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Thoughts from the mind of Ben Welby

Editorial illustration for "Five things I think about GDS, data and AI being split up again". A British civic quarter is shown in architectural cutaway, with government buildings, a courthouse, hospital and school above ground resting on a shared underground infrastructure representing identity, data, common platforms, interoperability, standards, procurement, service design, operational capability and leadership. While cranes visibly reorganise government buildings above, hidden foundations and connections below are shown fractured or incomplete, illustrating the argument that digital government is the invisible infrastructure that enables the state to function.

Five things I think about GDS, data and AI being split up again

July 22, 2026 / / 0 Comments

When the first briefings appeared over the weekend about abolishing the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), I decided to wait.

Machinery of Government changes have an awkward period in which the headline is certain but most of the consequential detail is not. Which teams are going where? Who owns the budgets, controls and responsibilities? Which minister is accountable? What has actually been abolished rather than renamed or moved? And what is this all supposed to make better?

The dust has not entirely settled and there is still detail to follow. But we know that the Government Digital Service (GDS) is moving into the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DDCMS). We also know that responsibility for AI is being pulled towards the new Office of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, with the Minister for AI attending Cabinet.

The reason there’s so much dust to settle is that this is more than blowing the bloody doors off.

I can’t say that bodes well.

The other reason not to dive in was that wise people were quick to say much of what needed saying.

Gavin Freeguard’s original thread and subsequent update have kept track of what is being announced. Tom Loosemore has been characteristically clear that rearranging departments is an unserious use of a government’s limited time, and about the dangers of separating AI from the platforms and data it relies on. Paola Roccuzzo’s roads and buses analogy gives the infrastructure argument to a prime minister who understands devolution. James Plunkett found a good idea within the bad one: turning digital government outwards towards places, local innovators and frontline services. Dave Rogers reflected on what happens when moving the machinery of government. Theo Blackwell asked whether failing the place test was part of DSIT’s undoing, while Sarah Munby has pointed to the hard graft involved in building the thing now being dismantled. 

Sam Freedman has offered an important counterargument to the idea that this is simply random rearrangement. His case is that Burnham has a theory of power: a stronger prime-ministerial centre, a clearer set of priorities and a deliberate attempt to put more strategic and delivery capacity under his own control.

His piece is a useful warning for me. When digital government is your hammer, a lot of things will look like nails. It would be wrong to assess the whole Burnham project through what is happening to digital, data and AI, or to treat either continuity or change as inherently good or bad.

There is continuity I welcome. I’m pleased that the work Alan Milburn has led on young people and employment is continuing. I wrote about the importance of its diagnosis in Strong branches and good shade, and I’m pleased too that Pat McFadden remains at DWP to oversee the emerging delivery of the reimagined jobs and careers service (and I assume skills brief is staying there too and is not on the move again). 

Mind you, there is continuity I am less enthusiastic about, including an effective endorsement of the Home Office’s thinking behind “earned settlement”, which left me pondering what it tells us about belonging, character, and the country we are becoming.

So, as I now join everyone else who has committed key to board, I’m trying to ask a narrower question: does an apparently serious theory of political power include a sufficiently serious theory of how an AI era state will operate?

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A cozy living space features a wooden armchair with a small device resting on its seat. To the left, a dark bench contrasts the light-coloured chair. A lush indoor plant stands nearby, and a warm lamp casts soft lighting in the room. Text in the image reads: "Whatever is nearest. Whatever is open. Whatever replies."

Whatever is nearest. Whatever is open. Whatever replies.

July 19, 2026 / / 0 Comments

On Thursday 9th July 2026 I sat in the audience for the launch of Mind’s Mental Health in the Age of AI Commission. Here are some thoughts provoked by that evening.

On the face of it, “AI and mental health” sounds like it fits neatly around a panel and a commission. In practice, it spills out of health care into a messy overlap of consumer protection, online safety, public-service design, and the raw capacity of health services. The tidy categories of policy do not hold up particularly well against the lives people actually live.

