Yes, civil servant: Meet Humphrey, the UK government’s AI package for officials
The artificial intelligence revolution is here. From using ChatGPT to search for information to OtterAI for transcribing and summarising meetings, many workplaces around the world have embraced new digital tools.
This includes governments, where leading administrations like Singapore have developed AI tools to answer parliamentary questions and chatbots to help citizens have their queries answered quicker.
In the UK government, AI progress has been slower. Global Government Forum’s (GGF) Digital Leaders 2024 report finds that, in the words of one interviewee: “It’s like we’re driving a car with one foot very firmly pressed down on the accelerator and one foot pressed down on the brake”, with efforts on developing tools – encouraged by ministers who see it as a way to streamline bureaucracy – co-existing with work on AI safety.
This might be described as a real dilemma in how governments can balance the excitement of ministers around the potential for artificial intelligence with how to manage the technology’s use in government.
As one government observer put it: “[W]hile it has been government policy to regard policy as a responsibility of ministers and administration as a responsibility of officials, the questions of administrative policy can cause confusion between the policy of administration and the administration of policy, especially when responsibility for the administration of the policy of administration conflicts, or overlaps with, responsibility for the policy of the administration of policy.”
This government observer is, in case it is not obvious, Sir Humphrey Appleby, the fictional senior civil servant from the British television comedy series Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister.
Played for laughs as the archetypal government bureaucrat, Humphrey is also a master of the structures of government in the show. So, when the UK government announced that its new AI tools for civil servants would be called Humphrey, it is perhaps not as counter-intuitive as it might sound.
The package of tools was set out at an event at the Government Digital Service as part of the launch of the blueprint for a modern government, where officials demonstrated some of the tools that will soon be available to civil servants.
The tools that make up Humphrey are: Consult, for analysing consultation responses; Parlex, to help policymakers search through and analyse decades of debate from the Houses of Parliament; Minute, a secure transcription service for meetings, producing customisable summaries in the formats that public servants need; Lex, which helps officials research the law by providing analysis and summaries of relevant laws for specific, complex issues; and Redbox, a generative AI tool designed to help civil servants with day-to-day tasks like summarising policy and preparing briefings.
Redbox is already available for civil servants, and GGF’s Digital Leaders 2024 report used it to summarise interviews with senior government leaders as part of the report’s analysis.
Read more: New UK digital services plan aims to ‘transform the relationship between citizen and state’
Consult, Minute and Connect – tools for civil servants explained
The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) said some of these tools are ready for use today, with the full suite to be made available to all civil servants soon. Global Government Forum attended the event and was able to get a demonstration of some of these tools and hear from the civil servants who have been involved in their development.
Consult, for example, was hailed as a way to massively streamline how the government analyses consultation responses. According to science secretary Peter Kyle, who spoke at the launch, it works much faster and cheaper than a human being.
He explained: “We do thousands of consultations in government, and it takes an enormous amount of time. Why? Because there’s hundreds of years of legislation and regulation that you need to consult with, to see what advice to put to ministers about what is possible, what is impossible and the like.
“So this particular tool works 1,000 times faster and 400 times cheaper than a human being does. That is the technology that we are bringing into government and deploying on behalf of the citizens, the people of this country.”
Consult was developed by i.AI, the government incubator for AI which is now part of the Government Digital Service.
According to the briefing on the tool, public consultations are a critical part of the process of making laws, but cost around £80m a year. A consultation attracting 30,000 responses requires a team of around 25 analysts for three months to analyse the data and write the report, and often consultations can receive double that number. The aim, therefore, is to develop a tool that can accelerate this process, meaning that civil service analysts and decision-makers are able to make better and earlier use of the consultation responses.
The Consult tool uses AI and data science techniques to automatically extract patterns and themes from the responses, and turns them into dashboards for policymakers. The eventual goal is for computers to do what they are best at: find patterns and analyse large amounts of data, freeing up public servants to use this for policy development.
Officials designing the tool told GGF that it has been trained using previous consultations. Pilots were conducted in the Department for Health and Social Care, running in parallel with their existing consultation process. A further pilot is now being planned by the Department for Work and Pensions before Consult is deployed at scale across government.
Read more: UK prime minister reveals plan for AI to ‘turbocharge every single element’ of government
The event also included a demonstration of Minute, an AI transcription service that produces summaries of government meetings in a secure way.
i.AI says that civil servants spend hours processing and summarising meetings, interviews and appointments – and while some civil service meetings have a minute-taker, most don’t, meaning that public servants are often required to do two jobs at once: be fully present in the conversation while documenting all key points of the interaction, ready to feed into a host of structured formats afterwards.
Therefore, Minute will transcribe and summarise meetings classified up to the Official-Sensitive security rating, with features including speaker recognition and the creation of summaries in the official Cabinet Office style for minutes.
Minute is currently undergoing trials across several public sector organisations.
The event also showcased Connect, a tool designed to be used by policymakers to help the government progress its mission to make Britain a clean energy superpower. The tool is designed to help the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) better understand how to manage demand for connections to the electricity grid by new developments, by allowing for it to test different approaches to agreeing grid connections.
Currently, projects can often wait for more than five years to be connected to the grid, with the traditional model allotting connections on a ‘first-come, first-served’ basis. But – according to the government – these low entry requirements have resulted in a surge in speculative applications, meaning a single project submits multiple applications to improve chances of connecting.
These so-called ‘zombie’ projects tie up capacity, and i.AI has therefore examined the opportunity to better optimise this process. It concluded there is a potential £75bn economic benefit if grid connection times can be reduced to six months.
Connect is therefore focused on leveraging the power of AI to more efficiently assign renewable energy projects to the grid. It uses matching algorithms and other machine learning techniques to provide new insights for policymakers on how to manage the connections queue, allowing them to test the impact of different policy decisions and visualise this in a dashboard.
i.AI is now working with DESNZ to use these insights to model the optimisation for grid connections. Connect is intended to allow decision-makers to better strategically plan and react to the changing needs of the national energy system.
Global Government Forum will be taking an in-depth look at various aspects of the blueprint for a modern government this week and sharing further insight from the launch event. Sign up to the Global Government Forum newsletter to make sure you receive all the articles in next week’s Digital and Data Monitor
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