The Government is being urged to deploy artificial intelligence (AI) to deliver change at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).
The Tony Blair Institute (TBI) has issued a report, Governing in the Age of AI: Reimagining the UK Department for Work and Pensions, where it details how even “the largest, most complex departments such as the DWP can be transformed” in the age of AI. It said embracing AI is necessary to “get to grips with the high costs and ineffectiveness of the DWP.”
The report contends that instead of a safety net, the welfare system run by the DWP “is more like a sticky spider’s web. Instead of receiving support when they need it and help to move forward, citizens find themselves trapped in a system that is slow, inefficient and does not tackle the root causes of need.”
However, it said the government has at its disposal a new set of tools, enabled by advances in AI, that can deliver change in the DWP.
“The day-to-day tasks of the DWP – those it shares with other departments, such as paperwork or policy design, and those unique to it, such as the operation of job centres – can all be performed faster, better and at less cost using AI,” it said.
The DWP is the second-largest government department by headcount (with 89,866 employees) and the largest by expenditure (more than £240 billion in FY2022-23). It employs 16 percent of the civil service and operates a massive estate, amounting to 20 percent of the government’s civil estate, at a cost of £500 million a year, with more than 600 job centres employing 16,500 work coaches.
“At the moment, the DWP’s operating model is bureaucratic and reliant on complicated forms and paperwork. It is labour-intensive, which means it struggles to respond to citizens’ changing needs, and beset by backlogs and delays. Fraud and error cost the department close to £9 billion a year,” said the report. “But a different model is possible.”
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Using the TBI for Global Change’s (TBI) database of almost 20,000 tasks ranked according to the potential impact of AI on them, the report found that the DWP workforce could free up as much as 40 percent of its time using AI tools. This is equivalent to a productivity gain of close to £1 billion a year.
Signature policies recommended
Using AI, the report said that DWP would be equipped to deliver three ambitious signature policies “to create security, opportunity and prosperity”.
- Better prioritisation and triage as well as improvements to application and eligibility-assessment processes would reduce backlogs for every type of benefit to zero, it said.
- It wants to see a digital employment assistant introduced for every claimant so they can find the right job or training to progress in their career and gain financial independence. This, said the report, can be achieved by personalising job and training advice, introducing virtual career clinics and matching opportunities more effectively to claimants’ circumstances and aspirations.
- Thirdly, faster identification of error and fraud, the use of AI-enabled policy-development and monitoring tools to improve design and coordination, and new ways of sharing information and tools across government would spur cross-governmental collaboration to drive economic growth and reduce the long-term cost of benefits.
“A well-functioning DWP would create more security, opportunity and prosperity for every citizen. The only way to achieve this is for the new government to embrace the opportunity of AI and show in practice what it means to govern well in the age of AI,” it said.
A study by Microsoft and Dr Chris Brauer, Goldsmiths from the University of London found that AI could save more than four hours per week on administrative tasks per staff member across all public sectors.
A report from the Alan Turing Institute in March suggested AI could help automate around 84 percent of repetitive transactions across 200 government services.
However, a survey by the National Audit Office (NAO) found that while 70 percent of government bodies were piloting and planning AI use cases, the technology is not yet widely used across government.
