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The UK Government Scraps Tech
Well, that's what an outsider could be forgiven for assuming.
On Monday, the UK Government quietly abolished the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), scattering its responsibilities back across Whitehall in yet another machinery-of-government reshuffle. On paper, technology hasn't disappeared. In practice, however, Britain's dedicated department for one of its fastest-growing and most strategically important industries has.
It is difficult to imagine the optics if the government announced it was scrapping the Department of Health and folding it into the Treasury, asking Defence to compete with Transport, or expecting Defra to fight for attention alongside policing.
Yet somehow, when it comes to technology, the prevailing assumption seems to be that everything can simply be absorbed elsewhere.
Apparently, tech can.
Internationally, the timing is baffling.
Governments across the world are doubling down on technology as a strategic capability. The United States continues to invest hundreds of billions through industrial policy. The European Union is racing to strengthen its digital sovereignty. Countries across Asia and the Middle East are creating ministries, agencies and investment vehicles dedicated to AI, semiconductors, quantum and advanced research.
Britain has gone the other way. Rather than elevating technology, we've dissolved the department responsible for it.
We've seen this story before.
It's worth remembering why DSIT existed in the first place.
In 2023, it was deliberately carved out of the then Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport because the government recognised something important: technology had outgrown being treated as a subsection of culture policy. The UK's ambitions around AI, semiconductors, quantum, digital infrastructure and science demanded dedicated ministerial attention, institutional capacity and a seat at the top table.
That diagnosis wasn't wrong then, and it hasn't become less true three years later.
If anything, the opposite has happened.
AI has exploded into the mainstream. Geopolitics is increasingly shaped by compute, chips and digital sovereignty. The race for frontier models has become a matter of national competitiveness. Every major economy is investing more heavily in technology as a strategic capability.
At precisely the moment the world concluded technology deserved greater focus, Britain concluded it deserved less.
Supporters will argue that technology is now "embedded across government". It always was (Just ask anyone who’s had the pleasure of logging into a Government Microsoft teams account)
The purpose of DSIT was really there to to ensure that technology had institutional weight, ministerial focus and someone waking up every morning thinking about Britain's long-term tech competitiveness rather than squeezing another policy area into an already impossible inbox.
The politics of where GDS sits im sure matters internally, but to us at arm length is less about where it sits but what gets done. We have no doubt a reorg just increases the likelihood that more focus and time will go away from supporting British startups to win government contracts when clicking yes on that renewal of (insert big us tech company name’s) contract becomes easier to do.
Anyone who has spent more than five minutes around Whitehall knows that when responsibility is shared, accountability usually isn't.
Technology policy will now compete for ministerial attention against trade negotiations, industrial relations, steel, tariffs, manufacturing, economic growth, culture, sport, the BBC licence fee and whatever political fire happens to be burning that week in a beefed up Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade
The question isn't whether those issues matter. It's whether technology receives the focus it deserves when it becomes one priority among dozens.
There is one genuinely positive development.
Kanishka Narayan MP promotion to become the UK's first Cabinet-level AI Minister is deserved. Few people inside government understand the technology ecosystem as well, and his elevation rightly recognises the importance of AI.
But there is an irony. Kanishka now has a seat at the Cabinet table. He just arrives without a department. It's a little like being promoted to captain after someone has taken away your ship.
Yes, he'll attend Cabinet. Yes, AI now has unprecedented visibility. But influence in Whitehall has never simply been about titles. Departments bring officials, budgets, institutional memory and the machinery required to turn ministerial ambition into delivery.
Without that machinery, even the best minister will find themselves negotiating with colleagues whose departments remain intact for time, money and direction
A seat at the table matters. A seat at the table with one arm tied behind your back is something else entirely. We hope he's there to actually do stuff and not to be a signal that ai is important without actually equipping him with the arms to truly do things with ambition scale and a remit for genuine transformation
The Government has understandably placed AI front and centre.
It is transformative. It deserves ministerial attention. But the technology brief is bigger than AI.
Cybersecurity. Digital infrastructure. Semiconductors. Quantum. Telecommunications. Developer ecosystems. Open source. Gaming. Digital inclusion. Online safety. Research commercialisation. Talent. Diversity.
The UK's innovation economy cannot become a footnote to AI policy.
