Labour announces plans to overhaul digital government

The UK government has announced wide-ranging plans to overhaul the way technology is funded, implemented and acquired across the public sector to accelerate the development of digital services to benefit citizens.

The Government Digital Service (GDS) will be expanded, a new commercial function is being established, and HM Treasury is to “experiment” with more modern ways of budgeting for the introduction and ongoing spend on technology.

Several new artificial intelligence (AI) tools will also be launched to support civil servants with the aim of speeding up decision-making across Whitehall.

“Sluggish technology has hampered our public services for too long, and it’s costing us all a fortune in time and money,” said Peter Kyle, secretary of state at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT).

“We will use technology to bear down hard to the nonsensical approach the public sector takes to sharing information and working together to help the people it serves. We will also end delays businesses face when they are applying for licences or permits, when they just want to get on with the task in hand – growth. This is just the start.”

GDS is to be re-merged with the Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO) which was split away from GDS by the previous Conservative government in 2021. Two other teams, the Incubator for AI and the Geospatial Commission, will also become part of GDS. Each of those organisations were brought under control of DSIT after Labour won the 2024 general election.

A new government chief digital officer will be recruited, responsible for the digital profession across Whitehall. The previous holder of the post, Mike Potter, left in September last year amid speculation that GDS and the CDDO – which he led – were to be brought back together.

Kyle will today launch a new “blueprint for a modern digital government” targeting £45bn in productivity savings across the public sector, which will “do away with insensitive and antiquated processes that have been holding this country back for too long”, according to DSIT.

A Digital Commercial Centre of Excellence will be set up to overhaul management of the £23bn annual government spend on technology. Its remit will extend into local authorities, for example by enabling councils to negotiate contracts jointly to save money, as well as opening up more opportunities for tech startups and scaleups to win contracts from government.

The Treasury will “experiment with a new approach that recognises how modern technology works” – although few details were included in the DSIT announcement, it appears to suggest that budgeting for digital services will take a more agile, iterative approach, instead of the traditional upfront spending followed by smaller annual maintenance costs. Such an approach has been called for by digital government experts for many years.

DSIT will introduce a “framework for finding and buying AI solutions” aimed at making sure small projects can happen quickly as well as addressing barriers to using AI at scale.

The blueprint will also introduce mandatory rules for public bodies to publish application programming interfaces (APIs) to enable and improve data sharing across government – a move that was first proposed as a long ago as 2010 by government digital advisor Martha Lane Fox.

DSIT is also launching a set of internally developed AI-based tools intended to support the work of civil servants – which are being branded under the name “Humphrey”, a reference to the fictional civil service chief Sir Humphrey Appleby from the former BBC TV comedy Yes, Minister.

Humphrey will offer applications including:

• Consult, which analyses responses to government consultations to present policy makers with interactive dashboards to explore what the public said.
• Parlex, which helps civil servants search and analyse Hansard texts of debates from the Houses of Parliament.
• Minute, a secure AI transcription service for meetings, producing customisable summaries in formats required by public servants.
• Redbox, a generative AI tool to help with day-to-day tasks, such as summarising policy and preparing briefings.
• Lex, which analyses and summarises relevant laws.

Other initiatives announced by DSIT include a Technical Design Council, a Responsible AI Advisory Panel, and a review of salaries for digital experts employed in the public sector, in the hope of making tech jobs more competitive with the private sector.

Last week, prime minister Keir Starmer announced an AI action plan for government, highlighting new policies and opportunities for using AI to support economic growth and improve public services.

More details will be published alongside the Spending Review in the summer, including priorities for the use of technology across government and a Digital and AI Roadmap.

“My department will put AI to work, speeding up our ability to deliver our Plan for Change, improve lives and drive growth,” said Kyle.

Work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall added: “Outdated technology is holding us back. Sluggish manual processes mean people don’t get the help they need quickly enough. That’s why we want to use the latest AI technologies to bring Jobcentres into the 21st century, giving our brilliant staff the tools they need to offer more personalised services to jobseekers.”

The latest announcements follow the publication by DSIT of a study into the state of digital government, written by external consultants from Bain & Company, which identified £45bn of potential savings through better use of technology by government – including £14.5bn spent on external consultants, a figure estimated to be three times higher than if civil servants were to do the same IT jobs.

The study also said a quarter of IT systems used by central government are outdated, leading to huge maintenance costs, estimated at three to four times more money than if the technology was kept up to date.

An April 2024 report from the Public Accounts Committee of MPs highlighted “significant issues with ageing IT systems” and called on government to stop making the same mistakes when it came to upgrading legacy IT.

The digital blueprint is the Labour government’s first major attempt to overhaul the delivery of technology across the public sector. Under the Conservative government, numerous digital strategies were published between 2010 and 2022, each promising to improve digital public services, address legacy IT issues, cut costs and modernise government.