BY: Stephen Tulip, UK Country Manager, Association for Competitive Technology
If you’ve never experienced the Labour Party Conference, let me give you a sense of the scale. It takes up several huge arenas and the surrounding area in Liverpool for five days and packs every hour of the day with roundtables, policy discussions, demonstration areas, networking, and of course pub trivia.
The Association for Competitive Technology’s (ACT) team has been attending for several years, and this year, with the growing focus on boosting UK SMEs by policymakers, we decided to do things a little differently. Instead of racing around the nonstop events trying to grab a few minutes here and there, we brought five of our incredible UK startup members to show off their technology and had the Conference come to us.
Our members Stars Edge, Twelve Oaks Software, My Print Pod, Footfalls and Heartbeats, and AI in Schools set up in the Labour Tech Zone and spent the week showing their products and sharing their stories with Ministers, MPs, journalists, and delegates. From space and AI to education and robotics to app development, gaming, care-tech, and sustainable 3D printing, our members brought the practical impacts of policy that Conference attendees need to hear more of.
During a panel discussion, co-hosted by ACT and the New Statesman, two of our members had a rousing back-and-forth with , Minister of State for AI, , Chair of the Science, Innovation, and Technology Select Committee, and , a tech enthusiast with a background in app development. In front of a large and engaged audience, it was encouraging to see these three lawmakers’ deep commitment to improving the policy environment and UK leadership for SMEs.
ACT had a front row seat at the conference’s tech discussions, and unsurprisingly, the topic of AI dominated, but with nuance around how its benefits can be distributed across the country and the role the UK can feasibly play in developing global AI rules. As a side note, the AI minister is likely to be up for the award of busiest person at the conference after speaking at 70+ events across the week.
A key issue for our members is the challenges faced by startups who want to remain and scale in the UK, starting with access to capital. In Funding the Founders ACT lays out eleven recommendations, all developed from roundtable discussions with SMEs across the UK, that could supercharge startup growth. Take government procurement as an example. If the government is serious about supporting SMEs, then make the government contracting process more accessible. Landing a procurement contract pays double for an SME. Firstly, revenue. A government contract can be significant predictable revenue for a startup that keeps the lights on. Secondly, as a positive signal to investors of viability. Improving access to capital for startups means that we get to keep these groundbreaking technologies here and giving the UK strategic advantages.
There were also encouraging discussions about the UK’s approach to regulation, which balances proportional and evidence-based interventions with the need to remain pro- growth. Our members are looking with interest at the potential of closer alignment with the EU, announced in the Prime Minister’s leader’s speech. While removing barriers and costs to export and import would be welcome, that cannot be allowed to threaten the UK’s successful approach to digital regulation by forcing us to adopt EU laws like the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and AI Act.
We are curious to see how the announced desire for the UK to develop a new global code to capture the benefits of AI whilst being clear-eyed about its risks will play out for small companies deploying AI in their business and creating new AI products.
Overall, our members at the conference were encouraged by the enthusiasm for startups and UK innovation shown by the policymakers they met.
At next year’s conference, the important test will be if the UK has become a materially better place to scale and grow a business, especially for startups and SMEs.