Department for Science, Innovation and Technology

What did you make of the case they made?

Look, I was the first Minister of State at the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology.

and saw it being created and never thought I'd also see it being got rid of.

So a couple of points.

With other departments merged, demerged, broken up, abolished on a regular cycle.

I mean, only in the last reshuffle, the Department for Science and Technology was scrapped and its contents folded mostly into the business department.

So it's not an unusual thing when governments want to do something.

for that to happen.

He recognized the civil service.

He founded DSIT, the Department of Science and Technology Institute.

He did a great deal to try and get science and technology and maths to rewire the thinking, the education system of the country.

Great deal on AI.

We need a level of intelligent, flexible automation, and that's the bit, the p- bit of the problem we're working on at the moment.

So to that aim, we secured almost £2 million from Department of Science, Innovation and Technology for some strategic infrastructure, uh, which allowed us to build a dedicated, um, safe automation cell that's remotely operated.

So it sits in the rear yard here at MTC and allows us to do research on real end-of-life battery packs up to, you know, sort of 1,000 volt, 100 kilowatt hour, like, significant battery packs.

With the challenge explained, we headed outside to see the facility itself.

It's interesting.

I, um, I had the final interview with Peter Kyle whilst he was at DSIT before the reshuffle.

Oh, wow.

Um, and then haven't spoken to government since Burnham came into power and obviously changed things and got rid of DSIT.

Um, do you feel, do you feel that the government is across AI as much as you might want it to be? I know that's a, that's a bit of a complex question, 'cause government is layered and whatever else, and there's lots of people in Parliament who really do have a good understanding.

But that doesn't necessarily translate to policy that's always joined up.

Yeah.

Okay, here's a quick question then.

glasses are not recording your conversation.

But where I was going with that is you can't ignore it, right? And I think it was certainly very good for me to have a focus in the first couple of months on a particular really important topic, which was And UKSC had a hand with our colleagues in what was DSIT at the time in putting that plan together.

And now we're very much a part of delivering on that plan.

So I think it's a good example, Anthony, but it's not that we've been set up to be you know, 100% focused on AI.

You've got leadership that's saying this is the agenda, which you've never had before.

But the big thing that I think is exciting for us is that we're talking to, well, we were talking to DSIT, but that now doesn't exist anymore, DBIST.

It is the same thing, though.

Well, yeah, it's DBT and science innovation, technology, and trade have been smashed together to form a department.

So that's good.

That's great, because I was reading as well, something that, which you soon brought in in 2023, I think it was, was the DSIT.

And now that's been removed and gone back.

And so the parts of it were taken out of DCMS and now that's been removed and gone back into DCMS again.

We keep the 20 gigawatts at the highest level, and then we make an assumption around about 50% of the FID investments get built.

This aligns really well with the DSIT projections.

So the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology, they have their own projections for the amount of demand for compute in the United Kingdom.

So as a validation exercise, their demand is about 9.6 gigawatts.

In April, the Centre for British Progress, a think tank, uh, compared employment across 412 occupations and found that no evidence that AI has replaced jobs at scale in the UK as yet.

Now, the question is, what comes next? Now, the government published an assessment in January, uh, from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, which has since been broken up, and the AI Security Institute, uh, the government's AI testing body that we discussed in the last story.

It cited an International Monetary Fund estimate that around 70% of UK workers are in occupations containing tasks AI could perform or enhance against about 60% in the United States, and put the difference down to Britain's service-heavy economy.

About half of those workers are in roles where AI may be more likely to do the work than to assist with it.