Breaking up the science department is a setback for Britain’s AI ambitions
Spreading AI across four different departments is a mistake Andy Burnham will come to regret, says Eliot Wilson
Last Tuesday, on his first full day as Prime Minister, Andy Burnham killed the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. That has set back the UK’s approach to science policy by several years, for reasons which are at best unconvincing.
Last week’s statement, in the register honed by the Starmer administration of a particularly dry textbook narrated by a hopped-up management trainee, explained that DSIT’s functions would be “redistributed to align with our core economic and social agenda, embedded as vital engines of growth exactly where they can have the most direct impact”.
What this means is that the Cabinet Office will be responsible for AI, with Kanishka Narayan as minister for AI based there and attending Cabinet, at minister of state level and no independent department. Digital transformation, inclusion and skills, information resilience and online harms moves to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and a new Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade takes charge of, well, science and innovation, to “align our science and research base directly with commercial application and job creation”. The 2023 changes have largely been reversed.
The argument is that some aspects of the former DSIT, especially AI, cannot be regarded as a discrete policy area but must run through every aspect of government. Others, like research and innovation, need to be more closely focused on the economic outcomes they help deliver.
There is a superficial logic to this, but it has the sturdiness of a house of cards. One general objection is process-based. Almost universally, Prime Ministers overestimate the benefits of machinery of government changes and significantly underestimate their cost and disruption. Dismantling and reassembling departments takes months, so it should not be entered into unadvisedly or lightly; but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly.
There is also a vaunted and mistaken belief in the ability of free-floating “overlord” ministers to coordinate policy effectively without the resources and heft of department under their control, a lesson Winston Churchill learned in the early 1950s. It has to be relearned regularly but the outcome rarely varies: only the biggest of big beasts can bend several departments to a common purpose, and 36-year-old Kanishka Narayan, a minister of state only “attending” Cabinet, is not such an animal.
There is a huge risk of disorganisation and lack of coherence. The government is making two near-contradictory arguments at once: that AI is best served by a central co-ordinating minister, whereas science, research and innovation, and digital transformation, are areas which should be securely anchored alongside other functions in separate departments rather than in a dedicated ministry of science.
‘Crackers’
Many senior figures in the field have spoken out not just to disagree with the new architecture but to condemn it in often pungent terms. Lord Vaizey of Didcot pinpointed one issue on LinkedIn.
“AI policy is now spread across four different ministers. Suppose another country wants to work with the UK on AI. Who in government do they call?”
He is hardly a lone voice. As rumours circulated that DSIT was to be broken up, techUK and the Startup Coalition jointly wrote to the Prime Minister warning that it would slow the UK’s momentum and weaken its tech leadership. Jimmy McLoughlin, a former Downing Street business director, described the idea as “absolutely CRACKERS”. Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho was still more blunt. “I’m so cross I couldn’t come in and speak – the devastation of the seriousness of the work of GDS is unforgivable.”
The scattering of science, innovation and technology has few champions outside government. Why has it happened?
The establishment of the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade – four words in a department’s title already suggest a lack of focus – reflects Burnham’s belief in government intervention in industry and the economy, as does his choice of the tepid but spendthrift Jonathan Reynolds to lead it. It is Harold Wilson’s Ministry of Technology redux, “to guide and stimulate a major national effort to bring advanced technology and new processes into the industry” (as Labour’s 1964 manifesto proclaimed).
In terms of AI, Burnham seems unsure whether this is a tool to improve the delivery of public services, or a field in which the UK can deliver economic growth and compete on the world stage. He has tried to accommodate both, and may achieve neither.
The wisdom of crowds is not always correct, but it is worth noting that, for example, Germany, France, Spain, Israel, India, South Korea, Mexico and Canada have government departments largely focused on science and innovation. To reframe Ed Vaizey’s point, it answers the research and development of Henry Kissinger’s famous but likely apocryphal question, “Who do I call if I want to call Europe?” If someone wants to engage with Whitehall on science and makes a similar inquiry, the answer can only now be “It depends what you mean by ‘science’”. In a fast-moving field where we hope to excel, that is not good enough.
Eliot Wilson is a writer and historian; senior fellow for national security at Coalition for Global Prosperity; contributing editor, Defence on the Brink