Tech secretary pledges to ‘rewire Whitehall’ and plug the digital gap

The government has to create a smarter state through better digital infrastructure and make brave technology decisions.

Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) minister, Peter Kyle, told Parliament in his maiden speech that the government takes the role of digital and technology “extremely seriously”, but added that public services are stuck in the past.

Kyle praised the UK’s tech sector, but said that “as innovation has accelerated, the state has fallen further behind”.

“Every day, people in Britain are confronted with a glaring technology gap between the private sector and public services – a gap that has become impossible to ignore, between the personalised and paper-shuffling, the efficient and the inconvenient, the time-saving and the time-wasting,” he said. “That gap is not just a policy problem to solve, but one of the great progressive causes of our time.”

One of the first decisions the Labour government made when they came into power was to revamp DSIT, moving the Government Digital Service, the Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO), and the Incubator for AI (iAI) to the department.

“That transformation will not just save people time; it will save taxpayers money too. This government are under no illusions about the scale of the challenge that we face,” Kyle said.

“If we want to lay the foundations for a decade of national renewal, we must be much bolder. We need to rewire Whitehall, because technology is much more than just another sector to support or a strategic advantage to secure – it is the foundation for every one of our national missions.”

He added that the decision to create a digital powerhouse through DSIT at the centre of government was made to harness the best of government through collaborative working.

“I recognise that the challenges that we are seeking to solve with a powerful digital centre of government can work only if we provide a resource that other governments aspire to draw down on and work collaboratively on,” Kyle said.

In his speech, Kyle highlighted the advent of artificial intelligence (AI), quoting figures that adopting AI across health, education and policing could boost productivity by almost £24bn a year.

“The urgency of our task demands decisive action, because people should not have to wait for better public services. Rightly, they expect that we will fix the public finances fast,” he said, adding that the AI action plan unit created by the government, and being led by AI expert Matt Clifford, is at the centre of how to do this.

“The action plan will work out how we can make the very best use of AI to grow the economy and deliver the government’s national missions. Then we will set up the AI opportunities unit to help make the action plan’s recommendations a reality,” Kyle said.

The Labour government was recently criticised for cutting £1.8bn in AI funding, promised by the previous Conservative government. However, fielding a question by the opposition during his maiden speech, Kyle said he couldn’t cut something that didn’t exist in the first place, highlighting that while the funding had been promised by the Conservative party, the money had not been allocated.

He also highlighted the importance of safety, particularly when it comes to AI and AI regulation, and said that for the country to benefit from AI tools, the government also needs to improve its data and digital infrastructure.

“To build a smarter state, we need to build a state with digital infrastructure that is faster than ever, from the datacentres powering cutting-edge AI to the broadband connections creating opportunities for all our communities. We must also manage public sector data as a national strategic resource. For far too long, public sector data has been undervalued and underused,” he said.

Before the general election, Labour’s manifesto outlined plans for a National Data Library to bring together existing research programmes and help deliver data-enabled public services. Kyle said that the data library would “replace chaos with co-ortination and confusion with coherence”.

“With a coherent data access policy and a library and exchange service, it will transform the way we manage our public sector data. It will have a relentless focus on maximising the value of that data for public good, on growing the economy and creating new jobs, and on delivering the data-driven AI-powered public services that they deserve.”

Kyle also touched on the NHS and the Labour Party’s manifesto commitment of £480m to create a future programme for the NHS, responsible for driving innovation in the health sector. This includes a life sciences action plan, created jointly by DSIT and the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC).