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Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)

Speaking in the House of Lords on 1 September 2025

Debate

Civil Service: Artificial Intelligence Productivity Gains

Contribution

My Lords, I declare an interest as a former Minister for the Civil Service—although it was an awfully long time ago. The record shows that the biggest increase in output and productivity in the Civil Service and the biggest fall in numbers in modern times occurred between about 1972 and 1982. Of course, the driving force for that was not so much energy efficiency, although there were attempts to improve that, as removing whole industrial functions from the public sector. The Civil Service numbers fell from about 815,000 down to about 510,000 in 1982. That was an enormous cost. The lesson of that is that, if one really wants to increase productivity and slim the Civil Service, as I believe the Government do, there should be the removal of whole functions from the Civil Service—in this case, the industrial Civil Service—into the private sector.

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