The ‘innovators and disrupters’ hired to bring AI to the UK public sector

{"text":[[{"start":8.45,"text":"Last summer, 22-year-old Harvard dropout William Tarr was living in San Francisco and working on his $3mn-valued start-up when he spotted a maths puzzle placed in the FT by the Cabinet Office as part of a search for “innovators and disrupters”."}],[{"start":24.599999999999998,"text":"The Devon-raised tech founder filled in the brainteaser and sent it off. By autumn he had moved back to Britain to work on the Isle of Sheppey off the Kent coast, building bespoke AI products for HMP Elmley prison under the Number 10 innovation fellowship scheme."}],[{"start":39.3,"text":"Tarr is among a cohort of 30 fellows boasting world-class technical prowess, including in AI and data science, who have signed up for what the government calls “high-impact tours of duty” of up to two years to bring novel technology to Whitehall and the wider UK public sector. "}],[{"start":56.949999999999996,"text":"The fellowship programme echoes efforts by the arch-disrupter Dominic Cummings to recruit “weirdos and misfits” to rewire the state, and also borrows inspiration from a US presidential scheme launched in 2015 by Barack Obama."}],[{"start":70.05,"text":"Efforts to digitise the state and better incorporate IT into departments have been undercut by big failings in recent years. These include the erroneous deletion of more than 150,000 police records during a “standard housekeeping process” in 2021 and the “merged identities” fiasco in the immigration system that saw 76,000 records wrongly collated in 2024."}],[{"start":94.1,"text":"Cummings railed against “chronic dysfunction” on Whitehall after working as a special adviser in the Department for Education and claimed, for example, that officials there had been so lacking in basic spreadsheet skills that their financial models and budgets could never be trusted and “almost every figure released to the media or parliament was wrong”."}],[{"start":116.89999999999999,"text":"Recent years have seen trust in the civil service fall while headcount has swelled, topping 523,630 full-time staff in March. The public most commonly view officials as bureaucratic and stuck in their ways, according to Ipsos polling last year."}],[{"start":135.64999999999998,"text":"This year the UK government has recruited from Nasa, JPMorgan, Microsoft, the Alan Turing Institute and German defence company Helsing for its innovation fellowship programme. "}],[{"start":146.95,"text":"The fellows are paid up to £200,000 under special exemptions to Whitehall salary rules. Officials say the unit more than pays for itself in efficiency savings across its various projects."}],[{"start":159.64999999999998,"text":"Meeting the FT in the governor’s office at HMP Elmley, Tarr admitted his decision to quit the US west coast tech scene to work for the UK government was met with “slight bemusement” by friends."}],[{"start":null,"text":"

"}],[{"start":171.49999999999997,"text":"He insisted, however: “The doors that open, the people you meet, the things you see, the people you chat to are kind of unrivalled. It’s very, very different to working in a start-up and profoundly better, I think, in many ways.”"}],[{"start":186.39999999999998,"text":"His co-founder is still running the audit-focused AI software start-up the pair launched, while Tarr creates custom AI tools that save prison officers thousands of hours of bureaucratic drudgery each month."}],[{"start":198.04999999999998,"text":"These include tools that transcribe conversations, translate foreign languages and automatically fill in documents. In turn they enable staff to concentrate on eye-to-eye contact and human connection with prisoners during meetings, instead of scribbling down the verbatim record of discussions that the criminal justice system requires. He has also helped upgrade the prison’s security using AI, but the details are classified. "}],[{"start":222.7,"text":"After rolling out solutions at HMP Elmley, Tarr is able to tweak his products to align with the digital systems of other prisons — and his tools are in high demand."}],[{"start":233.39999999999998,"text":"Pointing out a room of files “dating back decades” at the Sheppey facility, Tarr said moving from analogue to AI-assisted digital record-keeping for prisons would throw up insights that would “save the government time, money, make it more effective, make it more efficient, it would be fantastic”."}],[{"start":249.95,"text":"While some officials privately concede the arrival of the innovation fellows has ruffled feathers in some quarters of the civil service — including in the existing digital team — Tarr says he has had a great reception at Elmley. "}],[{"start":262.75,"text":"He says being deployed on the “front line” in the prison itself, and working with the staff to generate ideas together to automate or improve the difficult and tedious parts of their jobs, rather than remotely imposing new systems, has made a difference. There was no “Doge-esque” principle to his work, he stressed, a reference to Elon Musk’s former US government cost-cutting vehicle: it is not about cutting headcount. "}],[{"start":285.1,"text":"Teneeka Mai, 29, joined the innovation fellowship programme in January on secondment from the US management consultancy Oliver Wyman, where she was a director in its data, analytics and AI team, focusing on retail and consumer goods. "}],[{"start":300.95000000000005,"text":"She has used her technical background to spearhead the creation of a digital childcare tool, launched in May, which she said would “empower parents” and aims to improve competition in the market. "}],[{"start":311.75000000000006,"text":"Parents can enter their basic details into the online tool to check their government childcare entitlements, calculate locally tailored childcare cost estimates to help them budget before returning to work and compare nearby childcare providers’ Ofsted ratings, opening hours and available places."}],[{"start":329.05000000000007,"text":"Initially having signed up for a 12-month stint, Mai is considering whether to make a permanent leap into the public sector. “I took this job as a bit of a career change, wanting to do something a bit more meaningful, and I’ve really enjoyed my experience,” she said. "}],[{"start":342.75000000000006,"text":"Ministers recognise that most public services — including health, prisons, courts and welfare — are ripe for technology-led transformation."}],[{"start":353.20000000000005,"text":"However, they also acknowledge that recruiting technologists at the cutting edge of AI is difficult, given the high salaries in the private sector. "}],[{"start":361.25000000000006,"text":"The “tours of duty” temporary postings, which enable staff to arrange secondments from their regular jobs, are designed to boost the allure of the fellowships."}],[{"start":370.05000000000007,"text":"This small scheme also aligns with a wider push in the civil service to encourage “zigzag” careers where officials can leave Whitehall for the private sector and return later in their careers. "}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":380.6000000000001,"text":"Darren Jones, chief secretary to the prime minister, concedes structural transformation of old IT systems in the public sector will take at least five to 10 years but argues that the fellows can help achieve quick victories in certain areas."}],[{"start":395.6000000000001,"text":"The Labour government has doubled the number of fellows and overhauled an existing talent-exchange scheme with the private sector to focus on technology. "}],[{"start":403.75000000000006,"text":"British tech start-ups are irked by the drive to build products in-house, with intellectual property owned by the UK government. They argue the government is often wasting money reinventing products already available on the open market."}],[{"start":417.50000000000006,"text":"Vinous Ali, deputy executive director at the Startup Coalition, a tech lobby group, said: “These fellows should focus on working with government commercial teams and others to better understand the shape of the market so that government can become better technology buyers . . . not builders who get sucked into any one project developing tools that are already available off the shelf.”"}],[{"start":438.3500000000001,"text":"Jones is unapologetic about the fellows’ mission or the disruption they are causing on Whitehall: “I’m sure there must be some friction in the system . . . But look, the status quo is not good enough.”"}],[{"start":452.1000000000001,"text":"Fewer than 1 per cent of applicants are accepted for the highly competitive programme. “We’ve had thousands of people apply for a very small number of roles,” Jones said, because the fellows “get to do the type of things they wouldn’t probably get to in the private sector”."}],[{"start":466.4500000000001,"text":"Additional reporting by Chris Smyth"}],[{"start":478.55000000000007,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1783834985_9403.mp3"}