Tech Prosperity Deal – Interview with BBC Radio Berkshire
Dr Keith Arundale (Henley Business School) speaks to BBC Radio Berkshire about the Tech Prosperity Deal signed by the UK and the US to invest £150 billion into tech companies in the UK.
Transcript:
Q. I’m joined by Keith Arundale who is a senior visiting fellow at Henley Business School. So when you hear loads of big numbers you often think that is great news. Should we be happy about this deal?
A. Well I think it is good very good news and the timing of course was absolutely brilliant wasn’t it to coincide with the so-called historic second visit of President Trump so you know 7,600 new jobs is is great. What uh, you know we don’t quite know is exactly what it’s going to be used for. I think the vast majority of it I think £90 billion is actually going to be from Blackstone, probably the world’s largest private equity firm. So the question is how much of that is actually going to go into, say real estate maybe I don’t know maybe constructing data centers, for instance, which will obviously create jobs as they’re being constructed, but perhaps not so many jobs to actually run them and as you know, we have a number of data centers already in Slough and of course, Reading is really home to the country’s largest cluster of digital businesses outside London. You referred to it as as the UK Silicon Valley. It’s also, of course, one of the best locations for AI businesses in fact number 3 after Cambridge and Bristol, which is fantastic, and there’s a lot happening in AI in Reading very recently the Thames Valley AI Hub has been formed. They had their inaugural summit just the other day, and we also formed the Reading Tech Cluster here in Reading as well to better connect the big tech companies with the smaller companies across Berkshire Thames Valley. So I guess the question I have is how much of this money is going to go into supporting scale ups in the UK. We have not a very good record of financing scale ups. We’re very good at startups, we’re very good at innovation and all that sort of thing. But if you want to scale up a lot of the time, you’ve got to go off to the USA, to the venture capitalists in Silicon Valley with the much deeper pockets when we talk about scaling up.
Q. Keith, for scale up you mean obviously expanding and getting bigger, and I did see there were some critics on this, like Sir Nick Clegg, who was saying that you know. Does this mean that we just have increased dependency on US firms and we still don’t have access to the numbers that we need in order to do things like scale up?
A. As you say exactly yes, I mean there are moves afoot to improve that in terms of the financing, something called the Mansion House Compact and Accord, as came in a couple of years ago. It’s proving quite slow to get it off the ground, but the idea is to convince our pension funds to put rather more money into the private markets in the UK, venture and growth capital funds specifically, very little money currently goes into this only about 0.36 %, I believe, whereas you look at some of the very big pension funds in the US they’re putting well over 10% into into private equity and venture capital alone. I mean the other thing which is encouraging is this idea to get the local authorities pension funds to club together. So you end up with 8 mega funds who can invest in the private capital. So I think if some of the huge amount of money is going to go into our AI businesses in the Thames Valley to make us even stronger in that area, that would be excellent.
Q. Finally, is there anything else that you know we could be doing to make sure that a significant proportion of that money comes our way, given how we don’t know how this is going to be shared out? I know you’ve talked about the positivity that’s already there, but is there anything that can be done to almost capture it in a better way?
A. Yes, well, of course companies like Microsoft, Nvidia and Google are all based in the Thames Valley, here in Reading, so maybe they would be in a good position to be lobbied by local politicians and so on, and by organizations such as the Reading Tech Cluster, which I mentioned which I co-founded with other people. About a year ago, we had a very successful launch event at the University of Reading, which the Vice Chancellor opened. I should say also that we’re very pleased that the university has been named the inaugural University of the Year for bursaries and Scholarships 2026 in the Sunday Times. I don’t know how much of this money is going to be used for sustainable, because I think a lot of it is earmarked for AI, quantum and nuclear power, I believe, but hopefully there’ll be an element is sustainable within it.
We’ll have to wait and see.