After the panel I joined a breakout group focused on regulation. The conversation flowed well and we discussed the Online Safety Act and the boundary of responsibility between users and systems; where the MHRA’s role starts and stops; how to restrain actors who have no intention of behaving well, and what to do about those who say the right things while taking unacceptable risks.

And one conclusion seems hard to avoid: AI is already part of our mental health ecosystem, whether or not the tools being used describe themselves that way.

It fills the gaps left by waiting lists. Someone might use it to prepare for a GP appointment. A conversation about employment might be rooted in the ways their mental health is a work-limiting condition. Someone who doesn’t think they’re ill enough to ask for help, is too ashamed to ask, or has asked before and had a bad experience, might well be typing instead.

So arguments about whether people should use AI for mental health are largely academic. The reality has outpaced them: people are using it.

The harder question is what happens when that use takes place through tools and services that do not think of themselves as mental health services at all. Because “AI” isn’t one thing. It ranges from regulated clinical technologies and purpose built tools to general purpose chatbots and AI embedded in services designed for something else. Their risks are not identical, but people move between them far more easily and quickly than regulation does.

Mind’s Commission begins in that blurred reality, asking how AI is changing help-seeking and support pathways, how people can be kept safe, and what it means for inequality in access and experience.

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A dimly lit restaurant kitchen features three elegantly plated dishes on a counter, each garnished and ready for service. In the background, two chefs in white uniforms are seen working, focused on their tasks amidst the bustling kitchen setup. The atmosphere is lively, with various kitchen tools and equipment visible.

When the first plates leave the pass

June 16, 2026 / / 0 Comments

There are some jobs you leave because the evening has ended.

The plates are cleared. The conversation has run its course. Someone is stacking chairs. It was good, perhaps even brilliant, but it’s clearly time to go home.

Leaving DWP has not felt like that.

The image I’ve had has been of walking out of a busy kitchen in the middle of service. Everything simmering away nicely on the stove. The ingredients good. The chefs knowing what they are doing. The smell promising. And yet, for reasons that are right and good and exciting, and of God, leaving before dinner was served.

Except that, last Monday, the metaphor shifted slightly.

Because some of the first plates are now leaving the pass.

The Prime Minister used his London Tech Week speech to announce a new AI jobs tool to help people out of work find the right jobs, create their CVs and get back into work. He was referring to the new experimental Work Hub, with its AI work assistant, CV builder, action plan, jobs board, and support for employers.

Some of this is new. Some of it is remaking things government has had around it for a long time. Some of it is very much at the start of its life. That’s why the experimental badge is important. It’s also why it’s brave. DWP has made something visible early enough for people to use it, test it, misunderstand it, criticise it and improve it.

So have a play, test it to the limits of your amusement, and maybe you’ll be pleasantly surprised, maybe you’ll learn something actively helpful.

Still, given what is being imagined for the eventual menu, this is very much the hors d’oeuvres.

But I’m no longer in the kitchen.

I’ve taken off the apron, stepped into a different kind of work, and now find myself watching the first plates appear with a strange mixture of joy, pride and longing.

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A young man and an older woman look at a community noticeboard outside a local hall. The board suggests many forms of participation beyond paid work, including local groups, volunteering, learning, care, civic activity and community support.

If less work is the dream, why does it feel like a threat?

June 1, 2026 / / 0 Comments

About a year ago I wrote about Vibe Coding, Fireworks and the Mortar of Government, back when I was first getting excited by the new art of the possible. Since then I’ve had a lot of fun with these toys, at home and at work, while learning a lot along the way.

That fun left me thinking about what it all might mean for public sector product management and how we organise our work. I’m not going to spend this post re-running the argument that sets out why more members of the multidisciplinary team can now directly shape the product, or getting excitable again about what happens when the distance between intent and something runnable collapses. If you want to read that, you can do that in The Future of (Public Sector) Product Management in a Vibe Coded World.

This post finds its origins somewhere else: in a throwaway comment someone made that, by making those arguments, I seemed to be excited for the most pessimistic future of the labour market.

I’d rather think of it as being optimistic about being pessimistic. And hopefully by the end of this you’ll see what I mean.

