In February, Barnsley was named the UK’s first government-backed “Tech Town”. The initiative sits at the intersection of two defining domestic priorities: using AI to modernise the state; and granting greater power and responsibility at a regional level. If place-based growth is to become our engine of national renewal, might Barnsley serve as a tech-driven attempt to put such theory into practice?
A DSIT spokesperson said the pilot would “blaze a trail for the rest of the UK to follow”, with lessons from the former mining town in South Yorkshire shaping how AI is rolled out nationally. The plan covers a variety of AI tools in different contexts: from speeding up NHS triage and outpatient care to improving pupil outcomes in schools. The scheme also aims to provide free AI training for residents and upgrades to local digital infrastructure, Wi-Fi and cybersecurity.
Barnsley already has a digital campus, Seam, home to 33 businesses. This is being expanded into the National Centre for Digital Technologies, an institution charged with tackling “bespoke challenges through collaboration between industry, academia and the public sector”, and helping local businesses incorporate AI into their operations.
Leveraging technology as a tool for place-based renewal fits with Andy Burnham’s emphasis on devolution and place-based growth. However, this is not Barnsley’s first flirtation with such ambitious tech initiatives. Indeed, it’s not even the first time it has received the “tech town” name.
Between 2015 and 2018, Barnsley was a flagship member of ‘TechTown’, an EU-funded programme exploring how smaller towns could reinvent themselves around the digital economy.
That effort drew on European structural funds – resources no longer available to a town where just under 70 per cent of votes were cast in favour of leaving Europe in 2016. The world looks a very different place a decade on. At a time when councils face severe financial pressures, and new tech platforms bring the very future of our economies and public services into question, the tech town initiative asks a fundamental, urgent question: can AI help local government deliver better services with fewer resources?
Barnsley will be assisted in these efforts on a pro-bono basis by four US tech giants: Microsoft, Google, Cisco and Adobe. The council has also received a £500,000 “seed fund” to help finance the first 18 months of the initiative, part of which is being directed to test approaches to AI adoption in public services.
Last month, the government launched a £200m fund to accelerate AI adoption and to train workers in digital skills. Of this, £53m has been ringfenced for separate initiatives, including expanding the Tech Town initiative. Cisco has signed a Memorandum of Understanding to explore ways to further support the programme. eBay, meanwhile, will pilot place-based AI training in Barnsley.
There were no new contracts signed in order to bring the four US big tech firms onto the Tech Town pilot, according to DSIT. Instead, work has been in-kind and leveraged via existing partnerships with these organisations.
Wendy Popplewell, executive director of core services at Barnsley council, told Spotlight the case for AI in Barnsley’s public services is about survival.
Barnsley’s social workers, she says, are already operating beyond capacity. “If they’re sitting and taking notes, and they put their head down, it’s really difficult to look at what’s going on and to use [their] skills,” she continues. AI that reduces administrative burden, she says, could genuinely improve outcomes in stretched public services.
David Robinson, service director for information and digital services at Barnsley council, hopes the success metric for Barnsley goes beyond improving public services, helping to equip its population for a changing labour market. “There’s an absolute loop that we can close […] enabling citizens in general to be more confident around AI so that they can basically pitch into a modern job market as well,” he says.
Robinson paints the town’s embrace of AI as part of a wider economic shift. “We’re in the middle of another industrial revolution here, and the people that come out of it best will be the people that embrace it and work with it, not against it.”
Barnsley council’s use of AI tools sits within existing data codes of conduct, which sets strict rules on how residents’ information can be accessed and used.
“Just because [we’ve] got AI, it doesn’t mean you’ve got any other permissions or access that you wouldn’t have had before,” Popplewell says. But when asked who owns the data generated by those tools – the council or the technology companies providing them – neither she nor other officials spoken to by Spotlight could give a definitive answer.
With many AI tools, whether formally or informally, already embedded in day-to-day operations, questions have been raised regarding how transformative this scheme can be for to local government operations.
Alex Chalmers, a finance and technology writer, argues the £500,000 seed fund – or around £2 per resident – is “emblematic” of the incoherence of the government’s skills agenda. “It’s a very small amount of money,” he tells Spotlight. “I believe this kind of distributed for nakedly political reasons. It’s not going to move the dial.”
A DSIT spokesperson rejected this characterisation: “This pilot will deliver on the town’s ambitions to put AI to work in overhauling public services and business, blazing a trail for the rest of the UK to follow. What we learn here will shape how we roll out AI across the UK – making sure every community sees the benefits.”
The extent of those benefits, at least at present, are also open to question. Kevin Fenning, fellow at the Local Policy Innovation Partnership Hub (LPIP) at the University of Birmingham, examined how AI is being adopted in local government. Of the 101 case studies he reviewed, only 44 had any quantified AI benefits. And even fewer, 14, had monetised AI benefits.
Fenning argues local authorities are publishing efficiency claims without showing concrete evidence such efficiencies exist. “We have, at best, some numbers that are sort of unverifiable,” he says. “They sound plausible. But if you’ve saved 60 per cent of a staff member’s time, how much more time does it take for them to check what the AI has produced? We don’t really understand that.” The government’s own national blueprint for AI in local government, he argues, rests on evidence that is, by his assessment, largely unverifiable.
He is also concerned about the dependency on vast technology companies in places such as Barnsley. A report published by the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee this month calls on the government to set a plan to achieve sovereignty in artificial intelligence, warning that failure to do so risks leaving the country dependent on foreign partners who may not act in the UK’s interests.
“How do you make sure that you procure the right thing?,” he asks. “How do you balance the desire to be customised in the right way for your own organisation, with the risk of being locked into a particular vendor?”
Barnsley council does display good practices, according to the LPIP report, including an information governance policy requiring human review of all AI-generated content, and enhanced rules for high-risk settings such as children’s social care. But Fenning argues that strong internal governance only goes so far when the tools themselves are owned and controlled by large commercial vendors operating under their own terms.
For Fenning, the stakes of getting this wrong are high. “Almost everything with AI is in this sort of superposition,” he says. “It could be really beneficial if we use it well, or it could be really harmful. It’s one of those things where we want to be open enough that we get some benefits, but we’re mitigating the risks.”
A pilot reliant on the seeming goodwill of four US tech giants may be an effective way to test new approaches, but such generosity is unlikely to be a scalable model for public service delivery nationwide. As councils become more reliant on AI tools, questions about procurement, long-term costs, and vendor dependency will only become more pressing.
Those questions extend beyond Barnsley. If AI is to become part of the fabric of local government, ministers will eventually have to decide not only how these systems are funded, but who ultimately controls the technologies on which public services depend. It becomes a question of AI sovereignty as much as public sector reform. The government’s answer to that will ultimately define what shape the digital state takes.
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