Concern for Telecoms as New UK Prime Minister May Scrap Tech Department

The incoming UK Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, is reportedly planning to abolish the Government’s central Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), which also oversees broadband and mobile connectivity (telecoms) – partly via the Building Digital UK (BDUK) agency. The proposal plan could see DSIT’s functions being spread across other departments.

The potential move (see The Guardian and The Telegraph) comes at a time when broadband and mobile roll-outs, as well as the use of AI and data centres, are of increasingly central importance to the country’s future development. This is to say nothing of the issues around the underfunding of UK science, which is another significant issue.

The industry body techUK, which represents many of the UK’s key technology companies, is already understood to have written to Burnham in the hope of encouraging him to re-think his plans and thus avoid sending a “terrible signal” to the wider sector.

At the time of writing, we’re still awaiting official details and there’s a large amount of uncertainty about what will actually happen. But the indications are that DSIT’s current functions could be returned to where they came from under the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and the Department for Business and Trade.

In practical terms this might not, in the longer run, change as much as some people think. But such a reorganisation would at the very least cause some short-term delays, confusion and send a perhaps unwelcome signal to the sector that it’s not going to be as highly valued as before – an unusual position given the importance of science, technology and telecoms in today’s world. Either way, we should find out more today and will update accordingly.