and deployed by a British company is something that we need to sit down and work through properly. It is too easy to maybe just latch on to one.

Q189       Chair: By “we” you mean the UK Government.

Jonathan Legh-Smith: Yes, I mean the Government with contributions from industry and academia.

Q190       Chair: You are calling for Government action to define what a sovereign capability is and whether we have it in the UK.

Jonathan Legh-Smith: Yes.

Chair: That is clear at least.

Q191       George Freeman: Just to circle back to Kit’s earlier question about applications, having been the Minister for quantum, a question that I was asking was, “Where does this hit the runway?” There is clearly a computing thing. Everyone is in the race to build a quantum computer. There are other applications, are there not? On imaging, it is very powerful. It can be used for position, navigation and timing, quantum clocks and encryption.

Duncan, you are an encryption expert. Can we just unpack that? I met Gilles Brassard last year, who was telling me about the power of quantum computing to put a coach and horses through traditional classical cyber-security programs. How clear and present is the danger of a quantum cyber-security challenge? It seems to me that that is quite a here-and-now issue for the defence forces, in space and in satcoms. Can you unpack for us where that encryption race is and who is playing in it?

Duncan Jones: There are two sides to the quantum cyber-security field. There is the threat that advancing quantum computing brings and then there are some gifts that quantum gives us in terms of helping us build stronger systems.

On the threat side, we are all tracking the idea that, once quantum computers become sufficiently powerful—this is a point that we might hit in the first half of next decade, for example—they will be able to solve some of the hard problems that underpin our encryption systems today. When you have a secure WhatsApp message or you do some online banking, your data is secure because there are certain things that even the largest classical computers cannot do. That is on the threat side.

The solution there is the deployment of these newer algorithms. We have a fairly good hand on what the solution looks like. It is just an immense effort to deploy that because we have to touch almost every IT system there is to change these things.

Where quantum offers some exciting benefits is that the nature of quantum physics is odd and weird and it has some applicability to secure communications. For example, people are exploring how we can use quantum systems to make stronger encryption keys because it turns out quantum can make incredibly random numbers. There is also exploration on quantum-based communications. Can we use entanglement to allow us to securely exchange data protected by the laws of physics? I will say that I know that both the UK and the US are uncertain as to whether we will need to deploy that kind of technology, but it is very exciting that it exists, and we are exploring that.

On those particular topics, there are pretty well-understood non-quantum alternatives that are favoured by the NCSC today, for example.

Q192       Kit Malthouse: Before I get on to my questions, which are about specialism, Duncan, you said your company has deployed £2 billion so far. Where did that money come from?

Duncan Jones: We have done a series of fundraisers. The start of our journey was around 2013-14. Quite a lot of the funding was put into our company by Honeywell, in the United States.

Q193       Kit Malthouse: They are an American company.

Duncan Jones: That is correct yes. They built the quantum computers that we use in our business today. We formed a merger with them. We completed a fundraise in the last month or so, raising about $800 million. That largely came from international investors.

Q194       Kit Malthouse: They would presumably largely be from the US.

Duncan Jones: Not entirely, but yes.

Q195       Kit Malthouse: Would it be fair to say that the equity holdings in your business are minority UK?

Duncan Jones: That is correct today, yes.

Q196       Kit Malthouse: You would not necessarily count as a sovereign capability, even though you are based here. Anyway, we will come up with a definition.

I wanted to ask you a bit about specialism in UK strategy. We have heard a lot about how the UK has to make decisions about XYZ. The Government always get a bit torn about what they are doing. They are technology-neutral, but they have recently said they want to focus funding on a small number of high-potential computing firms. Is that the right approach?

Jonathan Legh-Smith: On computing, no. I believe it is too early to down-select to specific companies right at this point in time. As Duncan mentioned earlier, there are different ways of building quantum computers. We call them different modalities. Basically, we do not yet know which of those modalities will a) succeed or b) be best and come in first. To try to pick companies implies picking a modality, and we are not ready to do that. It is effectively taking a punt. I do not believe that is the right thing to do.

Q197       Kit Malthouse: What about across the whole of quantum?

Jonathan Legh-Smith: Across the whole of quantum, similarly, it is a difficult call to pick your favourite technology. If you consider it in terms of the impact on sectors, the priorities change. Within pharmaceutical and finance, you would say quantum computing. In defence, they are very clear that the priority is PNT. PNT is another area I should have mentioned as critical.

Q198       Chair: What does PNT stand for?

