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Wed 26 Mar 2025
Efforts to improve the efficiency of Britain’s civil service through the use of AI is threatened by poor-quality public data and outdated legacy systems, MPs on the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) have warned.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer has said he wants to improve public services while reducing the size of the workforce through the use of AI solutions.
But the committee found that 21 out of 72 “high-risk” legacy systems still lack the funding needed to update them, which has the knock-on effect of making them more difficult to implement AI technologies into.
Meanwhile, the public has low trust in the government’s potential usage of AI, partly due to a lack of transparency about algorithm-assisted decision-making.
There is also a severe lack of digital skills, with 70% of government bodies reporting difficulties in recruiting and retaining AI-skilled staff. Thus far, half of civil service digital roles remain unfilled in 2025.
Earlier this month, Starmer set out proposals to recruit 2,000 technology apprentices to “turbo charge” the take-up of AI in Whitehall in the hope that departments could be modernised at speed.
However, the government’s AI procurement efforts have struggled to keep pace with market forces. There are concerns that public bodies could be subject to vendor lock-in where dominance by just a few large tech companies risks stifling competition and innovation.
Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown MP, chair of the committee, said: “The government has said it wants to mainline AI into the veins of the nation, but our report raises questions over whether the public sector is ready for such a procedure.
“The ambition to harness the potential of one of the most significant technological developments of modern times is of course to be welcomed. Unfortunately, those familiar with our committee’s past scrutiny of the government’s frankly sclerotic digital architecture will know that any promises of sudden transformation are for the birds.”
Earlier this month, science and technology minister Peter Kyle warned that the headcount of the civil service “will go down” once AI is up and running in government departments.
The civil service is planning to introduce an AI toolset for its employees later this year named ‘Humphrey’. The tool will help take large amounts of information and summarise it in a more digestible format. However, it is not clear how many people in total are working on the project, nor which third-party tools – such as large language models – are being used.
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