Digital Economy Dispatch #288 -- How to Rewire the State

A government select committee report is not the kind of document most people read for pleasure. It is the kind you read because something in it matters. So, I’ll admit to a particular satisfaction in finding my own argument quoted back at me from the House of Commons, in the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee's first report of this session, Rewiring the state: Delivering digital government, published on 3rd June.

For readers outside the UK, a Commons select committee is a cross-party group of MPs that scrutinises a government department and takes evidence from witnesses before publishing its findings. Its recommendations carry real political weight but no legal force, and the government is obliged to respond, usually within sixty days.

In the chapter on sovereignty, the committee records that "Professor Alan Brown of the University of Exeter has argued that, when it comes to technology procurement, the UK should treat open source and open-weight models as first-class options, with evaluation criteria that credit them for the strategic flexibility they preserve." The footnote points to my Computer Weekly piece, the one whose subtitle is the core message of Making AI Work for Britain: consolidate demand, diversify supply.

The citation is gratifying. But it is not the interesting part. The interesting part is that a cross-party committee, working from its own evidence sessions and its own witnesses, has arrived at almost exactly the diagnosis the book sets out. When the analysis you have been making from the outside starts appearing in the language of parliamentary scrutiny, something has shifted in the centre of gravity of the debate.

What the Committee Actually Said

The report is built on a simple structure: four building blocks that successful digital government requires, and four barriers that currently stand in the way.

The building blocks are money, people, information, data security, and delivery. On each, the verdict is roughly the same. The government has a vision and the beginnings of the right machinery, but it cannot tell you what it spends, cannot get enough skilled people into the roles that matter, has not held itself to the data security standards public trust requires, and has produced a roadmap with no overarching metrics by which delivery can be judged. The committee is blunt about the last of these: publishing the roadmap as an ordinary web page rather than as a formal document laid before Parliament, it notes, conveniently allows the government to revise its commitments quietly, without the alerts that would let anyone hold it to account.

The four barriers are where the report sharpens into an argument. The first is hype. The committee takes the government's own headline claim, drawn from its January 2025 State of digital government review, that digitisation could save £45 billion a year, and calls it "worryingly optimistic", pointing out that the figure rests on an assumption that all routine tasks and a tenth of non-routine ones can be automated. The second is legacy systems, where the central scandal is not cost but ignorance: the government still does not know the full scale of what it is running. The third is vendor lock-in, much discussed in recent years but with little to show for it. The fourth is sovereignty. These last two are where my work sits, and where the committee's conclusions are most striking.

On lock-in, the report names names. Palantir concerns the committee most, and it recommends that the government commit to exercising the February 2027 break clause in the NHS Federated Data Platform contract, the £330 million system that holds and connects patient data, and publish a fully costed exit plan by the end of this year. It wants reasons for the £240 million Ministry of Defence contract awarded to Palantir in December without a competitive tender. It points to Amazon Web Services as the sole bidder for a ten-year, £472 million HMRC contract, and to the Competition and Markets Authority's estimate that Microsoft and AWS together hold between 60 and 80 per cent of the UK cloud infrastructure market.

Its remedy is structural rather than rhetorical: a strategy from the Government Digital Service, the unit at the centre of government charged with digital reform, to end lock-in, with supplier diversification targets reported quarterly; a cloud consumption dashboard that publishes contract values, break clauses and licensing terms; a requirement that public bodies prioritise open-source tools through the planned update to the Procurement Act; and a minimum share of procurement budgets directed to UK start-ups and small and medium-sized firms.

On sovereignty, the committee is equally direct. Reliance on a handful of US providers is, in its words, a strategic and economic vulnerability, one that could see the government's ambitions derailed by a decision taken outside our shores. It wants a working definition of technology sovereignty, reviewed annually, and a strategy with stretching targets for sovereign and open-source alternatives.

The Committee Reached the Same Conclusions as My Book

Strip away the parliamentary tone, and the recommendations are the framework I have been arguing for, almost line by line.

Consolidate demand, diversify supply is precisely what a cloud dashboard plus an all-of-government contract plus supplier diversification targets amounts to: aggregate the buying power, then deliberately spread the risk. The costed exit plan for the FDP is exit-by-design made concrete, the recognition that the time to plan your departure from a supplier is before you are dependent on them, not after. The committee's concerns that the government is "worryingly comfortable" with its dependencies is silent lock-in described from the inside. And treating open source as a first-class procurement option, the specific point for which I am cited, is the smart-buyer model applied to the one decision that determines everything downstream.

This is not a coincidence so much as convergence. The argument I’ve been making has moved from contested to mainstream, and a committee with no particular reason to flatter me has put it on the record.

The Blind Spot in the Report

But there is a critical complication. For all its diagnostic sharpness, the report has the very weakness it identifies in government. It is strong on what and conspicuously lighter on how.

A select committee shines a light. It does not deliver. Its recommendations carry no legal force, and the government's track record on adopting committee recommendations is, to put it gently, mixed. There is a deeper irony, too. The committee rightly criticises the government for a £45 billion figure unsupported by a credible delivery path. Yet a report calling for an exit plan, a sovereignty strategy, a workforce strategy, a legacy taskforce and a re-engineered cloud market, all at once, risks the same charge it levels at others: an ambitious destination with no costed route. The committee even warns, quoting its own witnesses, against the temptation to "boil the ocean". The recommendations, taken together, come close to asking the government to do exactly that.

So, the right response is neither triumph nor cynicism. The diagnosis is now a consensus, which is real progress and was not true even two years ago. The open question is the one my book keeps returning to, and the one I summarised after reviewing the government's record against my own 25 recommendations: vigorous activity, but no completion.

The work that matters now is not making the case. That case is increasingly won. It is building the delivery discipline, the metrics, and the follow-through that turn a sound diagnosis into a working state. That is harder, less glamorous, and far easier to abandon when the next priority arrives.

For digital leaders, this raises an important question: When the government responds to this report, as it must and conventionally does within about sixty days, what would count as evidence that it has accepted the diagnosis rather than merely acknowledged it?

My own answer is simple: a costed FDP exit plan by December, and a sovereignty definition you can actually hold a department to. I will be watching for both and tracking them on UK AI Watch. I hope you’ll be watching too.