No.10 will provide "oomph" to drive speedy and consistent tech reform and use of AI across departments, Keir Starmer has said.
The prime minister said departments will not deliver the required change quickly enough without No.10’s influence.
In Starmer's speech on government reform on Thursday, where he made the surprise announcement that NHS England would be abolished, he said politicians had in the past "hidden behind vast arrays" of quangos, arm’s-length bodies and regulator reviews.
Speaking on the Institute for Government’s Inside Briefing podcast following the speech, Starmer was asked how he thinks ministers need to operate differently as part of his planned rewire of the state.
The PM said: “I think we've got to empower them to change at speed, and that requires a cultural change, because I genuinely think that most people do want change for the better, they want things to work better.
“They want to be able to make better and quick decisions. But there's an inhibition. There's a human inhibition, which is, I don't want to be the person who is responsible for this change if it all goes wrong. Among the reasons we didn't get technology into criminal justice quickly enough is because everybody was scared that they might be the person.”
He added: “So we have to empower our ministers, and through them, the teams. We have to add a bit of oomph from the centre, frankly, because when it comes to AI and tech, I'm absolutely clear in my mind that that needs to be driven from No.10, because each department is not going to do it quickly enough, and there'll be inconsistencies.
“But there needs to be a sort of clear mandate for taking decisions and getting on with it, rather than sort of walking around the problem.”
In his speech on Thursday, the PM said AI is a "golden opportunity for efficiency" and pledged to "send teams into every government department with a clear mission from me to make the state more innovative and more efficient".
One of the Labour government's first announcements was the transfer of tech bodies from the Cabinet Office to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, a move which it said would make DSIT the “digital centre of government” and “the partner and standard bearer for government departments as it supports them to use technology across areas like energy, health, policing, and education”.
In the IfG interview, Starmer also said politicians are mostly to blame for blocking change rather than civil servants.
"It isn't about blaming civil servants, actually, because the layers of bureaucracy pushing things out to arms length, bodies, reviews, consultations, that actually all comes from politicians, and it usually comes from politicians who don't really want to take a decision," Starmer said. "If you're not prepared to take a substantive decision, the easiest thing in the world is to say, let's put it into a process. That's amongst the things that we're just ending now."
Starmer 'must get a grip on comms'
In the same podcast, former cabinet secretary Gus O'Donnell criticised Starmer's management of the messaging around his reform plans.
"My God, he's mishandled the communications on this terribly," O'Donnell said.
"Now the one thing he's got to do is get a grip on his internal media machine. Because, starting off with like the tepid bath or whatever it was of managed decline, and [now] project chainsaw, you are really, really offending civil servants."
He added: "And actually, I really don't think he wants to do that. He talked about brilliant civil servants. I know him. That's not where he is. So he's got to, and I can say this, as the former press secretary, align what he really wants to do with the messages that are going out there. So he's got to get a grip on the media machine that is trying to pretend that he's some kind of Elon Musk that is just not helpful for anybody."
Asked about these criticisms, the prime minister’s deputy spokesperson said Starmer was focused on “an active, agile and productive state that works for working people”.