Science, Innovation and Technology Committee

15 September 2026

Committee Actual start House of Commons

20:00 - 21:17
Speaker 1
Order, order. 

And welcome to today's meeting of the freshly renamed Science and Technology Committee.  And this is our first session of this parliamentary term, and we are discussing the machinery of government changes announced before the summer recess, effectively the abolition of BEIS and its implications for the future of science, innovation and technology policy and decisions.  And we're delighted to start by welcoming two witnesses with extensive experience of previous government reorganisations: Dr Simon Kaye, who's Director of Policy and Research at Re:State, and Alex Thomas, who's Executive Director at the Institute for Government. 

And later this morning we'll hear from the scientific research community and the startup and scale-up community.  But I'm going to start by asking each of you a very simple question.  And particularly Alex Thomas, the Institute for Government was rumoured to have been advocating for the abolition of DSIT for some time.  Perhaps you can suggest whether that was true or not.  But while saying whether DSIT has been effective since its creation in 2023. 

And then I'll come to Dr Simon Kaye. 

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