Let 1,000 AI pilots flourish to help public sector, says Labour MP

Letting civil servants profit from their own innovations could help Whitehall embrace artificial intelligence, a senior Labour MP has said.

Darren Jones, MP for Bristol North West and chairman of the Commons Business and Trade Committee, is one of Westminster’s evangelists for the opportunities presented by AI, but insists it cannot simply be seen as a way to make people redundant.

Speaking to the PA news agency, he said: “I’m convinced that the best way is doing an inclusive approach that works with public sector workers, as opposed to someone up here deciding that they’re just going to make someone redundant and put a tech system in place, which is extractive and exploitive, not inclusive.”

The key point there is that the workers have to share in that benefit

That “extractive” model is one that has driven much of the debate on AI, with discussion of which jobs are at risk of being replaced and how many people could be facing redundancy.

In the public sector, former Civil Service HR chief Rupert McNeil told MPs in June that the number of civil servants could be cut by 70% over the next decade thanks to AI and automation – a scenario that would see around 350,000 people laid off.

AI experts have suggested this is counter-productive, arguing that the public sector should focus on where AI can be used as a tool to do things that humans are bad at, rather than looking solely at where savings can be made on salaries.

This view is closer to that of Mr Jones, who wants to allow “a thousand pilots to flourish” so public sector workers can come up with their own ideas for improving services.

To do that, he acknowledges that proponents of AI need to calm fears that those public sector workers will be replaced by their inventions.

He said: “That’s why the inclusive/extractive language is really important.

“Because if you take an extractive approach – which is to say, like you’ve seen in some private sector companies, ‘We’re just going to put technology in place and we’re going to make as much additional profit or surplus as possible, and take that away, and if that affects the quality of people’s work or the number of jobs so be it’ – that’s an extractive, oppressive kind of environment.

“I don’t think that works in the private sector, let alone the public sector. What you want to do is get to a position where public sector workers say, ‘This change is coming, it’s going to be good for me’.”

One way to do that, he said, would be to emphasise that gains from improvements in productivity would be ploughed back into better pay, although he acknowledged the UK’s “horrifying” national debt would have to be addressed as well.

Alternatively, he suggested allowing the most successful of his “1,000 pilots” to become business owners, turning their innovations into start-ups that could sell services back to the government.

He added: “The key point there is that the workers have to share in that benefit, so they see it as an incentive to want to do it and not as an extractive process.”

Mr Jones, rumoured in Westminster to be in line for promotion at the next shadow cabinet reshuffle, argued that Labour is better placed than the Conservatives to ensure this process is inclusive.

He told PA: “I do think there’s a party dividing line on this, the way that you do it.

“Either inclusively, which is inherently the Labour way, or for the benefit purely of profit, which is Tory point.

“The way I would see the Tories developing this policy area is by taking a pretty standard approach to tech procurement and just saying, ‘Hey, tech company, can you come in and sort our universal credit payments properly?’

“Rishi Sunak knows, for example, how awful that system is, because during the pandemic he was told he couldn’t change the number more than twice a year. Ridiculous.

“They’ll just get a tech company and to do that, and the service will improve, the cost will go down, and they’ll just make 6,500 people redundant and they will think that’s a job well done.

“But the Tories don’t really think about workers, which is one of the reasons I’d say my argument is that there’s a very different approach to it.”

Workers have been a major concern for Mr Jones, who has achieved prominence as chairman of the Business and Trade Committee thanks to his questioning of businesses on their use of AI, including criticising Amazon’s use of algorithms to track its workers.