Category: Work (Page 1 of 9)

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

July 22, 2026 / Benjamin Welby / 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?

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 / Benjamin Welby / 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.

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 / Benjamin Welby / 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.

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 / Benjamin Welby / 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?

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 / Benjamin Welby / 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.

Beyond the screens: Can an omnichannel approach make digital public services more human?

June 11, 2025 / Benjamin Welby / 3 Comments

The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) is currently doing a piece of work to develop an omnichannel framework for public services across the EU. A week ago I joined a workshop alongside people from the OECD, Portugal, Sweden and Denmark.

It’s a topic close to my heart. Beyond my years learning from the best at GDS I was fortunate in shaping the OECD’s Framework for Service Design and Delivery that was developed during this research in Chile, summarised in this Going Digital Toolkit Note and further embedded into the OECD’s Good Practice Principles for Public Service Design and Delivery in the Digital Age. That work laid the groundwork for the OECD Recommendation on Human-Centred Public Administrative Services. I didn’t work directly on the Recommendation itself (it kicked off in earnest after I left) but those earlier pieces helped to shape the foundations it builds on. Bruno shared the definition from the Recommendation.

Omni-channel refers to the approach to managing service delivery channels in an integrated, interoperable way to enable users to access the service they want seamlessly and with consistent quality across channels (such as websites, physical offices, self-service kiosks, video-calls, call centres, etc.), as opposed to a ‘multi-channel’ approach that refers to the ability of the user to access services through different entry points, often operating independently of each other.  
OECD Recommendation on Human Centred Public Administrative Services (2024)

Now, through my work with DWP on the jobs and careers service, it’s great to be revisiting those ideas afresh, and in concrete terms. Part of our vision is to design a service that is ‘digital where possible; human when needed’. As an organisation with a national footprint of Jobcentres and a wide range of services that can (and should) be delivered online, we’re asking: how can we bring the best of in-person services into people’s palms and pockets, while at the same time bringing the best of digital into those frontline conversations for both staff and our users?

From tailored CV advice online, to guidance offered face-to-face, to the potential of personalised prompts and nudges through an agentic interface in the future, our aim is to meet people where they are, in the mode that works for them.. And for that, we need to be focused and ambitious in pursuing an omni-channel approach.

All of which is to say: thoughts, I’ve got a few. I wanted to write up the post it notes I stuck on the Miro board – it’s not a formal report, just an open reflection. If you’d been in that call, here’s what you’d have heard me say – but what would you have added (or objected to)?

A split image featuring two scenes: on the left, a woman in a yellow shirt passionately singing in a church setting with a cross in the background; on the right, a smiling woman in a green sweater is engaged in conversation with a man at a desk with a "jobcentreplus" sign visible.

Singing of the Goodness of God… and of the State?

May 20, 2025 / Benjamin Welby / 3 Comments

At church this weekend we sang the worship song Goodness of God

All my life You have been faithful,
All my life You have been so, so good…
With every breath that I am able, I will sing of the goodness of God

And in the middle of worship I found myself wondering whether anyone could ever sing the same about public institutions.

All my life, the state has been faithful
All my life, public administration has been good to me

It may have surfaced because I’d been able to make some progress with PrayReps this week. Or perhaps because of my day job helping the Department for Work and Pensions to design a new approach to providing jobs and careers support for the country. A life-long companion to help people navigate work, whether they’re seeking their first job, having a mid-career reinvention, or easing into a well-earned retirement.

What would it take for one of our future users to say: “All my life, it’s been good to me. It didn’t fail me. It was there”.

Thinking about the foundations of mission-led government

December 13, 2024 / Benjamin Welby / 5 Comments

In the past week, speeches from Keir Starmer, Pat Mcfadden and Georgia Gould¹ have painted a bold vision for the work of government. The Plan for Change is ambitious, rooted in missions designed to tackle the nation’s most pressing issues—from housing and NHS waiting lists to economic inactivity.

It is really good to hear our government talk up a positive, attractive narrative about the future they want for our country. Show me someone dismissing the combined story they’re telling and I suspect you’ve found someone choosing partisan tribalism over good faith engagement although, and perhaps more likely, they may just be someone understandably browbeaten by years of disappointment, frustration and hypocrisy.

