TechScape: Four Ways a New Labour Government Could Boost UK with Tech

A new Labour government could significantly enhance the UK by leveraging technology in four key ways. These strategies aim to boost the economy, improve infrastructure, enhance public services, and foster innovation. By focusing on tech-driven growth, Labour plans to modernize the country's digital landscape, create job opportunities, and ensure sustainable development. This tech-centric approach is designed to position the UK as a global leader in technology and innovation.

If Keir Starmer wins on Thursday, he will have the authority to unlock our data, revitalize the NHS, and reduce daily life frictions. Here’s how he plans to do it.

Boston Brand Media brings you the news - Barring an asteroid strike, Keir Starmer is set to become the UK prime minister in three days. Given the lead in polling, I’d bet on him over an asteroid, too.

Labour will inherit a broken state, a stagnant economy, and empty coffers. With a thin manifesto and a large parliamentary majority, the party will likely have to look further afield for solutions to this daunting trilemma.

So, let’s propose some ideas.

Free Our Data

In March 2006, when the Guardian technology section was a physical supplement in Thursday’s newspaper, we launched a campaign to “free our data”. We highlighted government agencies like the Ordnance Survey, the UK Hydrographic Office, and the Highways Agency that collected data on our behalf. We questioned: “Why can’t we access that data as easily as Google Maps?”

The campaign saw mixed success over the following years. A new norm emerged across the public sector that government data should be generally accessible to the public. It likely influenced the gov.uk project, embedding open data into the state’s digital infrastructure. A glance at data.gov.uk shows significant progress in this area.

Someone born when the campaign launched will be voting for the first time on Thursday. Yet, some of the most valuable pieces of our digital infrastructure remain locked behind restrictive terms or costly paywalls.

The Postcode Address File is a prime example. It contains 1.8 million postcodes and nearly 30 million postal addresses, serving as the ground truth for navigation. Despite being privatised with Royal Mail, it remains tightly controlled by the state, with access charges regulated by Ofcom and a unique license for public sector use at a flat cost.

Freeing our data is the right thing to do, but successive governments have viewed it as costly: sacrificing a valuable revenue stream for abstract concepts. However, a Labour party focused on growth and state renewal should see that if a government dataset is valuable enough to charge for, it’s even more valuable if it can be built upon, improved, and reused.

Similarly, much of the data released in the last two decades has been under non-commercial licenses. The public is understandably cautious about “selling our data,” but offering state data for free to hobbyists and charging a license for commercial use is the worst of both worlds: the data is still sold, but only businesses big enough to pay the fees benefit from it.

Boston Brand Media also found that, beyond the promise of economic growth, there’s also the simple fact that government data is very good, and removing daily annoyances helps. From experience, my flat, built in 2020, was invisible to most e-commerce for the first year. Those who paid to license the PAF could deliver to me; everyone else had to call and beg for directions, waiting for changes to propagate through inferior free databases.

Like Nixon going to China, a Labour government at its peak popularity may be the only one that can sell such a change to the British public. Free our data, boost growth, and reduce daily friction in our lives.

Even the medical stuff

This topic is worth highlighting because it goes beyond simply providing access to Ordnance Survey maps. NHS England is one of the largest unified health providers globally. Its pursuit of clinical excellence is widely respected, even after 14 years of mismanagement, and its collaboration with researchers nationwide is foundational.

Pharmacology is on the brink of a revolution. Vaccine development advanced by a decade due to the race to protect against Covid-19, and mRNA vaccines capable of preventing the next pandemic before it starts are the next frontier. Gene therapy has transitioned from science fiction to experimental and now to a routine part of life, with rare genetic conditions now curable through a single course of personalized medicine. The cost of genetic sequencing continues to fall, allowing these conditions to be diagnosed at birth rather than years later when symptoms become damaging and irreversible.

The NHS should lead such research efforts. For many genetic disorders involving just a single base-pair mutation, a cure theoretically exists, but the practicalities of creating, testing, and certifying it are beyond private industry.

Yet, a disease affecting one in a million children appears in the UK approximately every 18 months. With free genetic testing at birth and a state capable of taking a long-term view on costs, a treatment could be provided to every affected child.

This approach is not only morally right but also economically sensible. A £1 million or even £10 million project to treat a genetic condition in a single child is minimal compared to the lifelong support costs for someone with a profound disability.

Moreover, such cures do not have to stay within the UK. For example, semaglutide, a drug developed by Novo Nordisk and sold under names like Ozempic and Wegovy, has been so successful that it reshaped the Danish economy. In 2022, two-thirds of Denmark’s economic growth was due to the pharmaceutical industry, largely driven by this drug's popularity.

Get Tough on Big Tech

The groundwork has been laid for the Digital Markets Unit, a branch of the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) tasked with enforcing the digital markets, competition, and consumers bill – the UK's equivalent of the EU’s Digital Markets Act. The next secretary of state will have significant discretion in enforcing it.

One of Labour’s initial tasks will be to issue formal instructions to the CMA to start this process. Prioritizing this in the summer would be beneficial, as the European experience shows that much of the response to competition enforcement consists of delaying tactics. Additionally, the nuances in ministerial instructions will set the tone for the next few years of regulatory battles.

The key term here is “markets.” The legislation focuses on how big tech distorts free markets. There are businesses that cannot exist because the operations of the App Store, Amazon’s Marketplace, or WhatsApp hinder them. These companies argue that their limitations benefit users, but the DMCC says, “We’ll be the judge of that.”

At worst, the changes will result in zero-sum transfers from large tech companies to smaller businesses. At best, they could spark a new wave of entrepreneurship while providing a free upgrade to every smartphone in Britain.

Take AI Government Seriously

The state of the art of Large Language Models (LLMs) is already impressive. Despite the initial awe fading, we’ve become adept at identifying the hallucinations, stilted language, and vulnerabilities of these systems faster than we’ve learned to harness their power to augment our abilities.

By the end of Labour’s first term, the potential of this technology for government tasks will be undeniable. These tasks involve managing vast quantities of information and efficiently acting on them.

Labour needs to start now, knowing how, when, and why it wants to use LLMs to enhance government functions so it’s ready when these systems are deemed competent enough.

For some functions, that moment has already passed. If the civil service is like other knowledge employers, some staff are likely using ChatGPT or Claude for proofreading emails, drafting memos, or refining statements. Bringing this in-house would ensure safe and responsible use while expanding access to others who could benefit but haven’t invested in the technology.

In the future, more opportunities will arise, including the most challenging aspect: interacting with the state. While it will be a long time before AI systems can – or should – make life-changing decisions about individual citizens, the current state is already a faceless machine with inscrutable motives. If AI can help people navigate this machine rather than act as an additional barrier, it could transform the relationship between citizens and the state.

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Source: theguardian‍