The UK government thinks AI can do two-thirds of the most junior civil servants’ work

LONDON — The British government believes its least senior civil servants spend almost two-thirds of their time on routine tasks that could be automated, documents obtained by POLITICO show.

Ministers have claimed that public sector digitalization could yield £45 billion in annual productivity savings.

That rests on an assumption that 62 percent of the tasks done by the most junior grades of the civil service — administrative assistants — are routine and thus automatable.

The methodology was put together by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and obtained through Freedom of Information requests by POLITICO.

It estimates that civil service executive officers, senior executive officers, and higher executive officers spend 48 percent, 43 percent, and 23 percent of their time on routine tasks respectively, while the most senior civil servants dedicate exactly none (zero percent) of their time to routine tasks. 

Chancellor Rachel Reeves has said the government plans to cut civil service running costs by 15 percent by the end of this parliament, with 10,000 job cuts factored into that plan. Reeves told the BBC that this cost-cutting was “more than possible” thanks to advances in technology and artificial intelligence.

The modelling doesn’t forecast exactly where job losses might fall. It’s difficult to independently tease out what automation potential might mean for workforce reductions since civil service headcounts group some of these grades together, and averaging out percentages supposes an equal breakdown of roles. 

Giles Wilkes, a senior fellow at the Institute for Government think tank, said that even if AI takes over some civil service work, it might create new work, too. 

“You can’t just take a static analysis, take a whole bunch of tasks, work out how much they can be automated, and let your workings end at that point,” he said. “There’s often some kind of rebound effect, some kind of creation of new demand, that will often create further problems, further layers of management.”

“We’ve seen waves and waves of technological change over the years and we haven’t seen administrative budgets fall,” Wilkes added.

POLITICO was refused DSIT’s full model used to calculate the £45 billion estimate on the basis that it is “highly complex and forms part of a multi-stage pipeline hosted in AWS [Amazon Web Services],” the provision of which would exceed “cost and resource limits” under the Freedom of Information Act. 

DSIT said it is “currently working towards making a more accessible version of the methodology available to support transparency and understanding of the approach used” and plans to open source the model’s code in the future. 

Some MPs have argued that the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology — which made a commitment to transparency one point in its six-point blueprint for public sector reform — should have been more open about the methodology from the beginning, before ministers started quoting the £45 billion figure in public. 

Only after Select Committee Chair Chi Onwurah wrote to Secretary of State Peter Kyle in April requesting a full breakdown of the modelling did DSIT release a “methodology note” revealing there was no specific timeframe for realizing the touted savings, alongside other caveats including an acknowledgement that it hadn’t assessed whether existing AI could actually automate routine tasks.

“DSIT is doing some excellent work to improve government through the use of tech, so it’s a shame ministers are resorting to savings numberwang,” Connected by Data’s Gavin Freeguard, who led the Institute for Government’s flagship Whitehall Monitor, said. “It’s even more disappointing that it’s taken select committee enquiries and FOI requests to get any information about the methodology behind the number,” he added. 

Onwurah said the FOI findings underlined her concerns about “questionable assumptions and extrapolations” behind the methodology, and said the committee will “keep pressing ministers to be more transparent” as part of its inquiry into the digital centre of government.