London Tech Week 2026
Policy announcements across the AI Adoption Summit, London Tech Week and the AI Hardware Plan
As London Tech Week draws to a close, we look at the Government’s flurry of announcements made during the week, covering the AI Adoption Summit, London Tech Week and the AI Hardware Plan.
Alongside a concierge service for scale-ups to navigate government regulations, procurement and hiring talent, and a visa fee reimbursement scheme worth up to £25,000 per year — which are most relevant to entrepreneurs — the Government has also announced legislation for AI Growth Labs, support for open-source AI and a new AI Economics Institute.
New scale-up support and visa fee reimbursements
As part of a package to support businesses to “start, scale and stay in the UK”, the Government announced a bespoke concierge service and new visa and talent measures.
The bespoke concierge service will offer a tiered support model for high-growth scale-ups to navigate regulations, finance, procurement, talent and other growth barriers — to be built with input from entrepreneurs and investors. The Government has launched a tender for a private sector partnership to run a pilot to strengthen the scale-up pipeline, but it is yet to be confirmed exactly how the service will be run.
The Government has also launched a Visa Fees Reimbursement Scheme for Scale-Ups, a grant scheme targeted at UK scale-ups in clean energy, life sciences, and digital and technologies sectors. Businesses can apply for funding up to £25,000 per year, with a maximum award of £5,000 for each international hire and their dependants. To qualify, a business must hold a valid UK visa sponsor licence, have an established UK presence, and meet the scale-up definition of over 20% average annual growth in employment or turnover over three years, starting from at least 10 employees. Eligible hires are limited to the Skilled Worker, Global Talent and Scale-Up visa routes. Funding is limited and will be allocated first-come, first-served, with applications open from 16 June 2026 until 1 March 2027. You can find the full eligibility criteria and application portal here.
The Government separately launched an Office for Investment fast-track referral for a UK Expansion Worker sponsor licence, for businesses that are already receiving ongoing support from the Office for Investment, which could shorten processing time to 10 working days from the 8-week standard.
In other news, the Business Secretary gave an interview to the Sunday Times (paywall), acknowledging the shallow private capital markets in the UK pushing businesses elsewhere and vowing to take more active equity stakes in fast-growing private firms.
Growth labs and regulatory sandboxes
As we covered in our Policy Update in May, the Government is pushing a Regulating for Growth Bill to modernise the UK’s regulatory system by strengthening the Growth Duty on regulators and creating cross-economy sandboxing powers — allowing existing rules to be temporarily relaxed. AI is one of several technologies, alongside medicines, autonomous maritime and defence technology, to which the sandboxing powers could apply.
On Monday, Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced that the Government will be legislating for AI Growth Labs this autumn. On top of that, she also launched the Advisory AI Growth Lab to bring together regulators to provide practical guidance on how “existing rules apply to emerging AI applications”. Its first focus will be legal services.
Meanwhile, a report from the Public Accounts Committee criticised HM Treasury for asking regulators to take more risks while failing to “articulate what risk appetite they expect from regulators” and “define growth in any detail beyond an increase in GDP”. The Committee recommended that departments provide strategic policy steers to regulators to clarify their risk appetites, acknowledge the trade-offs, and articulate how regulatory actions are expected to contribute to growth.
AI Hardware Plan
Announced with a funding package of £1.1 billion, the AI Hardware Plan was published by the Government on Monday. As part of the Government’s previous commitment to expand AI Research Resource (AIRR), it backed a new national AI supercomputer at the University of Edinburgh with £750 million, to be operational by 2030 and to join the AIRR with UK-designed chips intended as a crucial part. Of that £750 million, £400 million will equip the supercomputer with next-generation chips, including £150 million to buy inference chips from British firms this summer through an advance commitment — making the Government an early customer for domestic startups.
The Plan also created a £150 million fund for UK hardware companies through the British Business Bank, £120 million to fund a new AI Hardware Innovation Programme for companies to design and test novel chips (with at least £20 million expanding ARIA’s Scaling Inference Lab), and £80 million for skills, including undergraduate bursaries in electronic engineering and materials science, a Centre for Doctoral Training in Chip Design, and support for PhD students.
Institute created to study jobs and productivity
At the AI Adoption Summit, nearly 40 companies signed the AI Adoption Insights Agreement to share their insights on AI’s economic impact with the newly launched AI Economics Institute. The Institute will be modelled on the AI Security Institute (AISI), acting as a research group within government to model the impacts of AI on jobs and productivity. A working group with tech companies including Anthropic and OpenAI will be established by the end of June, as these companies pledged to collaborate with the Government on “responsible AI development”. The Institute will also work with government departments to explore the use of public sector data.
Government backing open-source AI
On Wednesday, the AI Minister Kanishka Narayan announced support for open-source AI developers, backing them with access to 160,000 GPU-hours via AIRR. Alongside this, the Government announced an Open-Source AI Builder Mentoring Scheme and a new Open-Source AI Dev Board. The Mentoring Scheme will pair hackathon winners with experts from the Government’s Incubator for AI, while the Dev Board, chaired by the AI Minister, will give ten UK-based developers a direct line into Government to influence the use and development of AI.
One year on: AI Growth Zones
In the One Year Update to the Digital and Technologies Sector Plan published on Wednesday, the Government laid out a timeline for the first AI Growth Zones becoming operational, with all currently announced zones operational by 2030. However, data centre developer Era4 on Tuesday criticised DSIT and NESO for delays in getting permission for it to access power from a nearby plant.
Guidance on robotics in the workplace
The AI Minister announced a new partnership between the Regulatory Innovation Office and the Health and Safety Executive to produce the first guidance on advanced robotics in the workplace. They will work with industry to deliver regulatory clarity for collaborative robots. This follows our roundtable with the Regulatory Innovation Office in May, in which founders said that pre-market guidance from the Health and Safety Executive would be valuable.
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