Civil Service: Digital Skills

Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts

Monday 20th February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

I can tell my noble friend a lot about what we did at Tesco on this matter. We had a spaghetti junction of old technology and what we did—I am sure noble Lords will be interested in this—was bring in systems that were compatible with one another. We gradually got rid of the spaghetti junction of technology and moved to new technology across the board. It is about those sorts of principles. Alex Burghart, the very energetic Minister concerned, heads at ministerial level the Central Digital and Data Office. It is these sorts of issues that we are looking at, so as to make sure that the transformation to digital that we need is efficient, smooth and speedy, and does not cause lots of legacy problems. I think we all know of experiences in different government departments where these already exist.

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)]

My Lords, just to balance the argument on efficient digital government, we need to be quite careful, do we not, that we do not all end up, in communicating with officialdom, talking to artificial intelligence systems or to robots?

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

I share my noble friend’s concern. I will say that artificial intelligence and robotics are actually improving efficiency in some of the services that one uses, such as banking, so that we move through the telephone options and find a person, but they are absolutely no substitute, to my mind, for having proper customer care where that is needed. There is sometimes a risk that we can get exclusion and other problems if we go too far over the top. That is why I emphasised the importance of this new department and the ability it will have to devote more attention to these sorts of incredibly important issues. AI can be a plus but it can also be a risk. We really need to look internationally and do everything that we can.