Science, Innovation and Technology Committee
15 September 2026
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Science, Innovation and Technology Committee House of Commons
Follow its sittings00:13 - 01:31
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 DSIT 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 reorganizations: 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. Um, and particularly Alex Thomas, the Institute for Government was rumored to have been advocating for the abolition of DSIT for some time. Perhaps you can suggest whether that was true or not, but can't while saying whether DSIT has been effective since its creation in 2023. And then I'll come to Dr. Simon Kaye.
01:31 - 03:44
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 a moment.
I mean, I do think 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 um 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 the 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.
03:44 - 04:12
Speaker 1
Yes, since yes, thank you for that and thank you for clarifying that question as Institute for Government's position. And yes, I think there was 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?
04:12 - 06:00
Speaker 5
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, when structural changes occur.
Would I now recreate DSIT starting from where we are now? I don't think we want to hit those opportunity costs again. But more to the point, I think there is an underlying logic to the new arrangement as well. I think it represents government thinking about driving new distinctions in what is a really important cross-cutting set of questions and issues for the work of government. One's an internal versus external question.
What is government's posture to AI and technology and digital externally versus the internal development of those things? And I think you can see a kind of a departmental line being drawn between those things, rightly or wrongly. And I think there's also an opportunity versus risk question being addressed by this structure as well. One of the underlying motivations possibly of wanting to move the question of AI development into Number 10 and close to the Prime Minister and the Cabinet Office is that also brings it into closer proximity with the national security apparatus. And there are reasons why that expertise could be helpful across both of those things, as we've been hearing in recent days.