Burnham sparks backlash over reported plans to ditch DSIT
Sifted ● Covered by 6 sources
Andy Burnham is reportedly eyeing a breakup of DSIT, folding bits into the business department before he's even PM. Tech leaders say it's a needless distraction just as UK AI policy is gaining traction.
Based on reporting by Sifted — read the original for the full story.
Summary, retelling and take written by AI under human oversight; images are AI-generated illustrations. How we work · Report an error
Word that incoming prime minister Andy Burnham might dismantle the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology has landed like a brick through a window in Britain's tech world. The Financial Times reports Burnham is weighing a plan to shift parts of DSIT into a beefed-up business department, likely headed again by Jonathan Reynolds, while scattering other responsibilities across Whitehall. He isn't even sworn in yet — that's set for Monday — and already the department built to house UK tech policy is on the chopping block.
The backlash arrived fast. Vinous Ali of Startup Coalition posted on X that DSIT, only three years old, has just reached the point where it's moving from strategy into actual delivery on things like compute infrastructure and online safety rules. Tearing it apart now, she argued, throws away that groundwork right when it's starting to pay off.
Ian Hogarth, who chairs the UK's AI Security Institute and works as a partner at Plural, made a sharper point about institutional cost. Reorganisations like this eat up roughly a year of a department's attention, he wrote, and that's poison for any government claiming growth as its top priority. Civil servants who actually want to get things done tend to leave once their days fill up with restructuring busywork instead of substance.
Matt Clifford, who advised the government on AI policy, called the reported plan a mistake outright. His argument centers on timing: tech is now both an economic lever and a national security concern, and pulling senior officials into a structural shuffle right now diverts energy from work that can't really wait.
DSIT was Rishi Sunak's creation back in 2023, meant to consolidate science, AI, digital regulation and innovation under one roof. In its short life it's overseen the UK's AI Opportunities Action Plan, pushed investment into sovereign compute capacity, and grown the AI Security Institute into something with real teeth. Whether Burnham follows through on the reported plan or not, the mere suggestion has already cost the department a measure of the stability it spent three years building.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Machinery-of-government reshuffles are the easiest way for a new leader to look busy without doing anything, and this smells exactly like that. Britain doesn't have a departmental-org-chart problem — it has a compute, energy, and planning-permission problem, and shuffling DSIT's furniture around won't fix any of it. If Burnham wants to prove he's serious about tech, the boring move is leaving DSIT alone and actually funding what it's already doing.
Read more about this at: Sifted
