UK.gov vows to hack through regulation to get benefit from AI Ignoring the skeptics and threat of an AI bubble, the UK government is pushing ahead with AI "sandboxing" and backing a raft of projects it claims could benefit from red-tape cutting. The moves come after it claimed civil service adoption of AI tools would save about 75,000 days of manual work each year. Reports have offered …
Apparently, in the UK there are 254 working days per year (on average).
Given that UK gov is publicly stating that of pseudo-AI will save the peons money, it means that 295 government employees will be facing the chop.
Also, where is the basis for this figure ? Why not 7.5 million working days ? Then you could pretend to justify over 250 thousand redundancies.
What ? Too soon ?
It depends what you're using the number for. Assuming the UK then.....
For how much things cost then it's 261 working days because holidays and sickness are fully paid by the co and hence recovered from projects.
For how many days staff will be available to work then most of the companies I've worked for assume 220 days, which is 260 -(25 days leave + 8 days bank holidays + sick leave at 2%-3%).
And if you're ready-reckoning in your head then it's 200 days.
Almost right - you still need to take account of sick days, training days etc. Lets be generous and call it 200 working days a year. So that's 375 full time equivalents.
Unfortunately I suspect the saving takes no account of anyone checking the AI hallucinated output for correctness.
I was curious as to how thinly these putative 75,000 days were to be spread.
As of 2025 the UK civil service employed around 516,159† FTE [Full Time Equivalent.]
So we are on average distributing 75 working days to 516 FTE civil servants over a year. So each FTE would save 75/516 (0.145) of a working day per year and with the most charitable of assumptions that a civil service working day was 8 hours that amounts to 1.16 hours or 69.8 minutes per working year.
For the average 254 working days per year that is 69.8/254 minutes [16.5 sec] per day per FTE which falls well short of the Lloyds 46 minutes per day.
In both cases a steaming load of codswallop. Just installing extra water coolers closer to the employees would save that or re·employ tea ladies.
As for naming the Gov.UK "copilot" Humphrey that is rather unfair to an extremely competent (at least by today's standards) public servant — de Pfeffel or Cummings might be fairer and more accurate.
† 2025-03-31 statistical bulletin: civil service statistics 2025
Our parish council has just been pushed to spend about £1800 a year on an AI package. Not sure if they actually took it up, but the maths really doesn't work.
Like most parish councils, there's one part-time civil servant who gets about £900 a month gross. I assume that's about 15 hours a week (20 would be minimum wage)
There's no way any AI is going to save them two months of work - and to be frank, even if it did "break even", I'd much rather my tax went to paying a wage to someone local than paying (presumably) Microsoft for a rebranded Copilot.
The really ridiculous part is that it seems to be the clerk pushing the council to do it. If it works then they'll be significantly worse off - why?
There are well over 500,000 people employed by the core civil service, excluding those in more distant quangos and public sectors bodies such as the NHS. They hope to save about 1 hour per year per person, and like most government targets, probably fail to meet it.
"The British Board of Film Classification gets nearly the same figure to build an AI tool for age classification of videos streamed on demand."
At last, a suitable use for AI. The film censors see all the films before they are cut and classified. Their job is to prevent us becoming depraved and corrupted by the naughty stuff. Unfortunately, by watcing all the most vile celluloid scenes, the censors become the most depraved and corrupt people in the country. So much so, that whenever the most vile and heinous crimes are committed, the police line up consists entirely of BBFC staff.
A LLM film censor, having been trained on all the video available on the internet, will start off depraved and corrupt and it's moral fibre will be at no further risk. No further generations of BBFC employees will be put at risk of a life of crime, drug use and sexual depravity, unless they really want to.
"Why is the UK government so obsessed with this?"
Arthur C. Clarke said "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" and I guess that if you're a politician or civil servant and haven't got a tech background or you simply lack curiousity then LLM (as I wish el Reg would call it) results can look like the magic. That's fine when it's your dad trying to find out why Norman Wisdom was so popular in Albania cos the consequences of it making stuff up aren't important, but if it's a civil servant (or a lawyer, doctor, policeman).......
"Why is the UK government so obsessed with this?"
Speaking as a civil servant, it is because they have nothing else to place their hope on to drive economic growth. Government fully recognise that UK growth has been declining slowly but steadily for fifty plus years, and that what growth there is hasn't been felt by the majority of taxpayers. Now whilst there's various contributors to that (rising taxes, complexity of taxation for business, offshoring of jobs, declining value of sterling) government don't want to address those - they'd rather reorganise local government and introduce ID cards. When they ask business why they are not investing business says "because you w******s keep on layering on more regulations, restrictions, and taxes". Government have thought what they can do, and in time honoured fashion it's not their fault. So they're demanding regulators reduce their demands on business and becoming more efficient, but with the starting premise is that government don't intend to remove any of the huge volume of shitty regulations sitting on the books. Regulators have said they're only doing what they were commissioned to do, under the acts of Parliament; so that means through PPE graduate logic, that everything will have to be solved by regulators becoming more efficient, and absent pay and incentives normal in the private sector it needs to be something else. Along comes "AI", and the hopeless lawyers, PPE grads of the cabinet seize upon that as a magic bullet.
