Budget 2024: AI and drones in £800m technology package

The Budget will include an £800m technology reform package aimed at freeing up time for the NHS and police, the Treasury has announced.

Prime Minister Jeremy Hunt said ahead of the March 6 announcement that there was “too much waste in the system”.

As part of the reforms, AI will be used to cut NHS scan times by a third, and police will deploy drones to respond to incidents such as road accidents.

Labor said the package amounted to “hollow spin”.

Elsewhere, Hunt suggested the number of civil service workers could be cut by tens of thousands of jobs.

The Treasury expects the proposed technology reforms to deliver up to £1.8bn worth of benefits to public sector productivity by 2029.

“There is too much waste in our system, and we want our public servants to get back to the most important job: teaching our children, keeping them safe and treating them when they are sick,” Hunt said.

“That’s why our plan is to help patients get faster access to MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) and free up hundreds of thousands of police hours to respond to robberies and domestic violence incidents. , and reap the benefits of productivity.”

The Treasury said the move would see 130,000 patients a year get tested faster, including those awaiting cancer results, as at least 100 MRI scanners in the UK were upgraded to AI. He said that it would be possible to do so.

In the police sector, it said the reforms would help conduct a police productivity review, which found up to 38 million hours of police time could be saved annually.

Other key measures in the £800m investment include:

Darren Jones, Labour’s shadow chancellor of the exchequer, said: ‘After 14 years of Tory economic failure, there has never been a better time in the UK.

“Millions of people are on hospital waiting lists, schools are collapsing, streets are becoming less safe, and yet the Prime Minister is offering nothing but hollow fantasies.”

The BBC’s Faisal Islam said the Budget came at a time when the government wanted to leave room to announce voter-friendly tax cuts ahead of the general election.

The company initially expected to have around £30bn of “spare space” at the start of the year as borrowing costs fell significantly, but this figure had returned to November’s level of around £13bn by the middle of last month. The BBC understands.

Mr Hunt admitted to the Sunday Telegraph that the latest forecasts from the Independent Office for Budget Responsibility were largely “against us”.

“So this is going to be a budget that emphasizes the importance of being responsible for the country’s finances, because it’s fundamental that we borrow money for future generations to fund everything we want to do. “It’s not very conservative,” he said.

Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, told the BBC that the tax cuts in the Budget are “likely to be reversed after the next election, whoever wins”.

He added: “Whatever the size of the tax cuts announced this week, taxes will actually go up very significantly this Congress.”

Mr Hunt also said the government would consider further reducing costs in the public sector by restoring civil service staffing levels to pre-pandemic levels.

The number of employees has increased from about 423,000 at the beginning of 2020 to 496,150 in September last year, according to the Government Research Institute.

“you, [the] “Working in the civil service during the pandemic was justified,” the Prime Minister said.

“While these were unusual circumstances, we are not currently in the middle of a pandemic.”