Who has said what about the abolition of DSIT?

The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee has held a hearing on the possible implications of the abolition of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), taking evidence from experts in government and civil service, the science system, and tech and start-ups.

Here, we look at who said what, and what the consensus was on how the machinery of government changes will impact on science and technology policy-making.

Government and civil service

In the first part of the session, the committee took evidence from Re:State policy director Simon Kaye and Institute for Government executive director Alex Thomas.

Thomas said that it had been a “mistake” to get rid of DSIT, with the “fragmentation” of responsibilities for science and for artificial intelligence across both the newly created Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade (BIST) and the Office for the Prime Minister being at least “potentially problematic.”

He said that his think tank would generally approach machinery of government changes with a “bit of scepticism”, and that from what he had seen around Whitehall, this particular restructure had created “concern, disappointment, and scepticism.” He warned of the administrative costs around departmental restructures – as well as the inevitable “turf wars and sharp elbows that any kind of reorganisation brings.”

For Re:State, Kaye reiterated worries about disruption, but recognised the “underlying logic” around the move, in particular in terms of ensuring that AI policy was cross-government. He also called the creation of BIST a “huge opportunity”:

“There’s the potential here for a really coherent science-to-scale pipeline of sorts, where scientific insight feeds through much more quickly into the kinds of economic advantage that will make a difference to UK PLC in the medium to long term.”

But he warned that it would be important to ensure that science policy “not be lost down the back of the sofa” in its new, larger departmental home.

Committee member Kit Malthouse professed to be “amazed” that the two witnesses appeared relaxed in the face of what he called a “catastrophe for British science.”

Thomas warned over overreaction, but said that he did feel that the abolition of DSIT meant that it would be “harder to reach a coherent set of decisions around science in government.”

Science and research

The next session saw the committee take evidence from Royal Society president Paul Nurse and Campaign for Science and Engineering (CaSE) director Alicia Greated.

Former science minister George Freeman, now a member of the committee, put it to both speakers that DSIT had felt “very much like an AI department,” suggesting that other areas of science policy – “the wet science, the harder science, the metal, the regional clusters” – had been neglected.

Paul Nurse argued that abolishing DSIT had been “quite a big mistake”:

“Science as a whole has a role throughout government, in all departments. So it’s not just business; it’s health, it’s defence, it’s transport, it’s energy, it’s environment, everything. In fact, I would say the future of our country depends upon what science can put in to all that we do.”

He said that he felt that, post-reshuffle, there was at least a Secretary of State and science minister who in his view are “genuinely trying to do the right thing.” But he expressed concerns that UK science no longer had the friends in the Treasury that it used to, and that the sector had work to do in this area:

“So somehow we have to persuade government in all parts, including the Treasury, that science really matters, that science really matters for growth and productivity, but across everything that we do, it is absolutely obvious. But it gets lost somewhere in the noise.”

His wide-ranging comments to the committee also saw him say that non-government sources of funding for innovation in the UK were currently “pretty pathetic” and needing looking at, that communication around recent STFC budget cuts had been hampered by a lack of transparency about decision-making, and that the UKRI “bucket” model had helped give the funder some much-needed energy.

CaSE director Alicia Greated felt that new BIST secretary Jonathan Reynolds had been giving some “very warm messages” so far, but flagged two main challenges with the reshuffle: the potential for further policy instability, and perceptions that basic research might be deprioritised under BIST.

She also detected a lot of focus on “national capabilities”, potentially at the expense of a vision for international collaboration:

“The UK is this little country. We need to be super clear about where we have strengths. We have to be super clear about where we want to collaborate, where we want to compete. I mean, AI is the amazing example at the moment, but there are examples right across R&D and innovation, and at the moment, I mean, the geopolitical context has changed so much… I really feel we need to position ourselves if we want to bring inward investment. We need to be super clear what our offer is.”

Tech and start-ups

The final part of the hearing looked at technology policy and the start-up landscape, with the Tony Blair Institute’s Laura Gilbert and Startup Coalition director Dom Hallas answering the committee’s questions.

Gilbert’s main worry around how the reshuffle would impact on the government’s work on AI was that new portfolios had “separated the policy and the delivery”:

“You’ve taken the frontier technology away from the people who have the best experience of going through frontier technology transformation. Recently, we’ve got a new AI taskforce in the Cabinet Office, which you know obviously Patrick Vallance will be chairing. He’s excellent, but as I read it, they don’t have any analytical capability. I don’t believe in taskforces who don’t have analytical capability.”

She also felt that the removal of DSIT meant that the government “delivery board” for science and technology no longer existed, with the different parts of each moving into silos.

Hallas spoke more positively of the “huge opportunities” from innovation policy moving to the business department, in terms of better support for the journey from R&D to business finance to growth.

“The tying-up of the business financing landscape that sits at BIST with the the science funding and R&D landscape actually is a good opportunity. Quite candidly, I think that that there’s clearly been this tension, and we speak to businesses all over the country every day... OK, so you might go and get grant funding or loan funding support from, say, Innovate UK, but it doesn’t necessarily translate to private financing once you’ve had the opportunity to build something and you know you have a functional product.”

He went on to observe that this tension was particularly acute outside of the Golden Triangle, where access to private finance was more limited.

But the Startup Coalition head endorsed many of the concerns that previous speakers had raised, such as the “crowding out” of innovation policy in a much bigger department, especially given that the department will inevitably find itself fire-fighting elsewhere.

He recognised that the new department had made an effort so far to address these kinds of concerns – but wondered how much longer this would remain the case.