Andy Burnham should think again about scrapping DSIT
Author: Peter Fortune MP
Andy Burnham hasn't even moved into Downing Street yet, and already he's reportedly drawing up plans to abolish the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. Before the removal vans arrive, someone should tell the new Prime Minister what a mistake that would be.
The idea, as reported this weekend, is to fold DSIT into a bigger business department and hand oversight of AI in the public sector to the Cabinet Secretary rather than a minister. On paper it looks like tidy Whitehall housekeeping. In practice it would strip out the one department built to give science and technology a clear, senior voice at the Cabinet table, at precisely the moment that voice matters most.
AI is not a side issue any more. It's already reshaping how the NHS diagnoses patients, how schools teach, how our defence and security services operate, and how businesses up and down the country compete for investment. Getting the policy right, on everything from safety and regulation to skills and infrastructure, needs sustained ministerial attention. Bury that inside a mega-department also responsible for business rates, employment law and industrial strategy, and technology policy will simply lose out. It always does, because the urgent crowds out the important.
It isn't only Conservatives saying this. Matt Clifford, who advised both Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer on AI, called the plan "a big mistake", warning that a reorganisation would eat up months of official time we can't spare. The Startup Coalition, which represents over a hundred British tech founders and investors, has said much the same. Even some in Mr Burnham's own party are reportedly uneasy, with one MP describing it as scrapping "the department of the future".
There's a competitiveness argument here too. Countries we're competing with for AI investment and talent, the US, France, the Gulf states, are all sharpening their focus on technology, not diluting it. Britain's edge has always been in the quality of our science base and our ability to translate research into commercial success. DeepMind is the textbook example of that pipeline working. If we want more of that, and not to become simply a subsidiary of someone else's tech industry, we need a department whose whole job is making it happen, not one competing for attention with steel and business rates.
None of this is about defending machinery of government for its own sake. Departments come and go, and DSIT itself is barely three years old. But it was created for a reason: to make sure science and technology had a proper seat at the table after years of being scattered across Whitehall. Reversing that now, just as AI moves from a talking point to the defining economic and security question of the decade, sends exactly the wrong signal to investors, researchers and the tech sector about how seriously this government takes the industries of the future.
Mr Burnham built his political career on standing up for places and industries that felt neglected by Whitehall reorganisations dreamt up with little warning. He should apply the same instinct here. There's still time, before Monday, to think again.