Britain’s investment minister has revealed there are talks within government about introducing a universal basic income to support workers in industries likely to be wiped out by AI.
Lord Jason Stockwood, who joined the government in September after a career in tech, told the FT he believed that “bumpy” changes to society caused by AI would mean there would have “to be some sort of concessionary arrangement with jobs that go immediately”.
“Undoubtedly we’re going to have to think really carefully about how we soft-land those industries that go away, so some sort of [universal basic income], some sort of life-long mechanism as well so people can retrain,” he said.
UBI is not official government policy, but asked if other government colleagues were considering the need for UBI, he replied, “people are definitely talking about it”.
Stockwood said one of his motives for stepping into the job left by Poppy Gustafsson, the former Darktrace chief executive who resigned after less than a year, was ensuring steps were being taken to prepare for the rapid changes to society and the UK workforce.
Stockwood’s comments come in the same week that the chief executive of Anthropic, one of the world’s leading AI companies, warned of “unusually painful” disruption to jobs markets as AI was a “general labour substitute for humans”.
Sadiq Khan, London mayor, also warned this month of a potential “new era of mass unemployment” caused by AI.
Technology secretary Liz Kendall acknowledged on Wednesday that “some jobs will go” as a result of AI, citing initial concerns about entry-level roles in finance and law.
Kendall argued that “more jobs will be created than will go, but I’m not complacent about that”. She added that the government would help people adapt. “We will not leave individuals and communities to cope on their own”.
Stockwood has previously suggested that tech companies could pay a windfall levy to fund UBI payments.
“I think of the productivity gains and the wealth that AI can create, but we also need to think of the more pernicious and near-term danger that it just embeds inequality and makes a really small cohort of super-wealthy elites even wealthier because they control the capital and the technologies,” he said.
After a career at Lastminute.com, Travelocity and Match.com, Stockwood oversaw the sale in 2017 of online insurance broker Simply Business to Travelers for $490mn.
This put him in a position to buy a stake in his hometown football club Grimsby Town, where he remains chair.
When the League Two team beat Manchester United in August he let his son risk a lifetime ban by joining a joyful pitch invasion: “I waited 55 years of my life for that moment.”
Unlike the privileged backgrounds of many in the House of Lords, Stockwood grew up on a council estate in Grimsby, not knowing his father and watching his single mother take every job going, including as a debt collector and shifts on the docks, where he also worked as a 15-year-old labourer.
He has said in the past that there should be a wealth tax on “people who have broader shoulders”, and of those who wanted to shift offshore: “off you pop”.
Stockwood told the FT he spent his first week as a minister apologising for comments he had made before coming into government and has not repeated his calls for further wealth taxes.
However, he said: “If you make your money and the first thing you do is you speak to a tax adviser to ask ‘where can we pay the lowest tax’, we don’t want those people in this country, I’d suggest, because you’re not committed to your communities and the long-term success in this country.”
Nevertheless, Stockwood was recently mingling with the global elite in Davos, making his pitch for investors and wealth creators to come to the UK. “Investors can look at us as a safe haven, relative to the chaos in politics which we witnessed first hand last week”. He said US investors had revealed they were “shell-shocked” about Trump’s tariff threats over Greenland.
Selling the UK’s predictability is more difficult when Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has to repeatedly fend off leadership rumours, including about the ambitions of Andy Burnham, Greater Manchester mayor.
Stockwood emphasised he wanted Starmer to lead Labour into the next general election, despite admiring the “brilliant” Burnham. “What we need now is stability . . . the most important thing for us is not sending political chaos into our system.”
Stockwood stood last May as the Labour candidate for Greater Lincolnshire mayor, losing to Reform UK’s Andrea Jenkyns.
He admitted Reform UK was attracting both his business and investor peers and his “scaffolder mates” in Grimsby.
“It is a tragedy to me that the people I know and love, in the town I know and love, are leaning towards the far right. I mean, these are decent, hard-working people that I know and I care about, but they feel the political system is failing them.”
Stockwood said the government needed to do a better job of showing ordinary people how they would benefit from its growth agenda and trade deals.
He said the idea of a Reform government “leaves me in a cold sweat”, and took aim at Reform’s plans to give business leaders cabinet roles as an “absolute disaster” because leading government was not just about “deals and trades”.
He said he had already learned business was easier than politics. “I’ve been a CEO of a thousand people, I thought I ran a relatively complex operation, but it’s an absolute walk in the park compared to government.”
Additional reporting by Chris Smyth