A British Conservative Party Member of Parliament (MP) has released his report, ‘Unlocking Blockchain’, which advocates a public-facing chief blockchain officer to oversee the UK’s blockchain strategy, according to City AM.
MP Eddie Hughes made recommendations in his report urging Theresa May’s government to focus more readily on blockchain technologies, citing social freedom, increasing efficiency and the rebuilding of societal trust as the main areas of its use in governance.
The report was published by the Conservative party think-tank Freer, an offshoot of the Institute of Economic Affairs. It suggests that a long-term target of a 1% efficiency saving using blockchain tech should become its aim over the next year, saving up to GBP 8 billion on the 2017/18 budget.
Earlier this year, Conservative MP Matt Hancock delivered a speech to the Law Society commenting that blockchain technology would have a “monumental impact” on people’s lives in the future. The MP pointed out that in June 2017, the UK’s top ten publicly-traded fintech businesses crossed the 100-billion-dollar market at a value of GBP 71 billion.
He went on to illustrate that it was blockchain which was the most important emerging technology and that UK financial regulators were leading the world in encouraging innovation:
“Blockchain poses real and searching questions… What role do nation states have when setting frameworks for these decentralized, cross-border systems? And how do we address the challenges of smart contracts, when computer coding needs specificity and the law often needs interpretation?”
Hughes, clearly wanting to build on these successes, has suggested that the UK initiate an international blockchain competition to lure global companies to the UK market. He recommended that such a move would also promote local entrepreneurship and could be funded by businesses who would gain from raising national technological standards.
These voices from the conservative side of British politics continue to press the government towards a more proactive approach to examining how blockchain and its related technologies can improve and update UK’s data systems at the government level.
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