The UK Quantum Programme Risks Getting Lost In The Noise Of The DSIT Reshuffle

Within the first weeks of Andy Burnham’s premiership, the government he now leads abolished the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. The written statement announcing the change on 21 July runs to about a thousand words, and it carefully accounts for where everything is going, with artificial intelligence sent to one place, digital policy to another, and the teams and portfolios reassigned line by line. Nowhere in it does the word quantum appear. For a technology to which the British government had committed up to £2 billion only four months earlier, that silence is worth pausing on. Of that £2 billion, a full £1 billion is earmarked to buy quantum computers through a procurement competition called ProQure. Applications closed in May, and the first contracts are due to be announced in October. The department that designed the competition, however, no longer exists, which means the earliest and most concrete test of the new arrangements will fall due within weeks of those arrangements being created. There is a piece of physics buried in that timing, and it is worth understanding because it describes the risk with unusual precision. A quantum bit, or qubit, is almost never destroyed by anything dramatic. Instead…