So what you're seeing is a blame game:
"You naughty, naughty regulators, you're holding up growth!"
"We only do what you tell us."
"Well you're harming growth"
"Then you need to reform the law"
"No, we don't want to. If you were simply more efficient then none of this problem would exist!"
"We've spent years making sure that we don't impose major costs on business, what would you like to be different"
"I don't know! I've only ever been president of the student's union, it's not my job to come up with solutions. What about AI? I saw some great AI p**n the other day, that can do fantastic things, you should use that, it'll make everything better"
"So that's an instruction?"
"Yes".
They could always
- fairly tax the wealthy so they pay their fair share
- push the global fair tax on corporations agreement
- Staff HMRC so they can properly tackle tax evasion and questionable avoidance
- address higher rate tax relief on pensions
- stop wasting money
- insource/reshore IT and build a UK Sovereign Hosting and IT excellence function (like the CCTA used to be)
- accelerate green energy to get rid of gas distortion to electricity prices
- stop the haemorrhaging of Pharma with some investment behind it. Also Grabbing hold of mRNA that US has abandoned.
A few for starters.
"Milton Keynes Council has won a £781,817 portion of the pot to pilot the licensing of robots that could clean and de-ice pavements."
This doesn't allow for hi-tech maintenance and IT administration overheads, or the funds committed by Milton Keynes council to the project, or the ongoing annual running costs ...
You could just gainfully employ a few people with brooms on basic wage ... or is that a silly idea?
>” You could just gainfully employ a few people with brooms on basic wage ... or is that a silly idea?”
And those people would spend the money IN Milton Keynes…
I seem to remember a Labour Party political broadcast from before the election where they extolled the fact that £20 given to a typical person would circulate within the local economy creating jobs and wealth, yet the same £20 given to a very rich person would sit in an offshore bank account and do very little in comparison. I get the distinct feeling these AI investments are simply payments to very rich people…
The local value of an incremental job in the modern economy is very low, with most of the value dispersing our of the locale in no time at all, unless the job holder restricts their food purchasing to direct buying from local farmers, doesn't take holidays, buys no technology, buys no entertainment or content services. If the Labour party's lie were correct, then(for example) Wakes would have a self sustaining economy.
There is a truth in the concept of value loss, but it isn't the evil rich, it is at all levels the export of jobs and value through direct and indirect foreign purchases. So companies offshoring jobs whilst taking money from UK customers, companies buying subscriptions to Office365, people buying subscriptions to Netflix or Disney, people buying Chinese stuff via any online marketplace, buying cars made abroad, the purchase of any smartphone or tech hardware, people taking foreign holidays....
In the grand scheme of things, the last Labour government looked the other way as huge numbers of mid-value jobs were exported. Your idea of boosting the local economy with street sweeper jobs whilst we pay the Chinese to do so manufacturing, and India to do all coding and mid value accounting jobs....well, is a nation of street sweepers what you're going for, just So long as nobody gets rich?
That is basically what financial services do: get the transaction routed through London so that we can skim a small fee off it, with the volume of transactions those pennies pile up…, enabling the financial services sector from at least the 1990s be a major part of our exports.
So there are now robots deicing the pavements instead of people, but there will still be people needed to keep an eye on them, pull them back up curbs they have fallen off, etc. Without a 'supervisor' how long until those robots get vandalised or stolen? I'd give it five minutes, even in Milton Keynes, most of which is a fairly civilised place.
Milton Keynes has had dog size delivery robots for several years and they don’t suffer theft and vandalism much. When they do then it’s a big local news story.
The biggest problem for Starship robots in MK is people not using them because Deliveroo etc are cheaper and offer more retailers and range.
a few people with brooms
I think Wiccans price themselves a bit higher than the basic wage - the haughty besoms.
Actually have you recently seen anyone under 50 using a broom properly ? Or a garden rake ?
I do concede for a scythe that is mere fantasy except for the bony chap who habitually speaks in capitals.
>” Actually have you recently seen anyone under 50 using a broom properly ? Or a garden rake ?”
For street cleaning etc. MK uses ride on cleaners, so no need to learn how to use a broom.
As for garden rakes, they are far too dangerous to permit someone to use without training(*) :)
(*) I find it interesting trying to hire stuff these days and find the amount of equipment that I used years back now cannot be hired unless you produce a relevant training certificate.
@AC
I used* to use a scythe to maintain a "mini meadow" area in our garden, it's a technique that is relatively easily mastered, though that needs a scythe that is a good "fit" for your build (it's not just a trivial height matter either, leg & arm length can affect what is the best fit). It was quite therapeutic (though as with using alternative of a strimmer, still had to be on the look out for wildlife so had to focus)
* No longer have that "mini meadow" area that needed a couple of scythe cuts a year as what was once mini meadow is no more due to increased tree & shrub cover (from tree / hedging saplings we planted) - so now habitat change to more of a tree / shrub area with far less vigorous plant understorey (as trees & shrubs cut out a lot of light so growth of ground level plants much reduced) than a mini meadow.
