The Science, Innovation and Technology Committee has questioned tech experts on the government’s plans for the digital centre of government – or the new Government Digital Service (GDS).

The committee examined the role of the new centre and whether the government’s digitisation of public services will be successful.

Earlier this month, prime minister Keir Starmer promised a potential £45bn in savings should the government get digital services right, and pledged to send teams into government departments to ensure they are utilising technology and artificial intelligence (AI).

This is part of the government’s blueprint for digital government, published in January 2025, which promises agile technology delivery, upskilling of civil servants and a focus on AI.

Giving evidence to the committee, the government’s head of AI, Laura Gilbert, said there are currently a lot of people in senior digital, data and technology (DDaT) roles in government who she would not “consider technology people”, adding, “I wouldn’t hire them”.

“It’s very difficult to hire technologists well. The way the civil service hires for this sort of role is not suitable for this sort of purpose. It’s really hit and miss,” she said, adding that having CVs with the right buzzwords and programming languages checked off doesn’t necessarily make those people the right fit for the job.

“The system doesn’t have a way to hire that assures that people [can] do the job. Until that changes, it’s going to continue to be very difficult.”

She added that to become an AI engineer in the government’s AI incubator, she puts potential hires through a four-hour coding test, testing their skills in a real scenario, while the civil service “is still doing behaviour-based interviews and trying to apply that to technical roles”.

Gilbert said she is also concerned about the prime minister’s announcement that, by 2030, one in 10 civil servants will be in a digital role.

“Will they really be digital skills? Would Google hire them? Because that’s the standard we should be going for,” she said.

The committee also questioned the potential £45bn in savings, a figure that comes from a Bain & Company report published in January 2025.

Gilbert said the methodology for coming up with those numbers “is perfectly good” but, as with everything else, it’s guesswork.

She said there is a front-loaded part where there are easy gains on quite big projects you can spin up that don’t rely on keeping legacy systems afloat, but a lot of it will be long-term projects that need people and money, and she doubts the government will ever get to a point where they can say they’ve saved exactly £45bn.

Former civil servant turned consultant Richard Pope, director of Richard Pope and Partners, added that it is “really hard to digitise an analogue service and not save money”, so there will naturally be savings.

“But projects predicated on saving money tend not to work very well for the public,” he added.

He is also concerned that the government has publicly focused too much on AI as the saviour.

“I wonder if ministers have painted themselves into the corner with AI a little bit, because it’s almost like AI has become synonymous with savings,” he said, adding that there are other digital products, services and systems that may not sound as flashy, but work well, and that to achieve the savings predicted, the government needs to use “the full scope of digital”.

Both Pope and Gilbert are concerned by the lack of clarity around what the government is trying to do in data exchange.

Pope said that in the past five years, GDS has done five different data exchange projects, and the government’s blueprint signals that another one is in the works.

Gilbert is concerned that the value around the data programmes so far has been “really low and not far-reaching”. She says the plans around the data library and data sharing need to be “really clear” on why it’s being done and what problem it is trying to solve, whether that is data exchange within government, public data, personal data, what the outcomes will be, and where the money is being spent.

“The practical implementation is very important. There is a real lack of clarity on what people are trying to do in the system,” she said.

Pope added that the new GDS needs to show that it can exercise influence across the system and focus on delivering good services for civil servants and the public, particularly getting to grips with old, end-of-life systems.

“There’s a lot of unmaintained technology the government relies on to do its job. It’s not good enough at the moment, and we obviously need to fix that. We need to do that at the same time as delivering value to the public,” he said.

While the government’s plans for digitisation focus heavily on cyber security and legacy systems, Pope said it is important to think “a bit more holistically” and focus on digital public infrastructure and what is needed to deliver what works cross-government.  

The experts also pointed out that while the remit of the new GDS is a good one, should it work, it will be difficult to get right.

Pope said that historically, GDS has been focused on citizen-facing services, as opposed to businesses and the wider economy, which has been left out.

Gilbert added that the proof will be in the implementation.

“The other thing is, how are we tracking whether it’s delivering on that remit in a way that does not involve lots of written documents and involves actual outcomes?” she said.

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