The UK Government has today vowed to ‘put AI to work’ with the launch of new digital assistants to help drive civil service efficiencies.

A bundle of AI-powered tools, named ‘Humphrey’ after the fictional Whitehall official made famous in BBC drama ‘Yes, Minister’, aims to streamline public services, eliminate delays through improved data sharing, and reduce costs.

The development is part of a range of measures that will help deliver on the Prime Minister’s Plan for Change, under a shake up that changes how government experiments with, buys and builds new tech.

The package of reforms aims to modernise tech and deliver better public services to set the country on course for a ‘decade of national renewal’.

This follows a review which found that the government inherited a ‘dire system’ which over relies on ways of communicating that should be left in the last century – with HMRC taking 100,000 calls a day and DVLA processing 45,000 letters.

Technology secretary Peter Kyle said he wants his department – DSIT – to become the ‘digital centre of government’ to overhaul digital services and target £45 billion in productivity savings every year.

He said: “Sluggish technology has hampered our public services for too long, and it’s costing us all a fortune in time and money.

“Not to mention the headaches and stresses we’re left with after being put on hold or forced to take a trip to fill out a form. My department will put AI to work, speeding up our ability to deliver our Plan for Change, improve lives and drive growth.

“We will use technology to bear down hard to the nonsensical approach the public sector takes to sharing information and working together to help the people it serves. We will also end delays businesses face when they are applying for licenses or permits, when they just want to get on with the task in hand – growth. This is just the start.”

The Government pledged to do away with ‘insensitive and antiquated’ processes, including scrapping the need for people to queue at the local council to register the death of a loved one, and doing away with the need to post an advert in your local paper if you want to buy a lorry.

Another development will be ‘Consult’, a tool in the Humphrey package which analyses the thousands of responses any government consultation might receive in hours, before presenting policymakers and experts with interactive dashboards to explore what the public are saying directly.

Currently, this process is outsourced to consultants and analysts who can take months to consolidate responses, before billing the taxpayer around £100,000 every time.

Parlex will be another tool to help policymakers search through and analyse decades of debate from the Houses of Parliament, so they can shape their thinking and better manage bills through the Commons and the Lords. Minute: a secure AI transcription service for meetings, will produce customisable summaries in the formats that public servants need. It is currently being used by multiple central departments in meetings with ministers and is in trials with local councils.

Redbox, a generative AI tool designed specifically to help civil servants with day-to-day tasks, like summarising policy and preparing briefings, will also be introduced along with Lex, a tool which helps officials research the law by providing analysis and summarisation of relevant laws for specific, complex issues.

On data, the Government will also apply a ‘common-sense’ approach to sharing information, which could help central government departments, like HMRC and the Department for Business and Trade, share data with each other and local councils more seamlessly to crack down on fraud and get businesses the help they need to grow.

The developments followed the publication last week of the AI Opportunities Action Plan, which aims to position the UK as an ‘AI superpower’ – and has attracted over £14 billion in investment since being launched last Monday.

The changes will see a new team, housed in the Department for Science, Technology and Innovation (DSIT), cut across Whitehall barriers to join up public services, so people do not have to tell dozens of organisations the same thing, and training programmes to help civil service technologists become AI engineers.

The blueprint for a modern digital government, published today, sets out how the government will also overhaul how it delivers digital services and spends £23 billion a year on technology starting with a Digital Commercial Centre of Excellence.

This will look at how public sector organisations, like local councils, can negotiate costly contracts together to save money, and open opportunities for smaller UK start-ups and scale-ups to drive economic growth and create jobs as part of the Prime Minister’s Plan for Change.

According to the blueprint, five priority areas of focus will be worked on as ‘kickstarters’ during the next six months. They are:

  • A beta GOV.UK App and GOV.UK Wallet, enabling more personalised user experiences, verifiable digital credentials, and next-generation public services.
  • Collaborations with organisations across the public sector, supporting the government’s goal to Get Britain Working, by piloting improvements on how we can better manage a long-term health condition or disability.
  • Piloting GOV.UK Chat, an LLM-powered chat user interface for GOV.UK that resolves complex queries using natural language in seconds, providing targeted support to and reducing friction for businesses and business users. Marking our shift to better support businesses and growth in the new digital centre, we also see this as a good way of demonstrating responsible use of AI in digital public services.
  • Launching a new AI accelerator upskilling programme, helping digital professionals to become machine learning engineers. This will deliver important new AI expertise in leading government departments. 
  • Launching a new cross-government vulnerability scanning service, so that we can find and address weaknesses in our systems and services. This work is vital in ensuring our infrastructure is resilient and is a step towards better securing it against threats.

Structural changes will also be made. Under the plan, the Government Digital Service and the Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO), will be brought back together, ‘reducing duplication and ensuring a clear single place for departments and other public sector organisations to go to’.

The expanded Government Digital Service will be led by the Government Chief Digital Officer, who will be installed in post soon following the departure of Mike Potter last summer. It will be a distinct unit within DSIT, unifying existing teams across GDS, CDDO, the Incubator for Artificial Intelligence (i.AI), Geospatial Commission and parts of the Responsible Tech Adoption Unit into one organisation.

The aim of the restructuring is to ‘catalyse joined-up delivery in line with the government’s missions, to drive better services that cut across organisational and functional boundaries and different levels of government, and that serve businesses as well as individuals to improve people’s experience of government.

‘That will require us to serve and connect the wider public sector, starting with targeted support for local government and the NHS, and eventually reaching approximately 100,000 digital and data professionals across the public sector,’ the document states.