Because this is a post that asks what follows if the argument is even half right.

I’m not here to make any kind of prediction that all office jobs will disappear by Christmas. I am not trying to join the queue of people announcing that everything has already changed. 

But I think we should sit with a possibility.

What if AI doesn’t destroy work, but shrinks, thins or rearranges it enough to expose how much our social fabric relies on a particular framing of work in order for it to function?

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A woman in a long, patterned skirt sits on a stone bench under a large tree, while a younger man in a light-colored outfit sits next to her. They are engaged in conversation, with the tree's lush green leaves providing shade. In the background, there is a brick built church and grassy area. The scene is peaceful and inviting.

Strong branches and good shade

May 28, 2026 / / 1 Comment

A report that should arrest us

This morning Alan Milburn launched the Young people and work interim report. I tuned in to hear his speech and the follow-up Q&A, and I’d recommend you find the time not only to read the report but to listen to him speak to it.

It is arresting stuff. Not only because of the scale of the crisis being described, though the scale is staggering, and not only because of the policy detail, though there is plenty there worth wrestling with. But what especially struck me today was the moral seriousness with which Alan spoke about young people who are quietly disappearing from participation in the life of the country.

Over the last phase of my time at DWP, I shared my time between the team supporting this review and the jobs and careers service. Mine was a small contribution in the scheme of things, but enough to see at close quarters the seriousness, care and determination Alan and his team have brought to it.

It also means I am not a wholly impartial observer. I want this report, and the final report coming later in the year, to be read carefully, argued with seriously, and met with a level of response that matches the gravity of what it describes.

Because this is a report that asks important questions:

What happens to a society when more than one million young people are outside education, employment or training?

What happens when the pathways into adulthood no longer reliably function?

What happens when institutions each hold fragments of a person’s story, but nobody holds the whole?

And perhaps most importantly: what kind of country are we becoming if we learn to normalise this?

The review’s argument is not that this requires a temporary focus or a short-term policy tweak around the edges. We’ve been here before, oscillating between panic and amnesia. We briefly notice a crisis, announce something, fund something, brand something, and then move on before anything has changed.

No, the argument is that there has been a structural break in how young people move into work, confidence, belonging and adult life, and therefore structural change has to be the response. And that means harder questions to answer about institutions, relationships, participation, and the kind of social fabric that is required for young people to flourish.

This should arrest government.

But that is the minimum we should expect from a report like this.

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Here’s one weird trick that could save Keir Starmer

May 12, 2026 / / 0 Comments
Editorial illustration of UK electoral reform: an ink-splattered constituency map of the UK, breaks into coloured pieces while ballot papers flow from a cracked ballot box towards citizens gathered around discussion tables. In the background there is the Palace of Westminster and in the foreground a multi-coloured proportional seat chart suggests a more representative voting system.

I am sorry about the title.

Not very sorry, obviously. But sorry enough to acknowledge that “one weird trick” belongs more naturally beside adverts for miraculous belly-fat solutions, obscure pension loopholes, and things dentists apparently hate. And that it is not usually the hook into a conversation about democratic renewal.

Still, I think there is this weird trick available to Keir Starmer.

It is this: govern.

Govern with the majority he has to begin fixing one of the things that is most obviously, repeatedly, structurally broken in British politics. Not by avoiding disagreement. Not by finding the correct grid of announceables. Not by setting up the right combination of technocratic delivery boards. Not by locating the mythical median voter hiding somewhere between a focus group in Nuneaton and a laminated pledge card.

Govern with the majority he has to fix British politics by making votes mean something closer to what voters intend them to mean.

In other words: electoral reform.

I know. I know. Nothing says “urgent political response to last week’s electoral earthquake and this week’s leadership crisis” like constitutional reform. I know you and everyone else is crying out: at last, regional deliberative democracy methodologies.

And yet. It kind of feels like precisely the moment when you swing for the fences and you say the bigger thing.

Because the noise now is all about Starmer. Whether he can survive. Whether he should survive. Whether the speech worked. Whether the cabinet is wobbling, marching, whispering, briefing, plotting, or merely standing near a door with an unusually thoughtful expression.

