Evaluative Sovereignty: Reviewability and the Constitutional Limits of a Digital Sovereignty Strategy

Debate on digital sovereignty has settled on a single axis: who owns and runs the systems on which critical services depend, and whether they can be kept running under pressure. The defeat of New Clause 13 to the Cyber Security and Resilience (Network and Information Systems) Bill on 16 June 2026, and with it a statutory Digital Sovereignty Strategy, was a defeat on that axis alone. This paper draws a second axis, ‘evaluative sovereignty’, the control of the evaluation a system performs rather than the asset it runs on, and argues that a sovereignty strategy confined to the first leaves the more consequential exposure untouched. That exposure is constitutional. The rule of law requires that a consequential exercise of public power over a person remain capable of reconstruction and challenge, and a sealed evaluative layer can withdraw a binding decision from effective review in practical effect, leaving the court's jurisdiction formally intact and the statute book untouched. The deficit is not hypothetical: it has been realised in the Dutch SyRI and childcare-benefit cases and in the United Kingdom's own automated welfare-risk systems. None of the instruments now in view reaches it, neither pre-deployment audit nor the asset-focused work of procurement and a strategy duty, and the sovereign-funding posture can work against it. What evaluative sovereignty requires is an ‘answerability occasion’: a defined point at which a consequential evaluation can be reconstructed and challenged before a forum the deploying authority can answer to and the affected person can invoke. The Bill’s Lords stages are the live opportunity to provide for it.