Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what assessment she has made of the net financial impact of its AI programme, including implementation costs, staff training, data preparation and ongoing system support, relative to the efficiency savings outlined in the efficiency delivery plan.

As set out in the Department’s efficiency delivery plan, we expect a contribution to come from greater use of AI and digital tools. These tools can be used to automate and speed up routine processes that reduce system duplications and drive back-office efficiencies. As part of taking a test and learn approach, we are assessing impact and benefits on a case-by-case basis as appropriate in the life cycle of the project, as we develop our alignment across the DfT family on AI initiatives, and regularly add new use cases and applications.

A recent example of assessing impact is the published evaluation of our piloted Consultation Analysis Tool (CAT)1. This sets out a range of potential benefits, including net savings, which we will monitor as and when the tool is implemented as a standard process.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ai-consultation-analysis-tool-evaluation.