The UK government has faced criticism after reshuffling ministerial responsibilities for science, technology and digital government under new prime minister Andy Burnham, splitting a once-unified brief across multiple departments and scrapping the dedicated technology minister role. Dame Chi Onwurah, chair of the Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee, had pressed ministers for clarity after the July changes left portfolios undefined, and a subsequent joint letter from three departments has done little to reassure critics, instead exposing what the author calls confused and incoherent thinking about where technology policy belongs.

Responsibilities are now scattered awkwardly: space policy sits with Baroness Lloyd of Effra across the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade (BIST) and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), alongside her existing cyber, regulatory reform and insolvency duties, despite £7.8 billion in cross-government space spending. The old Department for Science, Innovation and Technology has effectively lost its "technology" and "department" identity, with digital policy folded into DCMS alongside culture and sport, while a separate Minister of State for AI, Kanishka Narayan, holds a joint Cabinet Office and BIST role. The piece argues this fragmentation ignores the historical links between technology and scientific research — citing the Manchester Mark 1, the World Wide Web and DeepMind — and risks leaving digital government policy without clear ownership.