Can Kanishka Narayan make up for the loss of DSIT?
Sifted ● Covered by 6 sources
Britain's new PM Andy Burnham scrapped DSIT the same night he made Kanishka Narayan a cabinet-level AI minister. Tech leaders are relieved by the promotion but nervous the department's 4,000 staff just got scattered.
Based on reporting by Sifted — read the original for the full story.
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Andy Burnham's first hours as prime minister delivered a whiplash moment for UK tech. He elevated Kanishka Narayan, previously a junior minister covering AI and online safety, into a cabinet-level AI role. And in the same breath, he dismantled the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, spreading its staff and responsibilities across other parts of government.
The reaction from founders and investors has been a mix of relief and unease. Harry Stebbings of 20VC called it the best available outcome for a tech community rattled by DSIT's removal, while Dom Hallas of Startup Coalition said the abolition is clearly bad but Narayan is the one person who could make up for it from inside cabinet. Narayan had already built goodwill in his previous post, announcing support packages for AI companies and overseeing the AI Security Institute. Meryem Arik of Doubleword described his approach to AI's risks and opportunities as nuanced and well communicated.
What comes next is less clear. Narayan's new brief will sit across a newly created department covering business, innovation, science and trade, plus the cabinet office — a structure Synthesia's Alexandru Voica says makes sense given how AI touches public services, national security, industrial strategy and regulation all at once. But Voica also points out that DSIT had roughly 4,000 civil servants working across science, technology, innovation and digital government, and it's not obvious the new arrangement keeps that expertise concentrated in one place. Some tech regulation is shifting to the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, and reports suggest Narayan might end up leading an AI Taskforce within cabinet — details that are still being worked out rather than settled.
For Arik, the real test is whether initiatives like the Sovereign AI Unit and AISI survive the reshuffle intact. The £500m SovAI fund, established earlier this year to keep promising AI companies anchored in Britain, sat under DSIT's jurisdiction, as did AISI; Doubleword itself is backed by the unit. Any major disruption to that machinery, Arik warns, could set the sector back six to 12 months.
Quantum founders are sounding a similar alarm. Carmen Palacios-Berraquero of Nu Quantum said the timing could hardly be worse, given the UK's ten-year quantum plan, first announced in 2023, only started being implemented two months ago. Her argument is that quantum needs patient capital and long-term certainty, and landmark procurement programmes launched just weeks ago need to continue unchanged if that certainty is going to mean anything.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Handing someone a cabinet seat is the easy part; keeping the department that actually does the work is the hard part, and Burnham seems to have done the opposite. Praise for Narayan is well earned, but a minister without a dedicated department is a name on a door, not a lever on the machine. The industry cheering this move should watch the SovAI Unit and AISI closely over the next few months — that's where the real answer to whether this reshuffle helped or hurt will show up, not in the title on Narayan's business card.
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