Alexander Iosad
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iosad.fyi
Alexander Iosad
@iosad.fyi
1.1K followers 210 following 73 posts
Director of government innovation policy @ the Tony Blair Institute. Views own, &c.
AI, a lot; also public policy, education, technology, history of science (DPhil).
Citizen of nowhere. Fan of universities, progress, 🏏. School governor. Diasporan ✡️.
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iosad.fyi
The NDL is a manifesto commitment and has become something of a shorthand for data-related things in government – with 29 mentions in Parliament,* not to mention at least five references policy papers including the AI Action Plan and the Digital Blueprint 3/

* could be more – they keep coming!
Priority reforms The new digital centre will catalyse change across the public sector. It will: • Create the National Data Library, making it easier to find and reuse data across public sector organisations; this supports better prevention, intervention and detection, and opens up data to industry, the voluntary sector, start-ups and academics to accelerate Al-driven innovation and boost growth. We should seek to responsibly unlock both public and private data sets to enable innovation by UK startups and researchers and to attract international talent and capital. As part of this, government needs to develop a more sophisticated understanding of the value of the data it holds, how this value can be responsibly realised, and how to ensure the preservation of public trust across all its work to unlock its data assets. The creation of the National Data Library (NDL) presents an enormous opportunity.
February 25, 2025 at 8:36 AM
iosad.fyi
Gave it a shot. Think we might need to have that conversation with @jamesomalley.co.uk after all. And you’re all invited to join in!
January 13, 2025 at 9:57 AM
iosad.fyi
In fact, “not a good look” is just another facet of “consultation nation”, except without even a semblance of due process. As @duncanrobinson.bsky.social writes, it leads to bad policy. And bad policy *is* bad politics.
The appeal of the phrase is obvious. MPs who rely on it can hide behind an imagined voter, rather than exercising their own judgment, reducing themselves to one-person parliamentary focus groups. For analysts, it offers a crutch of faux objectivity. Saying that a policy is wrong or immoral is banned for supposedly objective observers. So say it is a bad look to maintain your credentials as a shrewd political operative. Such an attitude breeds a cynical indifference to the consequences of politics. Whether things are actually important comes second to whether voters notice. If people found New Labour's mantra in the 1990s that "What matters is what works" a dismal philosophy, then "What matters is what plays well" is even worse. If looking shrewd is the intention, the effect is often the opposite. A focus on appearances leads to naive analysis. “For government the equivalent reads: policy first, politics second. In other words, decide the right policy to solve the problem and then fashion the right politics around it; don't decide the politics and then form a policy to suit. In general terms, and contrary to much received political wisdom, the best politics usually derives from the best policy.” From *On Leadership*, by Tony Blair
January 2, 2025 at 11:27 AM
iosad.fyi
I do. So, I assume, does the FT, who I am quoting here with this specific turn of phrase.
A British e-ID could supercharge public service reform - helping, for example, to integrate personal health records and patient data and streamline welfare payments.
December 15, 2024 at 4:00 PM
iosad.fyi
Eminently sensible @financialtimes.com leader today: “A British e-ID could supercharge public service reform.” Yes, it could!

Is this, too, banging on about ID cards?..
A UK e-ID would require debate and consultation. It would not be easy. But if Britain truly wants a modern state, it is an idea whose moment has come.
December 15, 2024 at 12:50 PM
iosad.fyi
Obligatory relevant passages from our work at TBI, much of which McFadden echoes in the speech (alongside that of others in this space like @jamestplunkett.bsky.social, @tomski.com, @richardpope.org & more)

