While Westminster was still digesting the BritCard cancellation, Andy Burnham also abolished the department that was supposed to build it.
The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology is gone, its functions split three ways across Whitehall, and AI policy has landed in the prime minister's own office. Ten days on, the civil servants who build and run the government's digital services are still working out which building they report to.
The demolition came in Burnham's day-one "rewire government" announcement on July 20, per City AM's reporting. Science policy, UK Research and Innovation and the Sovereign AI Fund go to Jonathan Reynolds' new Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade. The Government Digital Service (GDS), cyber security, digital skills and telecoms go back to a renamed culture ministry that once again has "Digital" in its title. And AI policy, the AI Safety Institute and public-sector AI adoption move to the center: a new Office for the Prime Minister and the Cabinet under cabinet secretary Antonia Romeo, with its own AI Taskforce and a prime ministerial adviser on AI, per PublicTechnology.
Three Reorganizations In Three Years
Rishi Sunak created DSIT in 2023; Keir Starmer's government then moved GDS and the digital delivery bodies out of the Cabinet Office and into it in 2024, so the tech sector would have one department to deal with; And Burnham has now reversed the whole exercise. The House of Lords hauled ministers in less than a day after the announcement, where one peer called the reorganisation a "phenomenal waste of time" and another warned that a year lost to restructuring is a long time at the speed AI is moving, per City AM - which also reports the decision originated inside the Cabinet Office before Burnham's team signed off, and that both No 10 and DSIT declined to comment.
The reviews since have been rough even by the standards of Whitehall reshuffle coverage. The Institute for Government put it flatly: "This machinery of government change is a mistake" - one department's job now split across three, each with a far wider brief, and GDS handed back to a culture ministry after GDS already failed once to drive digital reform from outside a dedicated department. Computer Weekly's editors asked what leverage a culture ministry has over Whitehall departments that have dodged digital transformation for years. Liz Kendall, the most recent digital minister, has left government altogether.
The AI Brief Now Reports To Burnham
The taskforce, the safety institute, the prime ministerial adviser and the cross-government AI adoption mandate all sit in the new prime minister's office, which now stretches to No 10 North in Manchester, while GDS, the data plumbing and the delivery teams get posted out to departments with weaker mandates and bigger distractions. Burnham dispensed with the BritCard himself: the savings from the scrapped national digital ID programme go to cutting the tax on electricity bills, per Global Government Forum. There is an official justification for every one of these moves, and Downing Street duly supplied them, but the bottom line is that the new prime minister has killed the digital ID scheme his coalition hated, pocketed a utility-bill talking point with the savings, and taken personal custody of the one technology portfolio every government on earth currently wants...
The government's stated position is that technology and innovation belong inside the economic agenda, not fenced off in a ministry of their own. Maybe so. In the meantime Britain gets a year of desk moves in the middle of an AI buildout, run by three departments that have not yet worked out their own borders, while control of AI policy sits inside Burnham's own office.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.