Nor should science.
Bringing science closer to industrial strategy has obvious advantages. Research should create jobs, companies and economic growth.
But science has never been only about commercial outcomes.
Some of humanity's greatest breakthroughs came from curiosity-driven research with no obvious commercial application at the time. Science pursued for its own sake has always mattered.
There is a danger that, by subsuming science ever further into industrial policy, we gradually redefine what science is for, how it is funded and what kinds of discovery we ultimately value.
Technology is no longer a niche sector.
The UK's digital economy contributes well over £150 billion annually and supports millions of jobs. Britain's software companies, fintech sector, cybersecurity firms, AI startups and games industry have become some of the country's strongest export stories.
Yet what is perhaps most curious is where the government appears to believe technology belongs.
Digital has once again been folded back alongside Culture, Media and Sport, as though technology is simply another cultural policy area. Reducing it to online safety whilst important feels a little short sited
That framing feels increasingly rooted in another political era.
It reflects a generation of politics where broadcast television, newspapers and radio were the dominant forces shaping public opinion.
But today's public square doesn't revolve around Channel 4 or dare even we say the BBC.
It revolves around X deciding what "free speech" means for hundreds of millions of users.
It revolves around Meta changing its content policies overnight. It revolves around TikTok's recommendation algorithm shaping culture faster than any broadcaster. It revolves around YouTube creators reaching audiences larger than many television programmes. Discord communities, Twitch streams, AI companions and online gaming worlds where millions of young people now spend their time are more important than ever. Grand Theft Auto probably influences more cultural conversations among under-30s than most current affairs or newspaper programmes ever will. .
Technology increasingly determines how culture is created, distributed, consumed and monetised. The distinction has collapsed. Which raises an obvious question.
If Digital, Culture and Media can comfortably coexist within one department, why wasn't Culture, Media and Sport absorbed into Technology?
It sounds odd but there is a logic there. Just take the Economics
The UK's technology sector contributes more than £200 billion to the economy and is collectively valued at around £1.6 trillion. By comparison, the UK's creative and cultural industries contribute an estimated £145 billion in Gross Value Added, while the sports sector contributes around £100 billion.
This isn't to diminish the importance of culture, sport or the creative industries. They matter enormously to Britain's identity, economy and soft power.
But technology is no longer simply another sector sitting alongside them. It underpins them.
Streaming platforms transformed broadcasting. Social media reshaped journalism. AI is redefining film, music and design. Game engines are used in architecture and engineering. Cloud computing powers modern media. Even elite sport is increasingly driven by data, software and artificial intelligence. So yes they make sense as bed fellows but in reality Digital within DMCS was 1/4 of the conversation. We've seen it before
Technology doesn't just support the modern economy; it increasingly determines how every other industry operates. Which is why it feels increasingly odd that Whitehall continues to treat technology as if it naturally belongs alongside things, rather than recognising it as the infrastructure on which modern culture, business and government now depend in the same way there is housing, or energy or water.
Perhaps nowhere is the uncertainty clearer than initiatives that were only just beginning.
Take the Women in Tech Taskforce.
After months of meetings, roundtables and discussion, tangible outcomes already felt difficult to identify. We genuinely wanted to be proven wrong. Sadly we haven't been. Instead, the department that convened it has disappeared.
So who owns it now? Who is accountable? Who is responsible for delivery (and what was delivery? (9 months according to their latest posts we think they were hypothecating what that even was)?
Will it continue, or quietly become another well-intentioned initiative remembered more for launch photographs than measurable change? We’d like to see the odds on Polymarket but you can imagine where our bets would go.
There is also a very practical consequence.
Across the ecosystem, organisations have spent months building relationships with ministers, officials and policy teams inside DSIT. Thankfully much of the civil service remains, but some of the chains will be broke
Most reorganisations, however frustrating they may be, are sold with a promise of.
Greater efficiency. Lower costs. Fewer layers of bureaucracy. Clearer accountability. Productivity gains.
In the private sector, reorganisations are usually driven by necessity. Markets shift, performance falters, or strategy changes, and structures are reshaped to respond. They are judged, ultimately, by outcomes: growth, profitability, competitiveness.
Whitehall reorganisations rarely face that same discipline.