Jonathan Legh-Smith: It is positioning, navigation and timing. Quantum provides clocks. That is the overlap with that. They are very clear on clocks, sensing and then computing. If I went into telecoms, it would be comms and then maybe a mix.

To try to choose the technology, you almost have to choose your favourite sector. Which is the most important? The UK has benefited because our programme has delivered companies across the spectrum. We can build on those.

Q199       Kit Malthouse: Even if they were to decide that they wanted to select, which they have said they do, are Government and their various bodies intelligent selectors? Do they know what they are talking about? Certainly, this will eventually land on the desk of somebody who does not really understand quantum.

Jonathan Legh-Smith: There is an approach to this. This is largely what the US is doing with the DARPA quantum benchmarking initiative. There is a very phased approach of working out how to assess and down-select companies. That is part of the planning. I have been told—we have not seen it yet—that part of the thinking is about how you develop the criteria against which you then down-select.

Q200       Kit Malthouse: Are the people developing those criteria smart?

Jonathan Legh-Smith: Yes.

Q201       Kit Malthouse: Do they know what they are talking about? Are they specialists in the background? Are they generalist civil servants? Do you have a microbiologist at the head of an agency making decisions about quantum? What does the skillset look like through the decision-making tree?

Jonathan Legh-Smith: The Office for Quantum is engaging with industry to academia on this. Part of the US-UK partnership and the benchmarking feeds into that. Part of the activities that I expect to see on the quantum mission, in actually engaging with business, will be about developing them.

Q202       Kit Malthouse: Just to use a parallel, up until recently the director of the Office for Life Sciences had previously been a senior Private Secretary within the Home Office. There is a tendency within the civil service to move generalists about and assume they can learn quickly. In an area such as this, if they are deciding they are going to pick, are you confident that they have the internal knowledge to be able to make the decisions that they seem to want to make?

Jonathan Legh-Smith: I believe they have the intent and are approaching it the right way, yes. If people move, that I cannot answer.

Q203       Chair: The UK is not the US. We do not have the US’s resources. We do not have the financial resources or the population. Your approach seems to be very much to let 1,000 flowers bloom and you will decide which ones may grow. Do we not need to be more focused if we are to reap the benefits of quantum in specific areas? Can the UK really just fund everything in quantum and wait to see what works best?

Jonathan Legh-Smith: We have to down-select. My statement around “now” would be too soon. The programmes that we put in place—

Q204       Chair: Right now we should be just funding everything. There is nothing that the UK is particularly good at that we should be driving excellence in. We should be funding everything across quantum.

Jonathan Legh-Smith: Across the major quantum technology domains, yes.

Q205       Chair: We should just fund everything. Do you agree with that, Duncan Jones?

Duncan Jones: I would separate it slightly into what we make available to researchers in the country. In terms of funding access to the latest quantum hardware, for example, we should not be selective. We should go with what seems, objectively, to be the most capable at the moment.

I would agree with Jonathan. As we look at what we try to fund across the modalities available for quantum computing, for example, it is early to be down-selecting. We do not have to fund 30 companies. We can look to see who is rising to the top of their particular modality. It would be wise to keep the door open to these various ways of solving the problem.

Q206       Chair: To build on an earlier point, George was talking about a global race. It does not seem that we know yet which races we want the UK to be winning in when it comes to specific quantum technologies or parts of technologies. In the vast expanse of quantum, we do not know what the UK is best at.

Jonathan Legh-Smith: I would say we are well positioned in all of them. To cast some aside at this point would be premature.

Chair: Politics is about prioritisation, and we have a vast amount of UK public money that needs to be appropriately allocated. We need to understand better the evidence that says that we can win the global race, particularly in terms of the security aspects of quantum, by supporting everything at this stage.

Kit Malthouse: I do wonder whether there is a cultural issue between politics and industry-soaked science. I get the impression that scientists look at a global race as eight people sitting in a rowing boat. It does not really matter where in the boat you are. The Americans might be up at the prow, but you will get over the line. Politicians would like all of us to be in individual boats and to be the one that gets over the line first.

Chair: That is a very interesting metaphor. You are right, Kit. When it comes to national security, though, there is a specific benefit to being in your own rowboat or at least one with your allies. We have probably pushed the rowing boat metaphor as far as we can.

It has been a really interesting discussion. We have learned a lot about quantum and about the UK’s approach to it. I really want to thank you, Duncan Jones and Jonathan Legh-Smith, for your contribution this morning.