Was avoiding the Place Test DSIT’s undoing?
For the first time, one department held the near full digital stack: fibre and mobile connectivity; data centres; joined-up public data infrastructure through the National Data Library; the digital capability, delivery and mandate of wider GDS for public service impact and AI; the broader AI Strategy with real money behind it; real firepower within its own ranks. Exciting – no department outside the Cabinet Office has had that much digital potential before.
But the power of that stack proves itself locally, not just nationally — in a council office, a combined authority, a resident waiting on a service that’s meant to work better because of it.
I was in meetings where successive ministers demanded impact — joined up local government services, inclusion — yet DSIT-corporate to a large extent seemed to wrestle with this.
Connectivity policy and growth /value ambitions are distant from one another; the National Data Library — now launched and crucial for local impact — was hard Whitehall miles; GDS Local is a step forward but still represents a relatively minor investment; useful services like One Login are still well out of reach.
Some of those instincts are muscle-memory from the Willetts era well over a decade ago: comfortable with the strategy and the frameworks; at home with universities, deep tech and big tech but less at ease in the room with a council leader who wants to know what tools help them change things for residents next year.
The Place Test isn’t about more guidance local government can use; an isolated exemplar like an AI Town; or a product created for Whitehall departments vaguely available to a local council. It’s whether a mayor, a council leader, a combined authority now has something they didn’t have before — to take an action, prevent a social harm, or just have greater agency.
Thanks to Ministerial pressure and those inside who saw this bigger picture, DSIT was shifting in the right direction (especially compared to what came before). But on the ground it too often distantly represented itself like a newly-empowered Whitehall department rather than the agent of local change it could have been:
– More connected places supporting jobs and making people healthier and safer
– More data-sharing across and between levels of government to support prevention
– More common digital and data services, built once with local government – and used often
The future? We’ll see soon. But these outcomes are just as fundamental to real devolution as it is to growth.
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