Scaleup powerhouse goals, chasing unicorns & immigration concerns - Michelle Donelan, tech secretary

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UKTN

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5 • 6 Ratings

🗓️ 23 January 2024

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Michelle Donelan, the tech secretary, discusses the government’s plan to make the UK a “scaleup powerhouse” and provides more detail on some of the policy support measures. The secretary of state answers questions about her goal to make the UK home to half of all European tech unicorns by 2030 and whether immigration policy is harming UK tech growth. Elsewhere, Donelan responds to concerns that scrapping parts of HS2 is a blow to regional tech growth, and is asked whether Fujitsu is still a trusted partner in the wake of the Post Office scandal.

Donelan is the UK’s first secretary of state for science, innovation and technology. She was appointed to lead the department in February 2023 after Prime Minister Rishi Sunak spun it out of the Department for Digital, Culture Media and Sport, which Donelan led from September 2022. Her responsibilities include all things UK tech, from skills to regulation to R&D. Her department brought the Online Safety Bill into law and negotiated the UK’s post-Brexit re-entry into the Horizon Europe research programme. Donelan and her department organised the first global summit on AI safety, which brought international leaders and experts to Bletchley Park last November.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The whole point about the scale-up agenda is that we're not capping out and these companies
0:09.3	are not locating elsewhere to the likes of America.
0:14.5	It's not good enough for us to just rely on the crutch of immigration in the long term
0:19.8	because we want to be able to ensure that
0:21.5	we can feed that industry from the UK.
0:26.6	We're never going to be able to write that wrong, but it is important that we give justice to
0:31.5	those who were impacted, compensation and support.
0:39.2	From the first timetime founders to the funds that back them,
0:42.7	innovation needs different.
0:44.9	Our episode partner, HSBC Innovation Banking,
0:48.4	is proud to accelerate growth for tech and life science businesses,
0:52.4	creating meaningful connections and opening up a world of
0:55.3	opportunity for entrepreneurs and investors alike. Discover more at www.h.hbc Innovationbanking.com
1:03.7	slash EN-GB. Hello and welcome to the UKTM podcast, a weekly chat with the movers and shapers of the UK tech industry and the destination for all things UK tech related.
1:23.4	And this week, for the first episode of our new season, I'm delighted to say I'm joined by the
1:28.0	Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, Michelle Donnellan. Welcome, Michelle.
1:33.9	Thank you for having me. Really excited to be here today.
1:36.4	So we're doing this interview off the back of the speech you made about tech scale-ups in the UK
1:41.4	and wanting to make the UK a tech scale-up powerhouse by 2030. So briefly
1:48.9	talk us through how you see that happening. Yeah. So we've got a really good story to tell in
1:54.0	terms of what we've done as a government over the last 14 years now since 2010. If we look back at 2010 coming out of that financial crisis,
2:03.5	we're finding it hard to get venture capital funding and investment into our tech and science
	...

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