DCMS loses government data policy to the Cabinet Office
Summary
In a move indicating a tightening of grip by 10 Downing Street, Boris Johnson has announced that responsibility for government use of data has transferred from the Department for Digital Culture Media and Sport (DCMS) to the Cabinet Office. At the time, former GDS leading lights, such as Mike Bracken and Stephen Foreshew-Cain, lamented the move as betokening, in Bracken’s words, the “end of central UK authority for digital, data and technology”. It is hoped they will have “expert technical expertise including in data engineering and statistical and machine learning technique [sic]”. At the start of 2020, Cummings issued a call for “assorted weirdos” to join him in using data science to change the ways the UK state works. In Whitehall bureaucracy terms, the government has indeed rethought its relationship with data, but surely not in a manner that Dowden would have anticipated.