Robots at No 10: Keir Starmer forges ahead with AI to ‘rewire’ the state

Earlier this year Morgan McSweeney, the prime minister’s chief of staff, launched an “AI ideas” competition in Whitehall. His aim was to find the brightest and best from the civil service and beyond to help deliver Keir Starmer’s promise to “rewire” the state.

It was reminiscent of Dominic Cummings’s efforts to bring fresh thinking to Downing Street – although McSweeney prefers to talk about “disrupters and innovators” rather than “misfits and weirdos”.

The sifting process was surprisingly easy. Only 10 of the 1,500 officials who took part in the contest passed the maths test. They have been invited to a hackathon in No 10, where they will tackle a range of real government challenges. The successful candidates will join a new cadre of 20 “innovation fellows”, external tech experts brought in to join the Downing Street data science team, known as “10 DS”.

The first of them starts this week, charged with reinventing how the government works. “Now is the time for radicalism,” a No 10 source says. “People want change. The most effective way of doing that is by reforming how the government works at the centre.” Starmer is, a senior figure says, a “true believer” in the transformative power of AI and data analytics.

As the economy flatlines and Donald Trump’s tariffs hit the prospects of future growth, the prime minister is convinced technology is the only way to square the circle of governing with dwindling resources and rising demand.

As director of public prosecutions, he replaced paper documents with digital files. Now he wants to use AI to drive productivity gains and humanise the delivery of public services. Starmer tells anyone who will listen about the wonders of software that can automatically transcribe interviews by social workers, doctors or probation officers and turn the text into a report, freeing up staff to concentrate on helping the people in their care.

There is a growing sense of impatience at the centre of government. Hit squads are being sent  across Whitehall to identify savings and improvements that could be delivered by tech. One team cross-checked data from the Department for Work and Pensions and HM Revenue and Customs and found a way to claw back more than £1bn in mispayment and fraud.

The next target is the £40bn “tax gap” between the total theoretical tax liabilities and the actual tax collected. “We are looking at merging or combining data sets and using AI to identify people who are paying less than they ought,” a source said.

Sceptics point out the ­government first needs to ensure hospitals and prisons have functioning computers. One cabinet minister jokes “rewiring Whitehall” is like opening “the box of wires in your house that no one knows where they go”.

There is a long history of failed and expensive government IT projects, and a lack of procurement expertise in Whitehall, but the hope in No 10 is that technology can rebalance the relationship between the citizen and the state, offering a practical answer to populism by allowing people to “take back control” of services. The average adult in the UK spends the equivalent of 10 days a year dealing with government bureaucracy, according to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT). Someone moving house needs to contact 10 organisations. Every day, HMRC handles 100,000 telephone calls and DVLA 45,000 letters.

Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, was convinced of the need for radical change when she tried to amend the address on her driving licence after moving to Downing Street and found she had to physically go to a post office. Aides persuaded her that there were better uses of her time than waiting in a queue to hand in a form, so she sent her husband (Nick Joicey, group chief operating officer at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) instead. The spending review in June will include a substantial allocation for new technology.

When Demis Hassabis, founder of Google DeepMind, addressed the cabinet in November, he told ministers AI could make the public sector 10 times more efficient in certain areas. The DSIT estimates the productivity gains could be worth up to £45bn a year. “Even if it generated a tenth of that, it would still be significant,” one adviser said.

In Estonia, where 99% of government services are delivered online, digital ID cards are estimated to save the state about 2% of GDP, equivalent to more than £50bn in the UK. Pioneers are already reaping the benefits of innovation. In London, Chelsea and Westminster hospital slashed its waiting list for elective surgery by a third by replacing spreadsheets with a unified data platform. In Huddersfield, AI scanners have cut the time it takes to detect lung cancer from seven days to seven seconds.

Teacher workload has been reduced by an average of three hours a week by Oak Academy’s AI lesson-planning tool. Bedfordshire police have introduced technology that has cut the time taken to produce a suspect profile by 80%. A separate AI tool redacts personal data in documents before they are sent to the Crown Prosecution Service. The College of Policing estimates that if the redaction software were adopted nationwide, it would save about 7.5m policing hours a year, equivalent to more than 4,000 full-time officers.

One government adviser says: “This isn’t pie in the sky. It is happening. But we have too many things that are working that haven’t been scaled. There needs to be organisational and political will.” Around the cabinet table, ministers compete to show off their latest AI initiative, but there is resistance in parts of Whitehall. By 2030 one in 10 civil servants will work in tech or digital roles and the traditionalists are nervous. Despite the chancellor’s enthusiasm, some Treasury officials are doubtful of potential savings and worried about the upfront costs needed to get basic IT infrastructure in place.

There is also a more political dimension to the tensions. One minister describes the Home Office as “the roadblock to reform” and “the place where good ideas go to die”. Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, is the main – maybe the only – opponent in the cabinet to the introduction of a universal digital ID system. Some think it is down to her department’s mindset.

“The prime minister is quite happy to take well-calibrated risk and is pushing ministers and officials to look for the upside of technology,” an influential insider says. “The Home Office is a department geared, culturally and institutionally, to risk management and focusing on what could go wrong.”

Others see the tensions through the prism of Labour history. “Tony Blair has been pushing this tech agenda and it’s the supporters of Gordon Brown in government who are the most resistant to change,” according to a source. “It’s back to the TB-GBs.”

Starmer prefers to look further back to Harold Wilson, who promised to channel the “white heat of technology” in No 10. When the prime minister visited Washington in February, he went straight from the White House to the offices of Palantir, the technology company founded by libertarian Trump supporter Peter Thiel.

Having navigated the foyer’s life-size model of the Star Wars character Chewbacca, Starmer, accompanied by Jonathan Powell, his national security adviser, and Lord Mandelson, the British ambassador to Washington, sat down with Alex Karp, Palantir’s chief executive. Karp had brought in a blue and white china teaset from home for his British guests. Offered the choice of loose-leaf Assam in a pot or PG tips in a mug, Starmer opted for the tea bag. There was a briefing about the company’s military expertise.

Then, while Powell and Mandelson put on virtual reality headsets to join a simulation of an air strike, the prime minister was talked through Palantir’s extensive work for the NHS, the police and the Ministry of Defence.

It was a vivid reminder that the AI revolution in government is going to rely on collaboration between the public and private sector that will at times be controversial.

A power struggle is under way. Thiel once wrote: “We are in a deadly race between politics and technology.” In his view, freedom was no longer compatible with democracy and it was only through technology that individuals could be liberated. His philosophy has been adopted by Elon Musk who has sought to undermine elected governments on social media and slash the state through the US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). By contrast, Starmer sees AI as a way to beef up and buttress the public sector.

One Downing Street source says: “DOGE is a wake-up call. You can use tech to take a chainsaw to the state or you can use it to strengthen the state.”