Blog For all that it has already become crucial to our everyday lives, AI is still a relatively new phenomenon. While lawmakers scramble to catch up with the lightning pace of progress in the frontier space, politicians across the board have a decision to make: do we let AI remain a political football, or do we permanently sew it into our national tapestry?
The UK’s approach has been thrown around in recent years, moving from the cautious optimism of Rishi Sunak’s Bletchley Park Summit to Keir Starmer’s focus on ‘mainlining it into the veins of the nation.’ But under Andy Burnham’s young premiership, the approach risks being something altogether worse: indifference.
But that doesn’t have to remain the case. Look at how economic policy has changed in the past 20 years. No one spoke about fiscal rules or headroom until George Osborne introduced the Office for Budget Responsibility. This independent check on the Treasury’s ability to borrow and spend has outlived Mr Osborne and played a crucial part in dismissing his old colleague, Liz Truss.
Jim O’Neill – the former chairman and adviser to Osborne – floated a similar concept earlier this Summer – an OBR for infrastructure. The goal would be simple, give the government the fiscal cover to fund long-term projects over decades and lower the risk of future projects getting the HS2 treatment.
It’s a bold idea, but if Burnham wants his upcoming 10-year strategy (expected in the Autumn) to carry genuine clout, it will take pragmatic mechanisms like this to deliver it.
AI, and the supercomputers that power it, must be central to that plan. The sector starts from a strong position, being designated as Critical National Infrastructure, but momentum has stalled.
Machinery of Government changes are almost always followed by bureaucratic bedlam, and the sudden collapse of DSIT is no different. AI policy now sits within DBIST, AI comms is coming out of the Cabinet Office, and crunchy policy debates like copyright risk slipping through the cracks. The Minister for AI, Kanishka Narayan, is a strong and smart ally for the sector, but one minister’s bandwidth can only stretch so far.
This administrative noise does highlight an uncomfortable truth though. Policy documents can be rewritten with every cabinet reshuffle, but tier-one compute infrastructure takes years to build.
If the UK is to secure a sustainable tech footprint which can power growth in every postcode, major AI facilities cannot rely on short-term political whims. They need to be treated as permanent, sovereign national resources, funded by the government to serve the whole country. They must outlive any single administration. And their value must be demonstrated in the real-world impact they are already having in healthcare, in regional jobs, in sustainable energy development.
If Burnham’s 10-year plan is to succeed, it must move past political positioning and focus on protecting the physical compute capacity already available to them. Whitehall revamps come and go. Sovereign AI capability must be built to last.