This is Westminster’s favourite kind of drama, because it can be reported almost entirely through human weather. Who is up. Who is down. Who is loyal. Who is “loyal”. Who is thinking of the party. Who is thinking of the country. Who is thinking of the country in a way that it just so happens involves them becoming prime minister instead.

And some of that matters. Of course it does. Leadership matters. Judgement matters. Political authority matters. If a prime minister cannot command confidence, that is not a trivial problem.

But the problem runs deeper.

The danger is that the Labour party convinces itself that this is fundamentally a personnel issue. Change the leader, change the mood, change the story. A new face, a new operation, a new grid, a new solemn promise that lessons have been learned and listening has occurred.  

Perhaps that would help. Perhaps it would not. But I reckon the forces now swirling around Starmer would swirl around whoever succeeded him.

Because I don’t think last week’s elections were really simply a verdict on one man.

I think we’ve been getting closer to this sort of outcome for years.

The electoral map was wobbling. Now it has toppled.

Reform is no longer merely an irritation on the right of the Conservative Party. The Greens are no longer merely a place for protest votes in seats where everyone already owns a bicycle. The Liberal Democrats continue to possess their strange and enduring ability to appear locally inevitable while nationally implausible. Independents, local parties, national parties and post-party moods are all tugging at the fabric.

The country is not behaving like a two-party country.

It has not done for some time. But last week made the point harder to avoid. Voters are moving in different directions at once. They are not simply swinging neatly from red to blue or blue to red, like a polite constitutional pendulum maintained by a retired civil servant in a cardigan. They are fragmenting, protesting, experimenting, hedging, punishing, searching.

And Westminster is still trying to cram that into a machine built for a different political world.

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Title slide: "The Future of (Public Sector) Product Management in a Vibe-Coded World," authored by Ben Welby. The background features a subtle wave design, adding visual interest.

Beyond the vibes

February 26, 2026 / / 3 Comments

Last June I wrote a reflection on how vibe coding had made it possible to create some fireworks that helped bring our vision for the future of public employment support to life. In the months since, those fireworks have become a portfolio of provocatypes, and a lot of learning and a cascading number of new ideas.

And it all has the feeling of standing close to fast machinery. You’ll know what I mean if you’ve ever been to an old mill turned industrial museum where the looms are up and running. Powerful, amazing, machinery. That could absolutely rip your arm off.

It’s hard to imagine what it would have been like when Edmund Cartwright first showed off his power loom, let alone what it was like when mill after mill was filled with them and all you’d ever known was hand looms and spinning wheels.

AI-assisted delivery and the craft of confidence

But I think if you’ve spent any time with AI-assisted development tools over the last year and a bit then you’ll know what I’m talking about. Maybe you’ve only just started with the new models in the last few weeks and you’ve read Matt Shumer’s widely shared Something Big is Happening piece which says things I can absolutely identify with. Or maybe, like me, this has been a slower burn and for a while now you’ve had that intoxicating mixture of exhilaration and dizziness.

Either way, I do think we are past an inflexion point like the one that greeted the start of the 19th century: a kairos moment for digital delivery where the nature of what it is to work in digital government has changed shape.

There’s a popular term for this: vibe-coding. But as I explore in the chapter why vibe-coding matters (and what it isn’t), the phrase is really the hook, not the substance. This world where we can use natural language to describe what we want and have working software generated moments later. But there is a tension in that language. It immediately sounds like flimsy demo-ware, and like a rejection of discipline or craft.

Vibe coding: the hook, not the point

And when it comes to building services that respond to the needs of the public, vibes aren’t enough.

So some months ago now I started to try and write about what this might mean for our disciplines and our craft. It has taken me longer than I wanted, but I’m happy enough with them to publish my reflections on on what changes for product management in a vibe-coded world — and the broader argument collected at https://vc-product.wel.by/.

A small warning: it’s long. I think it deserves your time (which will be much less than the time I gave it), because it’s trying to take seriously what AI-assisted delivery changes, and what it doesn’t. So I’ve woven in links to take you into the dedicated chapters where I try and unpack each idea. You’ll see there’s breadth but that’s because the implications are broad: for how we work today, and how we’ll need to work tomorrow.

