Will the government be able to achieve its £45bn savings target through tech?

Can the government deliver?

However, the success of the plan hinges on many things, including whether the government is able and has the right skills to implement this. In a Science, Innovation and Technology Committee hearing in March 2025, committee members questioned tech experts on whether the potential £45bn in savings was achievable.

The government’s former head of AI, Laura Gilbert, told the committee at the time that the methodology for producing these figures was “perfectly good” but also “a guess” as it is something that’s difficult to measure.

“The thing with that £45bn is that there is a front-loaded part where there are easy gains that you can pick up and say, ‘If we did this thing, if we automated this and there are this many people, there is this much time saved, or money saved, on quite big things that do not rely on legacy tech that you can just go in and implement’,” she said.

Given this government’s strong public commitment to such large savings, it will need to learn lessons from past failures and ensure that digitisation delivers for the taxpayer

“An awful lot of that is a long tail where, if you invested this much for a year and a half, you would make a 1% saving, but there is an opportunity cost in doing that. You would need a lot of people focused on it, and they could be off doing something else.”

She added: “I don’t think there will ever be a point when somebody goes, ‘Here it is. We’ve done the £45bn’.”

There is another issue as well. According to the note by minister Clark, the government came up with the £45bn figure by using findings from a previous analysis done by the Central, Digital and Data Office (CDDO), covering central government, the NHS and police, and applying them to the entire public sector.

“This estimate is based on internal analysis completed by CDDO, scaled up across the public sector,” the note said.

The figure of £36bn in savings through productivity gains is based on this analysis, estimating the maximum potential productivity benefits. However, the government said this was the lower, conservative estimate, and the upper bound of potential productivity savings sits at £72bn annually.

The note also reveals that there is no “specific timeframe for realisation” and that instead the savings are “anticipated to be realised over the long term”.

Science, Innovation and Technology Committee chair Chi Onwurah said she welcomed greater transparency on how the government has come up with the figures, but said the committee is “concerned that no time frame is given for achieving them, and that they are partially informed by extrapolations and assumptions”.

“The committee will be examining the feasibility of these estimated savings and will be seeking further clarity on the as-yet unconfirmed timeline for delivery as our inquiry into the digital centre of government continues,” she said.   

“All too often, governments have failed to deliver promised public sector technological transformations. Given this government’s strong public commitment to such large savings, it will need to learn lessons from these past failures and ensure that digitisation delivers for the taxpayer.”

All hail AI

The government has pushed hard on AI as a saviour. In January 2025, it published a 50-point plan to use artificial intelligence to help drive efficiency and growth across the UK economy.

The focus on AI has been at the forefront of the government’s digitisation plans. Prime minister Keir Starmer has vowed to send AI teams into government departments, saying that no person’s time should be spent on a task if digital technology or AI can do it better and quicker.

“We’re going to get the best of the best on AI working across government. I’m going to send teams into every government department with a clear mission from me to make the state more innovative and more efficient,” he said at the time.

It seems that AI has become synonymous with savings, and that is part of the picture. There are almost certainly opportunities for efficiency and savings through AI, but there are through more traditional digital processes and better design as well

Since then, the government has launched several AI-related initiatives, including an AI Accelerator Programme, aiming to turn data scientists working in the public sector into machine learning engineers.

According to Clark’s note, the government estimates that the current baseline spend could be reduced by 31% through the use of AI to streamline services.

However, this large focus on AI could potentially lead to overlooking other solutions. During the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee hearing, former civil servant turned consultant Richard Pope, director of Richard Pope and Partners, said he wondered if the government had painted itself into a corner with AI.

“It seems that AI has become synonymous with savings, and that is part of the picture. There are almost certainly opportunities for efficiency and savings through AI, but there are through more traditional digital processes and better design as well,” he said.

Whether the government will achieve its savings goal could be hard to quantify with no specific target date in place.

Clark’s note acknowledges that the government’s ability to achieve these savings and benefits hinges on the need for substantial investment and that further work with departments will be “required to understand the cost of implementing these projects and refine the benefits estimates”.

“This analysis concludes that there is substantial potential for AI adoption within the public sector, with the opportunity reaching multiple billions. GDS [the Government Digital Service] is currently working to strengthen the underlying methodology behind this analysis and develop the evidence base around the potential impact of AI on the Civil Service further,” the note said.

“We are working with relevant academics in the field to utilise the latest analytical methodologies and intend to publish peer-reviewed findings.”