Evaluative Sovereignty: The Layer Beneath the Digital Sovereignty Strategy

On 16 June 2026 the House of Commons rejected New Clause 13 to the Cyber Security and Resilience (Network and Information Systems) Bill, and with it a statutory duty to publish a Digital Sovereignty Strategy. The clause, moved by Victoria Collins MP with cross-party support, framed sovereignty around assured access to, and control over, the hardware, software, data and digital services on which critical systems depend. That framing reaches the asset and stops at it. It does not reach the evaluation those systems perform, which is where the decisions that bind citizens are increasingly formed. This note draws the distinction between ‘operational sovereignty’, control of the asset, and ‘evaluative sovereignty’, control of the evaluation, and argues that a sovereignty provision confined to the first leaves the more consequential exposure untouched. The Bill is now before the House of Lords, where it received a first reading on 17 June 2026 and awaits a second reading. Its Lords stages are the live opportunity to frame a provision that reaches both. The recommendation is a single addition, set out in section 5: any digital sovereignty duty should require the Government to identify the evaluative functions of imported systems on which public decisions depend, and to secure the capacity to reconstruct and challenge those evaluations.