“This is not a role for someone who wants to preserve traditional Whitehall ways of working,” read a recent job ad for the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology’s new director general for digital products. “It is a role for someone who wants to help change them: working with agility, reducing unnecessary bureaucracy, drawing on expertise from inside and outside government, and building coalitions that can deliver real change.”
Written by Emran Mian, these words also reflect how the permanent secretary sees his own role. “Government does need to hold on to its strengths: accountability, rigour, stewardship of public money. But if we default to process as the way of managing everything, we slow ourselves down and discourage initiative,” he tells CSW.
He points to the AI Security Institute – a research organisation that grew out of DSIT’s Frontier AI Taskforce – and progress on Sovereign AI, a venture fund for investing in AI startups, as examples of this approach in action. Those initiatives, along with digital products like the GOV.UK app, have “required us to move quickly and trust teams to get on with delivery”, he says. “Moving at that speed does involve a degree of risk. But, in my view, that risk is justified where we’re confident that the outcomes we’re seeking to achieve are sufficiently important.”
Mian is speaking to CSW after nearly a year as perm sec and nearly two years since it was announced that DSIT would absorb the Government Digital Service and become “the partner and standard bearer for government departments as it supports them to use technology across areas like energy, health, policing and education”. The transfer of 1,226 staff was completed last summer – increasing DSIT’s headcount by more than half.
Mian says all this change was the “main reason why [he] wanted to lead this department and why it feels just a total privilege to have the opportunity to do so”.
“We’ve got such a positive agenda,” he says. “We’re at this quite special technology inflection point where we are now able to do things digitally for citizens that weren’t possible 10 years ago... And then the emerging technologies that other parts of the department work on, such as AI and quantum, are at really exciting points in their development.”
“People are drawn to the mission that we’ve got and they can see that we’re building something quite special here” – Emran Mian
Mian had been a director general at DSIT for two years before becoming perm sec. “So I wasn’t starting from scratch – but I knew some parts of the organisation much better than others,” he says. Over last summer, he and his leadership team asked staff across the department to share their experiences of working there. Feedback from more than 800 officials showed “there was a lot of pride in the mission, but also a clear message about how we work: a desire for more trust in expertise, more room to experiment and more clarity on the impact of what we do”.
Out of this “listening summer” grew three values: expert together, inventive and impact driven. “They aren’t abstract statements; they’re a distillation of what colleagues told us they wanted DSIT to feel like in practice,” Mian says. “The real test, of course, is whether they change behaviour day to day. That’s the work we’re now focused on.”
As well as leading the department, Mian is the first perm sec to lead the government digital, data and technology profession – putting it on a par with its policy and operational delivery counterparts. He has pivoted away from previous plans to recruit a government chief digital officer – who would also be DSIT second perm sec and lead GDS – and introduced a “collective leadership model” for the profession. It’s important to have “really clear, cross-government leadership of what we’re trying to do on digital”, he says. “There are big, big digital services being run elsewhere in government, and we need to do this stuff together.” While he has a policy rather than technical background, he is exercising his role “in conjunction with a set of directors general” in DSIT and the large operational departments, who form the profession’s executive committee.
He says there has been a “really, really positive response from the wider digital profession” to the new leadership model. “I think people looked across that group and saw people like them, and also saw the value of having someone like me who can do a bit more of the translation and can represent the digital profession at the top table.”
And digital expertise among DSIT’s DGs and directors has grown “very, very significantly” in the last year, Mian says. Joining him for the interview are Christine Bellamy, the former chief exec of GDS who previously led digital transformation and delivery at the BBC, and Emily Middleton, a former partner at Public First who led the design of the London Office of Technology and Innovation. They are directors general for digital products and digital transformation respectively, on an interim basis as the roles are new. “We’ve got a much broader and much deeper leadership team than we’ve had before,” Mian says.
Attracting the best tech talent is a high priority. “If you talk to any founder in the tech sector, they say: ‘Spend as much of your time as possible on talent.’ And that’s something I’ve been trying to take to heart,” the perm sec says. He rattles off a list of hires that includes government chief data officer Aimee Smith, who joined from the Metropolitan Police last year, and ex-Monzo exec Tristan Thomas, who heads up DSIT’s new CustomerFirst unit.
“We’ve got four years of money ahead of us. That is unusual in government, to have that runway ahead of you to go on and get stuff done” – Emran Mian
“People are drawn to the mission that we’ve got and they can see that we’re building something quite special here,” Mian says. He says GDS’s mission in particular “really connects with people”. “It’s a place in government where you can work a bit differently to other places in government; it has a powerful story behind it. So I think that is really working. And it’s working not just in London, but in Manchester.”
The department is looking to expand its Manchester office – where Bellamy is based – “really significantly” in the coming years. Bellamy says plans are “less about a single, immediate expansion and more about a deliberate, long‑term commitment to Manchester as one of our core digital and technology hubs”. The city opens up access to “different talent pools and different ways into the department”, Mian adds.
