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Strong foundations: how can digital sovereignty help solve the UK’s growth crisis?

Nesta at the Labour Party Conference
28 Sep 2026 17:00 – 18:30
Nesta's pod, Liverpool Experience Campus (secure zone)

The UK stands to gain hundreds of billions of pounds over the next decade from AI, but our current data infrastructure is acting as a massive structural drag on growth. Right now, the UK operates as a ‘tenant state’, effectively paying rent to private tech vendors just to access and use public data. This fragmented patchwork of closed systems traps vital information in 20th-century silos, levying a ‘friction tax’ on citizens and businesses while stifling innovation.

Transitioning from a tenant to a sovereign owner of our core digital infrastructure - the shared operating system on which both public services and private innovation run - presents a massive economic prize, as evidenced by home-grown and international success stories like Open Banking and India Stack. But what does owning the digital foundations actually require? What has to structurally change to get there? And where are the opportunities for digital public infrastructure to unlock value from what already exists?

Join Nesta at the Labour Party Conference to explore what it will take for government to move from being a mere renter of services to the architect of a new digital realm - with the potential to unlock billions in NHS savings, energy efficiency and industrial growth.

Our expert panel will be chaired by Ravi Gurumurthy, chief executive of Nesta and includes Mallory Durran, Nesta’s applied research and methods director and Dr Laura Gilbert CBE, senior director, AI and innovation at the Tony Blair Institute. The panel will be followed by a drinks reception and the opportunity to experiment with Nesta’s Policy Atlas tool, which helps policymakers rapidly identify effective policies to tackle social issues.

This event will take place on Monday 28 September, 17:00-18:30 BST in Nesta’s pod at the Liverpool Experience Campus (secure zone). Add to your calendar.

Speakers

Ravi

Ravi Gurumurthy

Ravi Gurumurthy is group chief executive officer, joining Nesta as chief executive in December 2019. Ravi is the chief executive of Nesta, the UK’s innovation foundation. Nesta’s mission is to design, test and scale solutions to society's biggest challenges, from sustainability and health to educational inequality. Ravi also leads the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), often known as the ‘Nudge Unit’. BIT has grown from a small team in No 10 Downing Street to a 250-person global social purpose consultancy and a subsidiary of Nesta. Prior to joining Nesta, Ravi co-founded and led the Airbel Innovation Lab at the International Rescue Committee. He was responsible for designing new products and services for people affected by crises in over 40 countries. Ravi worked in the UK government from 1999 to 2013. He was an adviser and speechwriter to Foreign Secretary David Miliband, leading the creation of Every Child Matters and the Children Act 2004, and the world’s first legally binding climate legislation. Ravi has held a number of non-executive roles, and is currently NED for NHS England, and lead NED for the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero.

Mallory Durran

Mallory Durran

Mallory has led public sector and start-up teams harnessing data and technology for the public good for over a decade. She brings extensive experience from the heart of UK government, including in No 10 and the Cabinet Office, and most recently as Interim Director of the Incubator for AI at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, leading an engineering team building AI applications for public sector improvement. With an academic background in computational neuroscience, Mallory is a badged statistician and former SCS member of the Government Statistical Service. She has contributed to significant government standard setting and reviews on data and digital infrastructure, ethics, and AI safety and opportunity and led No 10's open API framework development (project rAPId). At Nesta, Mallory oversees the applied research, methods, AI, and technology offer for the group, bringing innovative approaches to improving access to and efficacy of interventions across Nesta’s missions and the wider public sector. She remains relentlessly enthusiastic about the power of data and technology to fuel positive change.

Laura_Gilbert

Dr Laura Gilbert CBE

Dr. Laura Gilbert is the Senior Director of AI and Head of the AI for Government program at the Tony Blair Institute, working to deliver a program of AI solutions to improve the ability of governments to plan and deliver resilient public services and generate better economic and wellbeing outcomes for their citizens. From September 2020 to January 2025 Laura worked in 10 Downing Street as the founding director of 10DS, the data science and analytics team, and the Incubator for Artificial Intelligence (i.AI). These high-performance teams successfully provided ground-breaking, fast-paced modelling and analysis to support policy making and delivery, and delivered expert data and AI solutions into public services. Laura holds a doctorate in Particle Physics and Computing from Oxford University, undergraduate degrees from Cambridge University and is a visiting professor at the London School of Economics and Policy. She has previously worked in defence intelligence and quantitative finance, and for nearly a decade was founder/CTO of a medical technologies company, Rescon, bringing it from start-up to SMT to acquisition before exiting and joining government in 2020. In 2023 she was awarded a CBE for Services to Technology and Analysis.

Event information

28 Sep 2026 17:00 – 18:30

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