🔗: institute.global/insights/pol... /3
Nominate a small number of departments as "Al exemplars" that are expected to lead the way on using Al in their work and introduce a new working culture. These departments should actively engage with successful UK tech companies in their domains and replicate their best practices, down to the design of office space. Newer departments like DSIT and the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) would be good candidates for this. 4. Launch a surge of Al talent into departments and commission an urgent review of civil-service careers for the age of Al. To build up internal departmental capacity, the government should set up a bespoke route into civil-service roles for people with Al skills, streamlining the application process and benchmarking pay to a minimum of 75 per cent of the market rate, establish two-way secondment schemes with leading UK Al companies and set up a graduate-entry route for Al experts through the Fast Stream and an apprenticeship scheme. Experimentation: technologists and product experts who start putting aspects of the Al-era state in place. This team should build elements of the long-term vision that can be integrated into existing digital-government platforms and coordinate experimentation across departments, in local government and in partnership with the private sector. This iterative approach would require a cultural change in the way many governments approach IT projects today.
December 9, 2024 at 6:48 PM
iosad.fyi
Sovereign state AI capability rather than systems as such (ie for some uses heavy customisation or even training from ~scratch is warranted, but in most cases strategy, skills, control and visibility are what matters). Suspect you might be looking for this: institute.global/insights/pol...
It is important to distinguish between "sovereign Al", in the sense of end-to-end ownership of a model and how it is used, and sovereign Al capability, meaning a level of control and confidence in the Al stack (from the training data sets to fine-tuning to the computational and serving infrastructure) that is appropriate to the use case. Not everything needs to be developed in-house, but rather governments should make strategic decisions on which components of the stack to source externally from highly trusted partners and which ones to build internally. Some of the more specialised tasks, including those in sensitive areas such as national security, where Al can be expected to support departments, raise the issue of "sovereign Al". Several countries have begun to invest in the development of their own models, France, India, Japan and Singapore among them. In the UK context, there are likely to be at least two areas where specialised, sovereign Al capability will be required: regulatory and legislative analysis and national-security applications.
November 29, 2024 at 9:16 PM
iosad.fyi
Absolutely *brutal* shade thrown by the legend to this chart in Ben Evans’ 2025 presentation.
"A line graph titled 'Software eats cars?' showing monthly 'robotaxi' trips in California from August 2023 to August 2024. While the legend includes three companies - Tesla, Cruise, and Waymo - the data tells a striking story: Waymo (in red) shows dramatic growth from about 20,000 to over 300,000 trips, Cruise (light pink) shows minimal activity in early months before disappearing, and Tesla (dark gray), despite being in the legend, shows zero activity throughout the entire period. This absence of Tesla data, juxtaposed with its inclusion in the legend, makes a pointed statement about the gap between promises and reality in autonomous driving. The subtitle reads 'After a decade of promises and tens of billions of dollars, autonomy might be starting to work.' Source: California Public Utilities Commission." [Alt-text by Claude]
November 25, 2024 at 12:01 PM
iosad.fyi
One chart (from @policyinpractice.bsky.social) to summarise a big problem with our current public service delivery model.
A line graph showing the number of pension credit claimants per week from April 2024 to September 2024, with the Policy in Practice logo in the top left. The y-axis ranges from 0 to 14,000 claimants, with gridlines at 2,000 intervals. The line remains relatively stable around 4,000 claimants from April through July 2024. At this point, marked by a green arrow and text reading 'Winter Fuel Payment changes announced,' there is a dramatic increase. The line jumps to approximately 8,000 claimants in August 2024, briefly dips to about 6,000, then rises sharply to peak at around 13,000 before declining slightly to 12,000 by September 2024. The graph demonstrates a significant impact of the Winter Fuel Payment changes announcement on claimant numbers, showing roughly a threefold increase from the pre-announcement period.
November 23, 2024 at 12:22 PM
iosad.fyi
I don’t know enough about the specific implementation to comment on the counterfactual, but I do know that this, if replicated across the NHS, would free up ~5% of beds in the country.
From the FT article: “However, several trusts have reported finding it very valuable. South Tyneside and Sunderland NHS Forgdation Trust, one of the FDP's pilot sites, has reported a 37 per cent reduction in the number of days patients remained in hospital after they were ready to go home since adopting the programme.”
November 22, 2024 at 8:47 PM