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How can the UK ensure it is positioned as a global leader in tech?

Well, as I've said in the past, the amazing thing is we have the difficult bit - the bit you can't sort of sit down as a new country and create is the science base. It is pretty much second to none in the UK and a legacy of hundreds of years. So, we have that, but it's a bit like having oil reserves. We need to get that out of the ground, we need to make it useful. And there are two approaches to that - one is bringing technology to make the public services work better. And the other is commercial impact. And we have not been good at that.

So, you know we're inefficient in how we get the ideas in our universities into companies. We now do have some funding for start-ups with we didn't used to have. But the big problem is that we give up too early in the cycles so what happens is our great companies - at the point where they’ve really got the technology straight - get acquired usually by foreign power. So Deep Mind is central to Google's AI, which is affecting many different things. Solexa in the genetics area, the list goes on and on and on. And that's why getting the London market working is very important because we don't want those businesses sold at 400 million. We want them to get onto the London market, we want them to list 3 billion like Darktrace. And then, let's try and get them to 30 billion. And the virtuous circle there is that that company ends up training people, we get expertise. Because you've seen that level of success, that funds investment. People say ‘oh look, I'd love to have that success’, so they'll fund the early companies and the ecosystem takes off. If a FTSE fund manager has 10 fundamental technology companies in the FTSE100 they have to know about it. If all of the companies in the FTSE100 are non-technical you don't need to know about it. So you've got to get this virtuous circle working.

I think the listing changes are very important to doing that, I think we could look at making transfer out of universities much more efficient. And, really, from political point of view, understanding strategy, which is what is Britain about post Brexit? What is it that we have? Well I think we have two fundamental assets - we have creative industries which is amazing – think about British music, British theatre, the great directors in Hollywood are British, many of them. But we also have this amazing science base and we need to understand what it takes to make that move forward. And there are things that governments can do - we can look at education, we can look at the funding landscape, we can look at the listing model. But the most important thing is declaring that’s our direction. Britain is going to be the place where if you want to be doing stuff that's going to change the world in the future, you do it here, and government can do things like change the regulatory framework so that they're updated for the modern world.