Earlier this week I was having a conversation about data centres, AI, and the fairly febrile state of mind surrounding both of them at the moment.
There are sensible arguments to have about where data centres go, what they require and who benefits from them. There are even bigger arguments about what AI might do to work, to public services and to the institutions we rely on. But both also seem to have become lightning rods for a wider uncertainty about where all this is heading, who is in control of it, and whether the people making the decisions can be trusted to make them well.
And in the course of the conversation, my colleague Barbara asked whether I’d had a look at the most recent OECD work on public trust.
I hadn’t. Which was a surprise given that public trust is something I come back to quite often.
It’s central to the thinking I’ve done about data in government and whether people feel they have any meaningful say in policymaking. It turns up in apparently narrower questions, like rolling out CivWifi for all, and in much bigger ones about what sort of institutions are trusted enough to carry us through whatever AI does to the world of work.
And yet, despite that, I’d completely missed the fact that the OECD’s latest edition had come out. I hadn’t seen anyone give it much coverage either. Maybe it simply passed me by over the summer.
But I think back to the 2024 edition, which also seemed to pass without much comment, and I think public trust is hugely underweighted in the way we talk and think about the challenges facing the UK and elsewhere. If I’d been in any of the conversations about the missions (RIP?), I would have called rebuilding public trust one of them. Not because trust is an end in itself, or because everybody ought to agree with government, but because as we’ve seen, it’s hard to do very much that is difficult, disruptive or long term if large numbers of people start from the assumption that government is incompetent, dishonest, unfair, uninterested in them, or some combination of the four.
AI is already a trust question
Anyway, back to the trust survey. For the first time, the OECD asked people what they expect if government agencies use AI. The British results do not say that people are simply against it.
They are more uncertain than that. 39% are confident AI would produce more tailored services and 36% that it would reduce government costs. When the questions turn to protecting personal information, keeping humans in control of important decisions, transparency and fair treatment, confidence sits between 31% and 35%.
But on all six measures Britain is less positive than the OECD average.1
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