At the beginning of last year, the UK government was riding high in its first term, having swept to power the previous July. It wasted no time making bold claims: publicly funded services, including the NHS, local councils, and central government were missing out on a potential £45 billion ($55 billion) in productivity savings due to outdated or poorly used technology. To tackle these issues, Peter Kyle, the then Technology Secretary, promised "digital tools, AI and common sense to overhaul public sector technology – so it saves money, treats people with respect, and just makes sense."It was barely 18 months ago, yet everything seems so different: for the government and its digital strategy. Last week, the House of Commons' Science, Innovation and Technology Committee (SITC) named the £45 billion figure as an example of minister-led hype that undermines, rather than boosts, efforts to make the public sector more effective and efficient with digital technologies.
The committee said hype represented "overly optimistic projections" that could affect the government's ambitions.
Having apparently swallowed a tech vendor slide deck in one mouthful, the government had already claimed its £45 billion saving figure – between 4 and 7 percent of public sector spending – "could be achieved through full potential digitization of public sector services… [through] process simplification, AI-driven automation of manual tasks, greater availability, adoption of low-cost digital channels and reduced fraud through compliance automation."However, as The Register has already reported, others were much more skeptical. In October last year, Nick Davies, programme director at the Institute for Government, said the figure was a "huge amount, given that most of what government is spending on is either salaries or is on different kinds of infrastructure." He pointed out there was a huge difference between productivity improvements – making services better with the same spending – and cashable savings. "There is certainly a kind of inefficiency, duplicative spending across the public sector that you could spend more effectively, but without knowing more about where that £45 billion comes from, it's harder to say," he said. The problem of hype is far from new, and does not belong solely to the Labour government. In 2018, when the Conservatives were in power, the government promised a "tech revolution is coming to the NHS." The "vision" was designed to create a modern tech architecture to underpin a new generation of digital services.Two years after it began, that NHS digitization strategy still had no implementation plan and risked repeating the UK health service's legendary IT failures, according to a report from the Public Accounts Committee (PAC). It said the NHS should urgently publish a detailed plan describing how it aims to meet its ambitions for transforming digital services."Without a proper implementation plan, the [government] cannot be sure that the £8.1 billion of taxpayers' money being invested in the digital transformation programme will deliver value for money," said the parliamentary watchdog. The government's latest plans for digital savings underscore how dangerous hype can be. The government's "estimate that the digitization of public services could deliver an annual saving of £45 billion is worryingly optimistic. While assumptions are an unavoidable part of economic projections, hyperbole diminishes the case for change," the parliamentary report said.
