Reynolds appointed business secretary as DSIT scrapped
Sifted ● Covered by 6 sources
Andy Burnham, the UK's new PM, just merged the science and business departments into one and put Jonathan Reynolds in charge. DSIT, the tech ministry built for AI policy, is gone after barely two years.
Based on reporting by Sifted — read the original for the full story.
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Barely hours into the job, Andy Burnham has already redrawn Whitehall's org chart. The new prime minister has folded the department for science, innovation and technology into a beefed-up business department, handing the combined portfolio to Jonathan Reynolds, who knows the business side well since he ran it under Keir Starmer before becoming chief whip last September.
DSIT wasn't exactly ancient. Rishi Sunak stood it up in 2023 specifically to give AI, digital regulation and science a dedicated home, separate from the usual industrial policy grind. In its short life it pushed out the AI Opportunities Action Plan, backed sovereign compute investment and stood up the AI Security Institute. Two years and a change of government later, it's being absorbed rather than expanded.
The merger had been rumored over the weekend, and once it landed, the reaction from Britain's tech scene was fast and not especially warm. Founders, investors and policy people who'd gotten used to having a minister whose entire job was thinking about AI and digital regulation worried that folding it into a broader business remit means less focus, not more efficiency. The argument, roughly: reorganizing government departments burns months that could go toward actually shipping the AI ambitions everyone keeps talking about.
Reynolds inherits a sprawling brief that now spans trade deals, business regulation, science funding and AI policy all at once. Burnham also named John Healey, previously defence minister, as chancellor, rounding out a cabinet built in his first day. Whether combining DSIT with DBT sharpens Britain's tech strategy or just buries it under trade negotiations and industrial policy is the open question nobody in Westminster wants to answer yet.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Merging a two-year-old tech ministry into a general business department the same week you take office is not a signal of prioritizing AI, it's a signal that AI policy just became someone's side project. Britain spent real political capital building DSIT as a standalone voice for digital regulation and sovereign compute, and collapsing it into DBT reads like a cost-saving reflex dressed up as efficiency. If Reynolds actually keeps AI policy moving at the pace DSIT set, great, but history says combined super-ministries mostly mean the loudest department wins the attention, and trade deals are louder than compute clusters.
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