Matt Warman was commissioned to undertake a review of the impact of technology on working life and, despite its ultimate cancellation, the former MP took some learnings from the experience

A former digital minister who led an unfinished government review into future working practices has claimed that his experience was that government as a whole did not appreciate the significance of a “coming revolution” powered by new technology and practices.

Matt Warman, who spent three years as a minister in the then Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, was commissioned by Downing Street in May 2022 to lead a ‘Future of Work Review’. The terms of reference of the review state that the exercise was intended to “assess what the key questions to address on the future of work are as we look to build back better from the pandemic”.

According to Warman, in a piece written exclusively for PublicTechnology sister publication The House Live, he was unceremoniously advised by a special adviser “that everybody knows this Future of Work Review has been invented to keep you busy”.

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Having undertaken some “wrangling” in order to obtain the necessary remit and resources, the former minister says that “initial discussions had tried to focus [the review] narrowly on the impact of new technologies such as AI on the workforce, but my instinct was that the future of work more broadly would both be more interesting and impossible to disentangle from technology anyway”.

The aim of assessment was to home in on the central themes of “technology, skills, workers’ rights and place” to update government’s policy agenda.

Issues to be considered by the review include “the advent of the internet that [had] reshaped our high street”, the widespread switch to working from home during the coronavirus crisis, and the face that “campaigners on the four-day week were making headway”.

Warman, who lost his Boston and Skegness seat to Reform last year, notes that “it is probably not a spoiler to say that the review was cut short by Boris Johnson’s resignation, but adds that he was nonetheless able to come to some conclusions.

“My overwhelming sense was that government hadn’t joined the dots of a coming revolution, and there continued to be unhelpful distractions, as when working from home momentarily became a key front in the culture wars,” he writes. “It remains impossible to comprehensively predict the impact of AI on the overall economy – educated guesses still don’t really try to look at it in the round because the structure of government imposes silos and No 10 isn’t a think tank. In truth, reviews of the sort I was tasked with doing should be more independent of government than I was.”

Warman’s piece can be read in full here.