Can we assume that the American spelling ("skeptics", "labor", "plowing" instead of "sceptics", "labour" and "ploughing" respectively) in the article means that it was written by an American (possibly AI-aided) author?
Oh, but according to his biography:
"Lindsay Clark has been writing about business technology for more than 20 years, starting at PC Week in the late 1990s. He went on to manage the news team at Computer Weekly in the early 2000s. His career was waylaid by music, which merited brief session appearances on BBC radio shows including those hosted by Mark Riley, Janice Long, and Whispering Bob Harris. As a freelance journalist, he has written for The Financial Times, The Guardian, and a list of B2B titles as long as your arm. He joined The Register in February 2020 to cover database software and other enterprise IT technologies."
What spell checker did you use?
(I'm a grumpy old English git, today, it seems.)
Chancellor of the Exchequer
I was wondering which government cockwomble/twatpoppet was the current incumbent and how Rachel from accounts was involved. Caught up.
All really rather dismal and on a bad day can hardly be much better than listening to Vogon† poetry.
† But not that of William McGonagall.
I have noticed that El Reg refers to our MPs as “lawmakers” which is also a (uniquely?) American term. It’s certainly not the correct term for an MP (and I’m leaving out any refs to what one might want to refer to our esteemed parliamentary representatives - but it’s certainly not “lawmakers”)
Bloody annoying
Ah. It seems you may be relatively new here.
If the article has been written about 3-4 years ago it would have had the correct spellings
But, about 3-4 years ago, El Reg decided it would be a great idea to go all “American” in order to (if I recall correctly) “be more international”
How this move was more “international” rather than just more “American” is totally beyond me or many of the Reg’s readership that have been reading this ostensibly British publication for the last …oooo …30 years.
It’s really bloody annoying though
(and I can’t help thinking it may have been the catalyst for the increasingly obnoxious, loud right-wing posts that have been swamping the comments of late)
Yep. Really bloody annoying
> possibly also why "Offbeat" (especially BOFH) has disappeared from my email notification.
I noticed the daily summary email go all strange and Big texted a while back...along with the loss of the "sections"......I much preferred the old format...
Even the title has UK.gov would make the UK a state of the US. I assume it is actually gov.uk or go.uk.
I vaguely recall from ancient sendmail.cf rules that FQDNs in JANET were arse about†.
† When you try to tell the youth of today about uucp, bitnet, csnet... — they don't believe you.
Why do we insist on inventing tools to replace ourselves rather than augment ourselves to do the things that we find exceptionally difficult?
Using AI to identify ways to manage epilepsy makes sense. It's a problem we simply have not solved. Even using it to look at the brain scans that are done to understand the form of epilepsy since this apparently takes months to do.
But no, we need to use it to write emails (I can only assume that more emails will then be sent), use Sora to create scene from 'It ain't half hot mum' with the actors replaced by babies.
And yes, I'm sure someone somewhere is going the right thing with it, but honestly, as a percentage of workload, it will be miniscule.
We don't insist on replacing our jobs, thats the way the current crop of AI companies are selling the benefit of their "products" to company bosses & government ministers.
( I was going to add that the latest move to LLM-generated porn was for a different customer base, but... )
The UK's headlong charge into AI comes after separate study published earlier this month found 75,000 days of manual work each year might be saved with the adoption of an AI tool designed to speed up analysis of feedback from government consultations.
WIWAL 'manual work' was digging up roads (navvies), collecting rubbish (dustmen) etc.
Now it seems to mean 'pushing paper around'.
Hmm, if they were processing 50,000 responses in 22 hours by hand then they were spending just over 1.5 seconds on each one ( or 15 secs if 10 people involved, etc ). So just enough time to count them as for or against the topic, but not to register any nuances or significant comments, no matter how common. Sounds about right for a government consultation exercise.
I doubt whether the inevitable errors from using an LLM to perform the same analysis would affect the overall summary - I'm slightly surprised it took as long as 2 hours to do it.
What sort of work are they defining as 'manual'?
From my time as a civil servant, manual work ment lifting bloody great boxes of equipment onto trucks, then assembling it/showing various military types howto assemble it, or indeed making the damn stuff in the first place to whatever deranged design landed on my bench/desk/sleeping pallet(we never played cards there... cards were played in the bunker behind the compressor house)
Perhaps they mean automating what the manual workers of old did ... sadly we've already done that and sacked those workers.
Ahh..... maybe they plan to get rid of the paper pushers(thats manual work) who infest every government department and slow all work down to a crawl.
I'm old enough to remember all the way back to the beginning of September:
UK government trial of M365 Copilot finds no clear productivity boost
You'd think that might give them pause for thought. But no, let's carry on with this AI nonsense regardless.
No, it's about LLMs, and Copilot is the one that gov.uk are actually using.
Sadly over the last couple of years "AI" in the press and common parlance has come to mean either "Large Language Model" like Copilot, or "Text to Image" like Stable Diffusion.
Much to the annoyance of the people working in the multitude of other AI and machine learning fields.
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