In practice, (we don't even know in this instance if the strategy has changed) but it is hard to point to many that have stood a major test of time and delivered something the person on the street would recognise as a meaningful improvement. Departments are created, merged, split, and renamed, but the lived experience of government often feels much the same.
This one feels different, though not necessarily in a reassuring way.
Beyond the headlines and the departmental letterhead, it is difficult to identify what tangible problem this reorganisation actually solves. There has been little explanation of what will now happen that couldn't have happened before, only that it will happen from a different department.
It risks feeling less like reform and more like a unhelpful rebrand.
As one industry commentator rather colourfully put it, it's "same sh*t, different toilet."
Crude? Perhaps. But there is an added irony here. This was one of the rare cases where industry broadly recognised the existing setup as working well.
Which, in Whitehall terms, can sometimes feel like the perfect precondition for scrapping it.
And so we are left with the familiar pattern: all of the disruption of another reorganisation, without yet seeing a compelling explanation of what has or will actually improved. If this was about elevating the ministerial profile of AI to the cabinet table, that could have been done at far less cost
Events have been planned. Roundtables organised. Invitations sent. Partnerships developed. Now many of those conversations simply sit in limbo while responsibilities are untangled. Yes its good Kanishka is still there, however it was never a one man band, and now it feels a lot more like that.
Civil servants will understandably spend months learning new reporting lines, new ministers, new priorities and new departmental cultures. Those "shall we grab a coffee?" emails suddenly become important all over again.
None of this is the fault of the officials involved. Many have done exceptional work under difficult circumstances. At least they have practice we've seen this all before. People joke about how many Prime Ministers Britain has had in recent years.
Well, the technology brief has actually been worse. Since 2016, Britain has appointed 17 Cabinet-level secretaries across the departments responsible for technology, alongside more than 19 junior ministers with digital, tech, AI or data portfolios. The average tenure for the minister actually responsible for the day-to-day technology brief has been just 8–10 months. So we may be back here before Wimbledon next year for another lap of the merry go round.
But every Whitehall reorganisation consumes something that is rarely measured.
Momentum. Meanwhile, the world keeps moving and this week alone we've seen debates reignited around sovereign AI, open-source frontier models and China's rapid advances through systems such as Kimi K3.
One suspects those discussions are unlikely to be at the very top of the new Business Secretary's inbox this morning.
Perhaps the most telling aspect of all this has been the reaction from across the ecosystem.
Rarely does Britain's technology community from the Startup Coalition and techUK to individual founders, investors, policy experts, and even former ministers speak with one voice, but on this occasion, it largely did.
This time, it largely did.
The warnings were stark: Matt Clifford cautioned that abolishing DSIT would be "a big mistake," while the Startup Coalition described the move as "the wrong change at the wrong time."
As former ministers began to publicly question the institutional logic, a clear consensus emerged. When your own ecosystem, your advisers and many of your predecessors are all asking you not to do something, it just appears quite typical that they did.
Let’s put our faith in the idea that somehow they know better than everyone else
And then there is the obvious question.
What did this actually save and how much will it cost?
If this was about putting AI at the Cabinet table, that could have been achieved without abolishing an entire department.
If it was about efficiency, where are the efficiencies?
Because Whitehall reorganisations aren't free. They consume time, momentum and institutional knowledge before they've saved a single pound. IT reorganisaiton, Logo replacements, Terms and conditions updates. All this bureaucracy costs time and money and we know there is no magic money tree.
For a government that should be focused on productivity and growth, it feels like a costly amount of disruption for benefits that, so far, remain difficult to see.
DSIT existed for just three years. It wasn't perfect. No department is. But it represented something important. An acknowledgement that technology wasn't simply another industry to administer. It was one of the defining strategic questions facing modern Britain.
Today, that symbolism has gone. In its place is a familiar Whitehall instinct that technology can simply be folded into everything else.
Perhaps it will work.
Perhaps Kanishka Narayan's Cabinet role will prove more influential than any standalone department ever could. We sincerely hope so.
Because Britain cannot afford for technology to become an administrative afterthought while the rest of the world increasingly treats it as economic infrastructure, national security and geopolitical power.
Obituaries are normally written after something dies.
Let's hope this one turns out not to be one for uk tech.