But while vibe-coding is the hook, I think we are really talking about something that needs its own name.

Andrej Karpathy, who coined the original phrase, has suggested ‘agentic engineering‘, and that’s useful because it insists that this is becoming a professional workflow: you orchestrate agents, you scrutinise output, and you keep the quality bar intact. That makes it serious rather than a good party trick.

But it’s not the frame we need when it comes to our public services.

‘Agentic engineering’ names how software gets written. But we’re grappling with how public value gets added. In government (and more than likely elsewhere too), the unit of delivery is not an individual with a clever workflow – the unit of delivery is the multidisciplinary team, and the enabling environment wrapped around it. It’s policy, ops, analysis, content, design, engineering, and their leaders getting closer to runnable reality sooner, together. That’s why in my writing I’m using AI-assisted delivery.

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What ‘earned settlement’ tells us about belonging, character, and the country we are becoming

January 14, 2026 / / 1 Comment
A decorative doormat with the word "WELCOME" is positioned in front of an open doorway. The entrance leads into a softly lit hallway featuring wooden flooring and warm lighting. Greenery is visible near the entrance, contributing to a cozy atmosphere.

Over the weekend I spent some time responding to the Home Office consultation (it closes in mid-February) on proposed changes to settlement and what it calls “earned residence”. Please engage with it. You might not agree with everything that follows but if any part of this unsettles you like it unsettled me then please share that with the government in the free text fields throughout.

I didn’t rush it. I did use ChatGPT though, not because I didn’t know what I thought, but because the free-text boxes are capped at 200 words, and I needed help saying the thing plainly, without my usual meandering. Whether you get to the end of this post or not probably determines whether you think I should be capped at 200 words more often.

Because, I’m afraid this is a long one. But it’s about something that more than likely will, in my eyes, come to define the 2024 Labour government and its oversight of our nation.

What unsettled me most wasn’t really any single proposal (many have been trailed since the new Home Secretary took up her position), but what the exercise has to say about the UK’s default setting – what we’re becoming comfortable with, what we stand for and believe in. What exactly are those “British values” some people are getting so angry about defending and proud about conveying with a flag?

Because this wasn’t a consultation that began by asking what it might mean for people to feel at home here. It didn’t start from the simple, obvious good news: that of all the countries in the world, some people choose this one to build their lives – to work, to raise children, to contribute, to belong. 

No, it began somewhere else entirely.

From the very start, settlement is framed less as recognition that the UK is going to gain because someone is making their life here, and more that our welcome must be earned through a sustained demonstration of worthiness.

Character: a decade long trial dressed up as suitability

It opens with character. Not character as formation, repair, or the slow work of becoming dependable. Character as a filter of suitability. Something you can fail; something that can add years; something that cannot be weighed against time, contribution, or changed behaviour.

And it’s worth naming the irony: character is something we are all either developing or degrading in ourselves. We’re all on a journey. We all have chapters we wish didn’t define us. So when the state chooses to make “character” into a decade-long review, it isn’t just shaping their behaviour — it is training ours. It is teaching us what we are allowed to believe about people, and how long we are allowed to withhold trust.

The test for me is quite simple: would I accept this logic if it were applied to someone I know and love, someone I’d invite to my Christmas dinner table? Not because they’re exceptional, but because they are ordinary. They’re capable of mistakes, misunderstandings, instability, bad seasons, and regret.

The system the government is imagining has little room for ordinary lives. Failure is sticky. Redemption is slow, if not forever out of reach. “Earned settlement” is less like a destination you’re looking forward to celebrating and more like the relief-filled end of a very long and exhausting trial.

This image isn’t neighbours and good friends, it’s guests and strangers. Allowed to stay but never invited to belong.

And that matters, not just morally, but socially. A society that keeps people permanently on the edge makes its own fabric brittle. If you never quite belong, how do you feel at home? And if you never feel at home, why would you invest in the place you live — emotionally, relationally, civically? The proposals fear a lack of integration, but aren’t they a recipe for exactly the detachment they claim to be preventing?

