Open source infrastructure and collaboration key to regaining control, say panellists at OpenUK session
The UK’s long-term failure to develop a coherent technology strategy is no longer just a business problem – increasingly it’s a democratic one.
That was the view of former ministers, open source advocates and policy experts at an OpenUK roundtable earlier this month.
They warned that, after decades of ceding crucial decisions to the tech industry and its representatives, the country risks losing control not only of its digital infrastructure, but of the political and economic systems that depend on it.
Lord Paul Drayson, a Labour peer and former science minister, described a growing sense that the government is no longer in charge. “The British public are really concerned about the way in which their politicians seem unable to control what’s happening to their society,” he said, pointing to factors including social media disruption, online harms and external influence over democratic processes.
The situation, he suggested, is becoming existential: “Does democracy work in the modern age?”
Others went further still. Mike Bracken, founder of consultancy Public Digital and former executive director of the Government Digital Service (GDS), warned that long-standing dependence on external technology providers, combined with poor strategic decisions, have brought the UK to a dangerous tipping point: “the way we run this country … is in peril”.
All breadth, no depth
A recurring theme was that the UK state lacks the technical capability to respond effectively to rapidly advancing technological change and geopolitical upheaval, not simply because of a lack of resources, but because of deep structural issues that have built up over time.
Laura Gilbert, formerly head of 10 Downing Street’s Incubator for Artificial Intelligence and now senior director of AI and head of the AI for Government programme at the Tony Blair Institute, argued that the problem is rooted in how the civil service operates: “People recruiting in their own image – they reject anything that threatens that continuation.”
Engineers and technologists are thin on the ground in both the House of Commons and Whitehall, she went on. “Having technologists in, it’s genuinely quite threatening.”
The result is a mismatch between policy ambition and practical capability. Despite significant expertise in technology policy, there is a lack of engineering depth to deliver it, Gilbert argued. “In DSIT … you had around 2,200 people, of which about 500 were working on AI policy. Why are we not having 500 AI engineers?”
For Jonny Williams, chief digital adviser for the public sector at Red Hat and a former civil servant, this gap explains much of what he sees as serious operational dysfunction, where fragmentation and duplication across government systems undermines efficiency and strategic coherence:
“We had 28 address lookup services. In no way on earth did we need 28. We have, today, thousands of proprietary implementations of what should be an open source commodity technology: Kubernetes.”
In the panellists’ assessment, the UK’s institutions are struggling to grasp, let alone shape, the technologies on which modern states increasingly depend. Most concerningly, the failure to tackle disinformation, the influence of large technology platforms and fears about AI are all rapidly eroding public trust.
People are starting to believe nothing will change
Gilbert argued that the failure to grapple effectively with how technology – which underpins the services the public depend on – is procured and deployed is feeding a wider malaise: “people’s frustration with the way that we live … the bins and the potholes”.
This colours how citizens perceive the competence of the state, leaving it exposed to new threats, including bad actors using AI-driven disinformation, which amplify discontent and drive division in a vicious circle.
She warned that AI is already being used in ways that could destabilise democracy: “It’s possible to use AI to undermine public trust, move people into more extreme ways of thinking.”
Despite widespread awareness of these issues, the response has been limited, she said. “There are task forces created, but they’re struggling to really fight the problem.”
Bracken was even more blunt about the risks of systemic failure:
“I would put reasonable amounts of money on one or more hospitals stopping working soon in practice. I’d put reasonable amounts of money on widespread financial services problems. We’ve already had global issues like this. We are not immune.”
Choosing to choose
Underlying many of these issues is an unwillingness to make long-term strategic choices, according to Drayson.
Across all parties, an aversion to picking winners – or even making explicit strategic choices – has become embedded. “It’s in the culture of British politics that it’s not right for us to be choosing one company over another company,” he said.
Even where there may be a clear strategic advantage to backing a particular technology or approach, the instinct is to avoid making a judgement. He described a conversation with a civil servant:
“They said, ‘I’m not sure that Transport for London should be choosing Wayve over Waymo.’ I’m like, why not?”
By contrast, Drayson pointed to other European countries that actively support national champions and align policy with industrial strategy.
For the UK, the consequence is a lack of leverage. “We just have to choose to choose,” he insisted. “We need to figure out how, politically, we are able as a country to say we’re making a judgement about which technologies and which standards are aligned with our priorities.”
Without that willingness, the UK risks remaining a passive consumer rather than an active shaper of the technology it uses.
Outsourced understanding
The UK has outsourced not only technology, but also the understanding of that technology.
Panellists repeatedly warned that over-reliance on vendors has led to a loss of institutional knowledge. “Quite often people are outsourcing the responsibility, the understanding. They think that it’s somebody else’s job … and that’s catastrophic.”
If politicians and civil servants do not fully understand the systems they are procuring, they cannot compare alternatives, assess trade-offs, manage risks or set direction effectively. Instead, they default to incumbent suppliers.
“The choices we’ve created ourselves here are shocking,” said Bracken. “Where we’re at now is a 15-year failure to shape a market around common standards and platforms.” The technology marketplace, he argued, is “little short of monopolies and oligopolies”.
Gilbert linked this directly to data sovereignty: “You need to understand the data – you should not give the data to somebody external who doesn’t have your best interest at heart.”
Failure to understand the tech has led to a form of dependency that goes beyond procurement. It is also a structural impediment to what the state can do, and there’s not much sign of that changing. In the age of AI, where data is a primary industrial feedstock, Bracken estimates the UK is exporting 85% of this raw material to overseas tech companies.
The role of open source in regaining UK digital sovereignty
Against this backdrop, the panel identified open source and open data as key building blocks for restoring sovereignty – but only if used strategically.
For Gilbert, open source can help rebuild the UK’s economic base by lowering barriers to entry, reducing “activation barriers for small businesses” and supporting job creation.
Williams framed it more fundamentally as a democratic tool. Open source enables transparency and participation, allowing citizens and developers to “have a stake” in the systems that shape society.
Open source also offers a path to international influence. By contributing to global codebases, platforms and protocols, the UK can shape standards and exercise what he described as a form of soft power.
However, panellists were clear that open source is not a silver bullet. Bracken dismissed superficial policies such as “open source first” as ineffective and insufficient. “It’s just pointless” without the infrastructure and governance to support it, he said.
Instead, the focus should be on building underlying capabilities, platforms, protocols and institutions – including open data where the UK arguably leads the world – in a way that enables collaboration while maintaining control.
Other countries have demonstrated how this can be done by embedding national values into technical standards and using them to deliver services at scale.
But there was recognition that sovereignty cannot mean isolation; rather, it means creating alternatives through cooperation and coordination.
Anil Madhavapeddy, professor of planetary computing at at the University of Cambridge, argued for “federation and collaboration” with other countries, using open ecosystems to achieve scale and resilience. He cited agreements on a satellite communications network between Europe, the EU and Japan as an example. In this model, open source is not simply a procurement choice, but a strategic approach to rebuilding capability, influencing global systems, and restoring the state’s ability to act.
But that would require some major changes in government thinking.
OpenUK CEO Amanda Brock professed herself underwhelmed by the government’s latest announcement of an Open-Source AI Builder Fund to help developers turn scale early-stage projects, saying it missed a fundamental necessity: a focus on the layer below.
“We need the actual infrastructure that sits behind the open-source ecosystem in place and proper funding of open source. The words ‘open source’ are not magic words.”
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