These efforts have been aided by a funding boost in the 2025 Spending Review, which allocated the department £1.2bn for “cross-cutting digital priorities”. “We’ve got four years of money ahead of us. That is unusual in government, to have that runway ahead of you to go on and get stuff done,” Mian says.
DSIT also has on its side a “quite unusual combination of real political drive and commitment on digital government”, he adds. Last year, Keir Starmer said he wanted 10% of civil servants to be working in the DDaT and cyber professions by 2030 (up from around 5.5% in 2025). Middleton says that “sent a really powerful message” to staff and external specialists that their skills are valued in the civil service.
A “massive push” on training will continue over the next few years in a bid to make working in government as compelling as possible, she adds. DSIT has also been trialling programmes to help digital specialists keep their skills up to date, including the “phenomenally popular” AI Accelerator, which teaches data scientists machine learning engineering skills.
It has also been expanding its early-talent programmes. “We’ve got some brilliant people that used to be primary school teachers or bank managers… learning how to be tech architects or coders or [develop] other skills that are in shorter supply in government,” Middleton says.
And work is continuing with the Treasury on pay frameworks. “We are regularly looking at: what’s the median pay for folks within different specialisms in the wider market? How can we make sure that government’s competitive? We work with departments on that, which is really important,” she says.
Within DSIT, Mian says pay has been “a real constraint” as it competes with the private sector. “If people have to leave in order to progress or be recognised for their skills, we lose both expertise and diversity of background.” Addressing that is also “part of the work” to remove barriers to diversity in the department, he says (see box).
“Creating the space for conversations on racism and diversity matters. So does being prepared to sit with a degree of discomfort when they do happen” – Emran Mian
Emran Mian on ethnic diversity
Writing for CSW in 2019 – then a director general at the Department for Education – Mian said he was tired of being the only non-white person in meetings and that the civil service had not been “bold about creating a platform for change”.
The perm sec says he still feels that way, seven years on. “The overall picture has improved over time but it isn’t yet reflected consistently at the most senior levels,” he says. “The number of permanent secretaries and directors general from minority-ethnic backgrounds remains low relative to the wider civil service.” Mian is co-race champion for the civil service and says a lot of his focus in that role is on “supporting that progression in a more structured and consistent way”.
He is still sometimes the only non‑white person in the room. “That experience is part of what keeps the issue live for me,” he says.
Ethnic-minority representation is stronger at the entry and mid-levels, but progression “isn’t always as even as it needs to be”, Mian says. “It’s also about being honest that this isn’t something that fixes itself. You need sustained attention from senior leaders and you need to be willing to look carefully at how decisions are made and who is in the room when they are.”
In his 2019 piece, Mian urged his colleagues to ditch the “halo mentality” around race: thinking that as public servants and “good people”, “it can’t be that we are racist, can it?” He said he had been surprised when Jonathan Slater, then DfE perm sec, “was willing to challenge the organisation and ask that question”.
“What struck me at the time was the willingness to say something that most people would instinctively resist – to move the conversation away from pipelines and processes and towards what might actually be happening in people’s judgements and behaviours,” he says. “I remember having the same initial reaction as others; a sense that this couldn’t really apply to colleagues you respect. But when you then hear the lived experience – the assumptions people make, often without realising – it becomes harder to dismiss.
“That’s carried through into how I try to lead. Creating the space for those conversations to happen matters; but so does being prepared to sit with a degree of discomfort when they do, and to take seriously what you hear.”
CSW asks how the integration of GDS into DSIT has gone so far. “I can’t honestly say it’s gone 100% smoothly,” Mian says. “As with any merger or organisational change, you expect there to be some things to work through and that’s true here as well.”
But he says there are “good connections between the culture that we want in DSIT and the culture that we’ve already got in GDS”. The “win-win” for GDS – and for the Space Agency and Building Digital UK, which DSIT has also absorbed in the last year – is that “we become… not just a policy and strategy department but a department that builds things”, he says. “The GDS culture is massively important for that. That’s a really positive thing for the organisation, but there definitely have been some challenges for colleagues.”
Bellamy adds that GDS, “at heart, is a dynamic organisation” whose designers, engineers, data scientists and technologists build, test and run live services every day. “For that to work, they need an environment that removes friction rather than adding it.”
“In the beginning, I think we probably felt like an operational department and a policy department,” Bellamy says. “What we’ve done… is really scratch at that problem to make sure that we’ve got one DSIT.” That has meant aligning expectations for areas such as agile delivery, risk management and assurance, while GDS needed to help DSIT officials understand some of the critical services it runs, such as emergency alerts, GOV.UK and Notify, the text notification service.
She says the department has a “snagging list” – “but a year later, we’ve made that transition”. Today, Bellamy describes DSIT as a “lovely melting pot where you’re starting to not see the breaks in the organisation, but you can see the expertise”. There are regular “show and tells” and a weekly all-hands meeting. “We really see all of the marks that people are making across government and with services,” she says.
