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Keir Starmer ir has launched a new drive to bring seemingly free innovators into the heart of Whitehall, reflecting Arch-Disrupter Dominic Cummings’ efforts to hire “fairy and misfit” to redesign the government.
A highly selective process aimed at bypassing career civil servants in favor of “elite technical talents” drawn from industry and academia, providing salaries of up to £200,000 a year to potential recruits.
Cummings, former Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s chief of staff, goes out looking for outsiders to work with him in the government, and his mission is notoriously picked up by the government of the breath.
In a speech last December, Cabinet Secretary Pat McFadden said: “You may remember a few years ago that a system called weirdos and misfits.
As part of the sieve process of the recruitment process aimed at people with “exceptional mathematics and reasoning skills,” Financial Times can uncover the puzzles used to filter applicants.
McFadden said: “This puzzle is an invitation to some of our best minds from academia and business, and is applying their brains to some of the most pressing challenges of our time, from waiting lists to prison reform.”
“10 Innovation Fellowships for Transforming Government Projects” aims to create a team of engineers, developers and data scientists to “help rewiring the state.”
“It was established to attract people who have done great things in an industry that may not have considered their role in government before,” the spokesman added. Less than 1% of applicants are accepted.
Cummings thought that sometimes steamy, hierarchical whitehall machines called “blobs” needed a fundamental overhaul.
The two fellows are starting with four more to start soon. The first group includes CERN’s large hadron colider, scientists who worked for executives at consulting firms with a background in big data and AI, and leaders from high-tech companies with records of government data provision.
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Government officials said they wanted to build “an important new capabilities at the heart of the government.” They work alongside the existing 10 Downing Street Data Science Team (10DS) set up by Cummings, where they are “protected from bureaucrats.”
The Cabinet Office said there are tools that will help first Fellows develop frontier AI models to provide health technology solutions and mitigate last year’s riots “in real time.”
Last year, when Starme plagued civil servants, it seemed he was accepting some of Cummings’ criticisms of government machinery.
Cummings, who left Downing Street in 2020 after dropping out with Johnson, describes the labor government’s embrace of “fairy and misfit” as “more than “Cummings was right.”
Data visualization with Cleve Jones