Andy and I tried to write our take on what it looks like to think Christianly about asylum under the phrase Welcoming Well. And our conclusion is that welcome is the gospel-shaped starting point; that our approach to asylum can be firm without being cruel; that borders can exist without contempt. That got written in the lead up to 2024’s general election where the previous government’s time in office had had many immigration related low points: Windrush, the hostile environment, distorted statements about migration in pursuit of Brexit, “citizens of nowhere”, the immigration health surcharge, and so on.

I had hoped a change of government might bring a change in moral imagination too. That we might step back from where we seemed to be heading. 

Those hopes have not been realised.

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A graphic featuring the British flag as the background. In the foreground, a large golden key labeled "DWP" is positioned, with green upward arrows and leaves emerging from it. Below the key, the text reads: "Could DWP be the key to unlocking the growth mission?"

Could DWP be the key to unlocking the growth mission?

September 8, 2025 / / 0 Comments

One of the first headlines I saw after Friday’s reshuffle came with a familiar and unsurprising tone. Starmer signals plan to slash benefits with tough new welfare chief. It’s probably pretty accurate. The size of the welfare budget is a serious question for any Chancellor, and it’s one that will always be a priority for the Secretary of State.

But I’m not sure the bill is what the caricature suggests. Every time it is mentioned, the same assumptions surface: that it is about idleness, about people who could work but won’t. In truth, it is much more complicated. Large numbers are still poorly after the pandemic (either because of COVID or other difficulties or delays in accessing the healthcare they need, especially that associated with mental health). Young people are struggling to enter the labour market. Carers, students, and the early retired are all folded into the same “economic inactivity” bucket. A welfare system where health-related benefits are more generous than unemployment benefits. And beneath it all, an economy that has been stagnant for years, with R&D investment consistently behind our peers.

The cost of welfare is not a story of moral weakness. It is a story about the condition of the country.

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A man in a suit smiles next to a man with long hair and a beard, wearing a robe and a hood. They stand outdoors with historical buildings in the background. The text above them reads, "What if Robert Jenrick hung out with Jesus?"

What if Robert Jenrick hung out with Jesus?

September 7, 2025 / / 1 Comment

So much of the current public discourse leaves me with a heavy heart, and Robert Jenrick’s recent interview with The Spectator is another depressing contribution. It might be worth reading the full thing because it provides important context for what follows but in short it tells a harsh story about deportations, “rudimentary prison” camps for asylum seekers, net emigration, and suspending both visas and foreign aid. It is a story of scarcity, suspicion and punishment. It doesn’t sound like justice, mercy, humility, love for neighbour, or hope for renewal. It doesn’t sound like good news.

And yet Jenrick makes a point of mentioning faith: “I do believe in God. But I’m not at church every Sunday. I take my children to church, my wife sometimes takes them to synagogue.” Faith here is less like the pearl of great price that Jesus spoke of, and more like a virtue signalling badge of pseudo-respectability.

What I don’t hear is a man who abides in the love of Christ.

But it left me thinking how extraordinary it might be if he did abide. If he found the treasure hidden in the field, if his politics and his life left people thinking about good news? Not out of some misguided Christian Nationalism and delight at the theocratic imposition of the ‘correct’ policies. No, because it would mean his own personal story would be of life lived to the full.

And why not have some better policy to go with it?

In previous posts on what makes us feel at home, on welcoming well and thinking Christianly about asylum policy, and on migration in Christian perspective, I have tried to sketch a different vision specifically when it comes to questions of immigration – one of hospitality, abundance and neighbourliness.

So I was minded to reimagine Jenrick’s words in the spirit of kingdœmocracy. You don’t need to have read the interview first but it might give you a frame of reference for the alternative. What would it sound like if a senior politician spoke not from fear but from faith? If his words reflected the overflow of love from his heart and were humbly shaped by joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control (which is what we mean when we talk about being ‘guided by the Spirit’)?

Perhaps his interview might have sounded more like this:

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