TL;DR
The Government Digital Service has published its plan for lifting AI and data capability in the Strategic Authorities of England, part of the Digital Devolution programme the Prime Minister announced on 21 August. The next three months bring workshops, readiness diagnostics and skills schemes; the destination is a two-year strategy folded into the Devolution White Paper still to come. The diagnosis underneath it is refreshingly unglamorous — the barrier is not model access, it is that neighbouring bodies serving identical residents cannot exchange records.
The problem GDS says it found
Conversations with data and digital leaders at these authorities surfaced information sharing as the dominant obstacle. Bodies covering the same population frequently cannot move records between them, which makes joined-up services and targeted support harder to deliver. Digital maturity also varies widely from one authority to the next.
Appetite for AI was described as strong, but with a caveat the authorities raised themselves: organisational capacity, workforce skills and governance all have to mature alongside any adoption. That is a more sober framing than most public sector AI announcements manage.
The practical response is a set of data access workshops, readiness diagnostics run locally, and reusable templates for sharing agreements intended to cut the friction between Whitehall and mayoral bodies. GDS will also work through specific “blocked data journeys” — cases where information cannot be obtained or used — with that strand supporting what the Milburn Review recommended on moving young people into work and training.
On skills, the programme spans a new AI Places Accelerator, Get Tech Certified, AI Engineers in Residence, and Skills Accelerators covering data science for councils, plus work on cyber security and data governance. Writing jointly, directors general Emily Middleton and Christine Bellamy said stronger foundations would let authorities move faster and concentrate on outcomes for their communities.
Looking forward
Eighteen Mayoral Strategic Authorities are expected to participate, with five to ten civil servants embedded in each on a pilot basis, every secondment lasting six to nine months.
Two things are worth flagging. First, despite the “devolution” label this covers English mayoral authorities, not the devolved nations — the Scottish Government published its own separate public sector AI guidance today, through an entirely different route. Second, the emphasis on interoperability and common standards is an implicit admission that a decade of local digital investment produced estates that cannot talk to each other. Suppliers should expect procurement to start asking about that.