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Sir Keir Starmer has launched a brand new drive to deliver freethinking innovators into the guts of Whitehall, echoing efforts by the arch-disrupter Dominic Cummings to rent “weirdos and misfits” to revamp authorities.
Salaries of as much as £200,000 a yr are being supplied to potential recruits, in a extremely selective course of supposed to bypass profession civil servants in favour of “elite technical expertise” drawn from trade and academia.
Cummings, former prime minister Boris Johnson’s chief of workers, famously went out seeking outsiders to work with him in authorities and his mission has, solely half-jokingly, been picked up by Starmer’s authorities.
In a speech final December, Cupboard Workplace minister Pat McFadden mentioned: “You would possibly keep in mind a couple of years in the past, there was a name for weirdos and misfits within the system. Effectively, no matter time period you wish to use, we do need innovators and disrupters and unique thinkers.”
As a part of the sifting course of for the recruitment course of, geared toward individuals with “distinctive maths and reasoning expertise”, the Monetary Instances can reveal a puzzle used to assist filter candidates.
McFadden mentioned: “This puzzle is an invite for a few of our greatest minds from academia and enterprise to use their brainpower to a number of the most urgent challenges of our time, from ready lists to jail reform.”
The “No 10 Innovation Fellowship for Transformative Authorities Initiatives” is meant to create a staff of engineers, builders and information scientists to “assist us rewire the state,” a Cupboard Workplace spokesperson mentioned.
“It has been set as much as appeal to individuals who have executed nice issues in trade who might not have thought of a task in authorities earlier than,” the spokesperson added. Fewer than 1 per cent of candidates are accepted.
Cummings took the view that the generally stuffy and hierarchical Whitehall machine, which he referred to as “The Blob”, wanted a radical overhaul.
Two fellows have already began with one other 4 to start quickly. The primary group features a scientist who labored on the Massive Hadron Collider at CERN, an government from a consultancy with a background in massive information and AI, and a pacesetter of a tech firm with a report in delivering authorities information.
Authorities officers mentioned they needed to construct “a big new functionality on the coronary heart of presidency”. They may work alongside the prevailing 10 Downing Avenue Information Science staff (10DS), arrange by Cummings, the place they are going to be “protected against forms”.
The Cupboard Workplace mentioned the primary fellows had developed a frontier AI mannequin to ship well being tech options, and instruments that helped officers mitigate final yr’s riots “in actual time”.
Final yr, Starmer aggravated civil servants when he appeared to embrace a few of Cummings’s critique of the federal government machine when he mentioned: “Too many individuals in Whitehall are snug within the tepid tub of managed decline.”
Cummings, who left Downing Avenue in 2020 after falling out with Johnson, has described the Labour authorities’s embrace of “weirdos and misfits” as “Extra ‘Cummings was proper’.”
Information visualisation by Cleve Jones
