The UK government will bank on swapping legacy IT and juicing up on AI and the cloud to increase public sector productivity as it looks to fill a previously undisclosed £22bn hole in the UK’s finances.
Rachel Reeves has pulled the plug on a series of projects launched by the last government that she claimed were unfunded to the tune of £22bn. These include the “Advanced British Standard”, a proposed replacement for a-level exams, and a tunnel underneath Stonehenge.
More broadly, she said that government departments will be asked to look for administration budget savings of 2% and cut “non-essential spending on consultancy in 2024-25 and halve spending on consultancy from 2025-2026”.
The former is slated to save £225m this year and the same amount next year. The latter will save £550m this year, and £680m next year, which might be expected to cause some hurt to tech services suppliers.
Predictably, the government will look to technology to help it increase efficiency and secure value for money.
A document explaining the plans - Fixing the Foundation: Public Spending Audit 2024-25 – explained: “The government will create the conditions for successful digital adoption in the public sector by addressing legacy IT and utilising cloud services and data sharing.” [Labour has also pledged to make it easier for cloud providers to build data centres]
This will set the stage “to realise the opportunities of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and improve public service outcomes.” Improving data and digital infrastructure “will enable a move to more personalised public services that meet people’s needs, improving user satisfaction and efficiency.”
All of this “will transform public services by giving people more choice and control over the services they use.”
The roadmap for this is already underway, in the form of “The Artificial Intelligence Opportunities Action Plan,” announced on Friday. In addition to driving AI adoption in the public sector, the Action Plan will explore “how to build a UK AI sector that can scale and compete on the global stage.”
This is being headed up Matt Clifford, co-founder of Entrepreneur First, and the PM’s representative for last year’s Bletchley AI Safety Summit. Clifford is also chair of the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency.
