Science, Innovation and Technology Committee
15 September 2026
Contents updated on 15 Sept 2026
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Science, Innovation and Technology Committee Actual start House of Commons
Follow its sittings20:00 - 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.
21:17 - 23:30
Speaker 2
Thank you, Chair, and thank you very much to the committee for having us. That's a curveball. I wasn't expecting you to suggest that the Institute for Government had been advocating for the abolition of DSIT because we haven't. So no. And in fact, actually, the and particularly the commentary we've and analysis we've carried out since the abolition of the department, we've said that it was a mistake to get rid of it.
But we may come onto that more in in a moment. I mean, I do think where where I suppose when the then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak created the department, we are generally sort of you need to make a very good case for any machinery of government change. We've done a lot of research and again we may come onto this into how costly, disruptive, not only in the absolute cost but the opportunity costs of machinery of government changes they are. So we would generally approach any sort of stroke of the Prime Ministerial pen with a machinery of government change with a bit of skepticism. I was also personally concerned when DSIT was created that it was a it had the slight feel of a here today gone tomorrow department.
Did it have a kind of strong enough locus and sufficiently kind of hefty policy responsibilities to really establish itself in the Whitehall landscape? I think I was wrong actually in that skepticism, because partly because of Rishi Sunak's kind of personal advocacy of the department's agenda and partly because of the kind of cohesive logic of bringing science, innovation and technology together. I think the department had started to establish itself, had brought quite a lot to the kind of Whitehall party, and as I say, it was on balance, we would say it was a mistake to abolish it when the new Prime Minister came into office.
And certainly, and again, we may come onto this in more detail, the fragmentation of responsibilities for science, for artificial intelligence and so on across Whitehall departments in the new setup seems to be at least potentially problematic.
23:30 - 23:58
Speaker 1
Yes, and yes, thank you for that and thank you for clarifying that question as Institute for Government's position. And yes, I think there's always been a discussion, and particularly when it was created, about the trade-offs between having a central organization which could drive something and be focused on it, but might not have the political will in each department, and having something in so many departments which might not be able to be coordinated to actually achieve effective change. Dr. Simon Kaye, what is your view?
23:58 - 24:46
Speaker 3
Well, I agree, I think, on the whole with what Alex just said. To the extent that the DSIT department represented the product in some ways of a lot of external engagement on the part of Whitehall and the principal architects of the department seemed to engage very broadly with the wider scientific and technical community while trying to arrange it. And then even those skeptics who were outside the system at that point started to engage over the course of two, three years of really hard work emanating from that department. As Alex said, an awful lot of disruption can happen. There are always costs, opportunity costs incurred when machinery of government changes or structural changes occur.
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