“What we get to do now is think about the problem right from the citizen, all the way through to how the UK runs,” she continues. One example of this is the launch of the digital driving licence later this year, which will be accessible via the GOV.UK Wallet on people’s phones. GDS would never have brought digital driving licences to fruition on its own, Bellamy says, “because it would not have had the policy background to be able to get that across the line”.
The roadmap for digital government, published in January, outlined a series of products and initiatives to transform government digital services by 2030, building on last year’s blueprint for modern digital government. “But we only get to 2030 if every single year, we deliver good outcomes,” Bellamy says. The next couple of years “will be transformative for the citizen experience”, she adds. “We can already see in our data that’s starting to make a difference.”
The GOV.UK app, for example, is now in half a million people’s pockets and should provide access to more services over the next year – such as benefits updates, thanks to work with DWP. Some 80% of app users have customised their homepage, with over 50% returning to use it multiple times. “There is a strong appetite for what comes next: seeing it as a single front door to government that will make everyday interactions simpler over time,” Bellamy says. The day before our interview, DSIT launched GOV.UK Chat, an interface for the app that she says will “fundamentally make it easier for people to get what they need from the state”.
Mian says the move to the app represents a new paradigm shift – the last one being the creation of GOV.UK in 2012. “I think a lot of people think 2012 was the moment for GDS,” he says. “I resist that on one level – GDS has been doing lots of good stuff since 2012 – but… there’s a grain of truth in it.”
And the changes won’t just affect citizens. Behind the “single front door” for citizens, services are often still run on individual departmental systems. The paradigm shift “on the techie side”, Mian says, is creating horizontal, cross-departmental systems that serve everyone – such as One Login, the government-wide login system that is now used by more than 120 services.
Middleton says the roadmap is “not a static document”. “A digital practitioner knows you need to adapt your plans and your delivery in response to changing user expectations, needs and the environment around you,” she says – allowing for “transparent and iterative” progress updates.
One of the “fastest evolving” areas of the roadmap, Middleton says, is AI. “That’s probably the area where we are going to see the most change, as the technology evolves rapidly.” An update to the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee in April said DSIT was closing some internal AI pilots that had been “superseded by more modern, widely available platforms”. It would focus instead on developing “frontline ‘big bets’” – namely Consult, which analyses consultation responses, and Extract, which digitises historical planning documents – and tackling “deep-rooted issues in areas like social housing and education”.
To this end, DSIT is working with other ministries on “ambitious” test-and-learn AI initiatives, including one with the Department for Education to help close the attainment gap for secondary school pupils, Middleton says. “These are not only demonstrator projects; they’re helping us identify the platform capabilities and design patterns and delivery approaches that we’ll need right across government to scale AI effectively.”
She says DSIT has learned important lessons from the pilots that have ended. “Tools like Redbox, Minute and Parlex… were critical in building government’s own AI capabilities and demonstrating the difference that AI can make to everyday working life,” she says. Some are being used elsewhere in government, including the parliamentary intelligence tool Parlex, and Minute, a secure AI transcription and summary tool developed by the Incubator for Artificial Intelligence that Middleton says “demonstrated a significant reduction in administrative burden”. And since the Ministry of Justice adapted Minute for its “wildly popular” Justice Transcribe tool, note‑taking time at the MoJ has halved.
“One important lesson we’ve learned from these pilots is the importance of co‑designing with frontline users,” Middleton says. At the MoJ, this meant working closely with probation officers “to make sure tools like Justice Transcribe fit into real operational workflows and produce outputs people can trust and use day to day”, she explains. “Here, we’ve found that the biggest gains have come where AI is used in such a way that it frees up time for staff to focus on professional judgement and direct engagement – ways that also make jobs more rewarding.”
These lessons are shared via the AI Knowledge Hub – an online repository of resources to enable public servants to learn from each other.
Alongside the citizen-facing products and tools for public servants, a lot of work is happening to change the operating environment in government to make it easier and faster to deliver. “[That’s] something I’m really passionate about because we’re only going to keep those talented people, and we’re only going to make the progress that we need to make at the pace that we need to, if we can adapt how we fund, procure, govern and assure digital in a way that’s fit for the modern era. So you’ll see updates on that side of things, too,” Middleton says.
Experts CSW spoke to for this issue raised concerns about legacy systems and fragmented and inconsistent data being barriers to AI, with one saying there is “an absolute rat’s nest of practice across government”. Middleton acknowledges these are “real challenges… [that] will make it harder to scale some AI tools as quickly or as effectively as we might like”.
One of the digital blueprint’s five outcomes for GDS is “firmer foundations”. “We know we need to make government’s tech infrastructure more interoperable, more secure, and more resilient,” Middleton says. “While the challenges around data are real, there is now a much stronger, more systematic focus on improving data quality, strengthening governance and making data genuinely usable across government.”
This is just one area where DSIT is aiming to provide the “clear, cross-government leadership” Mian is so keen on. As the perm sec says: “We are not doing it all from DSIT; it’s really a team effort.”