Plans being considered for National Data Library to monetise anonymised public health data, says DSIT Secretary

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Peter Kyle also said that the UK government was also considering plans to use AI to mark homework using data pooled in a national “content store.”

The UK government is considering plans to harness a “National Data Library” of anonymised data on the public to train AI to mark pupils’ homework and monetise population health insights within a decade, the Science, Innovation and Technology Secretary has said. In an interview with the Financial Times, the Rt. Hon. Peter Kyle said that the government has already created a “content store” pulling together education documents including lesson plans, anonymised pupil assessments and curriculum guidance.

Created in collaboration with Faculty AI, a state-sponsored startup, Kyle said that the facility would act as a testbed for plans to monetise much larger volumes of government-held data over the next decade. The scheme, said the DSIT secretary, was “ a really good example of the kind of gathering of data together and the use of data that… will ultimately be the National Data Library.”

Ambiguous plans for National Data Library

Originally pitched as part of its election manifesto in 2024, the then-opposition Labour Party said that a National Data Library would “bring together existing research programmes and help deliver data-driven public services, whilst maintaining strong safeguards and ensuring all of the public benefit.” The creation of such a facility was hailed by think tanks including the Alan Turing Institute, which for its part estimated that 143m out of 1bn citizen-facing transactions per year could be automated, saving 1,200 person-years of work annually.

Work has proceeded apace on the project. In January, the UK government’s AI Opportunities Action Plan recommended making five publicly-owned datasets available to the private sector immediately, though Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer refused to answer questions on what rules would be imposed on how that data could be used. That strategic ambiguity led several think tanks to fill the seeming policy vacuum, including the Tony Blair Institute and the Open Data Institute, which recommends bootstrapping data from Trusted Research Environments and cultural heritage data.

In his interview with the FT, Kyle said that the UK government was midway through a six-month ‘scoping exercise’ for the National Data Library. Any monetisation of publicly-held data would wait, he said, until public trust in the system is firmly established. “What we will not have,” he said, “is companies from abroad coming in and using our data and taking it abroad.”

Concerns over UK government ability to harness AI

The UK government has repeatedly stressed its intention to use AI to make public services more efficient. However, its former director of data science Laura Gilbert recently told the House of Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee that Whitehall currently lacks enough technically-minded civil servants to realise this policy.

“In the GDS there are a lot of technical skills, and there are pockets of real excellence throughout the system,” Gilbert told the committee. “But there are a lot of people that I come across in government… in probably quite senior digital data roles… who I don’t consider are technologists or data people. I wouldn’t hire them.”

Gilbert’s criticism echoes that of the Public Accounts Committee, which recently published a report which, in addition to raising doubts about the innate expertise of civil servants in AI, also decried the government’s use of outdated IT systems. An estimated 28% of central government systems, it wrote, used equipment that was “end-of-life…out of support from the supplier [and] impossible to update.”