This is the East-West railway.
A £5 billion project to connect the English cities of Oxford and Cambridge.
There are hopes that, once connected,
the region can become a tech supercluster for the U.K., just like Silicon Valley.
I want to ask you to help turn the U.K. into the world’s next Silicon Valley.
The British government wants to make the U.K. a science and technology superpower by 2030.
That’s in seven years.
So, in a post-Brexit world, the U.K. might need some help to achieve that goal.
And that help is likely to come from 5,000 miles away in India.
Today, India has over 100 unicorns. It’s the third largest startup ecosystem in the world.
We need to wake up to international competition.
This dominance in one sector by the USA will not last forever.
So, the interesting question is, how is it going to break? Who will break it?
The Oxford-Cambridge arc is an economically significant area in England,
lying just 50 miles northwest of London.
There are nine British universities,
science centres and technology parks in between the two cities.
The Arc hosts the largest space cluster in Europe and over 400 biotech companies.
The region has the highest rate of patent applications in the U.K.
and it’s where the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine was developed.
Alistair Lomax is the Director of Arc Universities Group.
The group advocates for a triple helix approach, a partnership between government,
private sector and academia, to boost and commercialize research from the cluster.
I think the private sector has been investing systematically for a long time,
in the major opportunities that have flowed out of Oxford and Cambridge.
What it hasn't had the opportunity to do is to invest in a system that straddles an entire region.
What's the U.K. government's involvement in this area? How much are they going to invest?
Well, the U.K. government's doing something very significant in
supporting the new national rail infrastructure in East West Rail,
which will improve the connectivity between the two ends of the arc.
If the support is not consistent from the U.K. Government,
that it won't just diminish things here. They will go to other parts of the world.
Shortly after announcing his desire to transform the U.K. into the next Silicon Valley,
British finance minister Jeremy Hunt visited Bengaluru, also known as India’s Silicon Valley.
There, he met tech CEOs and founders,
exploring how the U.K.’s links with India can help achieve its goal.
To become a tech-superpower, the U.K. primarily needs two things:
highly skilled talent and financial investment.
And when it comes to talent, India is not in short supply.
The country is expected to surpass China as the world’s most populous country in 2023,
with around one million young Indians entering the workforce each month.
65% of India's 1.4 billion population is under the age of 35.
Just reflect on the youth, the potential and economic benefits
that this young workforce could offer.
In 2022, India was the U.K.’s 12th largest trading partner,
with a trade relationship worth £34 billion.
Both sides are also committed to ink a free trade agreement despite political
instability in the U.K. and disagreements over issues such as visa quotas.
We are witnessing the creation of a new golden era in U.K.– India relations.
India has been an engineering global talent hub for the world over recent years.
I think both the U.K. and the USA could really tap into that talent
because the mindset of young Indians is changing,
they want to be innovators, they want to be job generators, rather than job seekers.
The U.K. isn’t the only country hoping to attract Indian talent to its shores.
According to the European Commission, 4 out of 10 adults in Europe lack basic digital skills.
At the start of 2023, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz
announced plans to ease visa rules for tech workers from India,
saying Germany needs skilled labour to meet the demand for software development.
We have this view that we can sit and wait in the U.K.
We can't, we're in a race.
We are concerned that it looks very expensive to come to the U.K.
That also is part of making us not look very internationally appealing at the moment.
If you want to come to the U.K. as a skilled worker, the amount of money
you and your sponsor need to pay is more than $10,000.
In comparison, other nations that are leading in science and research
have an average cost of $1,600. A 500% difference.
In 2023, the U.K. launched a new scheme allowing up to
3,000 young professionals from India to come and work in the country for two years.
This was a sharp reversal from 2022 when the U.K.’s home secretary expressed reservations
about increasing visas for the South Asian nation.
I want Britain to have control over migration, and cut overall numbers.
Of course, we don't want to have to rely on immigration for the science superpower ambition.
The government has a lot of ambition for our schools with much more focus on teaching maths,
more focus on making sure people have digital skills,
which is something industry, all over the world, I think is saying it needs.
Do you think the political rhetoric around immigration
is somehow complicating things for the U.K . when it comes to attracting talent here?
In my personal view, I suspect this is causing a problem to us.
I think we probably don't look very welcoming to immigrants.
So, how will the influx of overseas talent be received here in the U.K.?
I’ve come to Oxford University to find out why immigration,
even after Brexit, remains a highly contested topic in British politics.
Immigration goes up in the agenda in Britain, when governments are in trouble.
Professor Dorling is a human geographer from Oxford University,
studying social inequalities in Britain.
Let's talk about this broader vision first.
The U.K.’s ambition to become a tech superpower. How do you see it?
In the 70s and 80s, Britain created its own microcomputer.
We had a Windows system before Xerox had it, and Apple had it.
It almost all died.
It was killed by marketing, monopoly, cleverness, largely from America.
In recent years, the EU introduced several legislations to counter America’s big tech dominance,
including a €95 billion research and innovation fund called Horizon Europe.
We've seen the European Union responding very quickly to try and
make sure that they keep both technology and investment in those areas in the EU.
The EU may look at it and say, this isn't good, monopolies like this are not good.
And that of course then creates a market for the same services within the EU.
The U.K. hasn’t benefited from the EU’s €95 billion Horizon scheme the country left the EU in 2020.
But in terms of overall funding, the U.K. is still out in front, ahead of
its biggest competitors in Europe like Germany and France.
The British tech industry is valued at $1 trillion,
making the U.K. the third country ever to hit this valuation after the U.S. and China.
In 2022, British tech companies raised $29.5 billion,
more than France and Germany combined.
Now we have a good track record on technology-based startup and spin-out companies,
I think the biggest challenge is how do we get those companies to grow in the U.K.,
so that they really contribute to the U.K.’s GDP?
The U.K. has all the ingredients to become a global tech science superpower by 2030.
Collaboration and partnership will really be at the heart of that initiative.
It's far better to do it slowly and organically.
And to teach people in your schools in such a way that some of them
actually enjoy and like doing this stuff.
But you can't just snap your fingers and magic a 'Silicon Valley'.