Speaking personally I want to be optimistic. I really want to believe that mission-led government can make a dent in these seemingly intractable problems. And because I’m now working in a team directly tied to one of the missions I’m closer than most people to what it means to translate these ideas into practice. But that means I can see a stark challenge: acknowledging the extent of the gulf between rhetoric and reality.

Visualising Government as a Platform

November 25, 2024 / Benjamin Welby / 2 Comments

In Richard Pope’s essential book Platformland he pitches a new ‘anatomy of public services’ and uses helpful images to dismantle, reconstruct and develop for 2024 ideas that he was first part of putting forward in 2015. Given how well the book does this we should all hope that he’s moving the conversation forward in terms of the UK’s inertia in this area.

Over the weekend he popped up on BlueSky and LinkedIn to ask what people who had seen those original drawings in 2015 thought about them at the time.

Question for digital government people c 2015. Did you see these at the time? What worked / didn't work about them (conceptually, not graphically)
— Richard Pope (@richardpope.org) 2024-11-23T10:14:39.259Z

This will be the nudge I needed to finally finish a series of posts (I don’t think you want it as a single post 🙃) I started writing about my reflections on Government as a Platform so if you want them straight to your inbox then do subscribe.

I remember being treated to a sneak peek of what Richard and others were cooking up and being persuaded pretty quickly that they were absolutely spot on. When it was subsequently presented to GDS more widely at an All Staff (I don’t think any public version exists but Tom Loosemore’s October 2015 Code for America talk captures a lot of it) it was one of those moments at GDS, of which there were more than a few, that made me feel so lucky to be working alongside such inspiring minds.

So perhaps I was too close to the thinking and experiences that produced the visualisation to be an impartial observer – I was already fertile soil for these seeds to land in. I expect people who were further away from the conversation (and the shape it subsequently took) might give more insightful responses to Richard’s immediate question for his purposes in 2024. Nonetheless, here are some thoughts of my own.

Mark Foden’s “Gubbins of Government” was another reference point at the time and I thought these images and the ideas they put forward were a great complement to that and spoke of a similar ambition in ways that could land with a not-inside-GDS audience.

I liked how the visuals were helpful beyond the ‘whole of government’ perspective. The obvious takeaway is that the data, consent and components layers are about the role of the centre to enable vertical services at the top. I think it’s also a helpful cross section for specific services to think about as well. Any end to end service trying to meet a whole need is going to do that through a composite of elements (micro-services if you will), that sit on top of a service-wide approach to data and identity.

At the OECD I wrote the Government as a Platform pillar of the Digital Government Policy Framework. That exercise was really helpful for me in marshalling my thinking as a partial retrospective on my work as the Lead Product Manager for Government as a Platform in the UK (more on this in those upcoming blog posts).

One of the biggest things I felt when it came to writing it up was the need to take a wider-angle lens on how you enable and equip teams to move quickly, at scale, and with quality. This 2015 visualisation sits alongside a whole host of contextual assumptions about things we at GDS didn’t exactly take for granted but which we saw as self-evidently important: fixing procurement, controlling spend, assuring quality, building capability, etc.

So as powerful as I think the visuals are and were, I think they only tell a partial, more technical story, about what it means to create a Government as a Platform ecosystem.

Back to work

November 19, 2024 / Benjamin Welby / 2 Comments

When I left the OECD last summer, it was for several reasons (some of them implicit in this blog post). And I’m pleased that I decided to do so. This has been such a valuable slice of time – a luxury I recognise few people are able to enjoy.

I’m so lucky to have had the career I’ve had to this point and the breadth and depth of what I’ve done. But it has given me a bit of a dilemma about the shape of who I am and the role that best fits, especially in this new, post-OECD phase.

In terms of substance, the OECD was a good match and I was fortunate to have been adept at what the job required. I’m really proud of all the work I contributed to there. But it’s also true that I missed the “gnarliness” of delivery – the practical, hands-on experience without which I wouldn’t have been as good at the job. So I always knew my time focusing on the conceptual and advisory wasn’t forever – it’s testament to the team and the content that I surprised myself and ended up staying for five years.

A report that should arrest us

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