Interestingly, the Turing Institute’s technique is very similar to the response of the Ministry of Defence’s reaction to last week’s National Audit Office report on the F-35 fighter programme: select one piece of positive commentary, use it to imply everything else is fine and simply ignore other direct criticisms.
Thanks for your reporting, it is very welcome, but I not nearly harsh enough. This is a national scandal in terms of: the scale of money wasted by the executive; the permitted dismantling of a national institution by a handful incompetent out-of-control staff and the board chair; the Trumpian environment that staff have had to tolerate with numerous sackings, zero communication, constant undermining and no logic to any decision; the sham 'consultancy'; and the enormous impact this will have had on many areas data science and AI research.
The government stated in July 2025 that the current leadership and the Turing 2.0 strategy were not fit for purpose. As the ELT has trashed all programmes (except defence and specific research areas which it could not touch) it is not surprising that government sees little of value, especially at 20 million a year and with massive overheads. I have worked at Turing for 5 years and never experienced anything like this in my professional life, with staff treated by the ELT with total contempt. My own programme is only able to survive because it has been designed from the outset to be very low-cost, mad management-proofed and is co-overseen by a large number of brilliant colleagues and national and international partner institutions. However the UK side is still heavily affected as the ELT has refused to let apply for any grants so we have no PI funding continuity, and our cloud credits which maintain our open tools have now been stopped.
What has been really shocking to see is that despite UKRI and the government clearly knowing what has been going on (with new Challenge directors resigning last year in disgust at the leadership and its non-existent 'strategy', the December 2024 staff letter to the board and the recent leaked Ministry of Defence letter), the bullying of staff has still been allowed to continue as has the dismantling of successful UK programmes and the loss of AI and data science expertise. There has still been no proper public exposure of what has happened except in terms of the released 2024 letter from Turing academics (which many more of us would have signed if we had known about it) and your blogs. Thank you for these. If anything, Turing is a great example of how a national institution can lose its reputation (despite its use of Turing's name) and squander £20 million of tax payers' money within a couple of years without anyone in government caring and with no effective checks and balances being in place it seems to prevent this happening again.
I was the impact lead at the Turing (let go in December) and I know they were meant to provide an impact report to EPSRC this summer - it might be worth finding out what they said, what EPSRC's reaction was, and why that work hasn't seemingly impacted on government thinking!
There is a particular kind of institutional irony that is hard to ignore. The Alan Turing Institute — the body charged with advising the United Kingdom on artificial intelligence and data science — has no operational map of itself. Its CEO admitted as much at an all-staff town hall: when something needs doing, nobody can reliably say whose job it is.
For example, the ERP implementation that sits at the heart of this dysfunction has been, by any measure, a slow-motion disaster. Three years in development. Three project managers. Millions of pounds of public money. The Finance leadership pushed the transition through and the result has been near-total institutional blindness on the numbers side.
The picture is broader than one failed system. Manual spreadsheets remain standard. Departments operate in silos. Process ownership is undefined. In an organisation that positions itself at the frontier of 2025, the internal reality looks closer to 2005.
Senior leaders appear insulated from this. Decisions are made without a clear understanding of operational dependencies. when things go wrong, the response is more messaging than action.
A recent restructuring has compounded the problem. Experienced, independent-minded staff have been replaced by expensive ones who reinforce existing thinking rather than challenge it. The culture left behind is one that several current employees describe as fearful, with little appetite for the kind of dissent that might surface uncomfortable truths upward.
An organisation whose leaders cannot map what it does, or who does it, is not a body in transition. It is a body flying blind. That this particular body is the one advising Britain on its data-driven future is a contradiction that is very difficult to square.
Interestingly, the Turing Institute’s technique is very similar to the response of the Ministry of Defence’s reaction to last week’s National Audit Office report on the F-35 fighter programme: select one piece of positive commentary, use it to imply everything else is fine and simply ignore other direct criticisms.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-ministry-of-defence-has-dropped-the-ball-on-fighter-jets/
this is better than Love Island can't wait to follow the drama
Thanks for your reporting, it is very welcome, but I not nearly harsh enough. This is a national scandal in terms of: the scale of money wasted by the executive; the permitted dismantling of a national institution by a handful incompetent out-of-control staff and the board chair; the Trumpian environment that staff have had to tolerate with numerous sackings, zero communication, constant undermining and no logic to any decision; the sham 'consultancy'; and the enormous impact this will have had on many areas data science and AI research.
The government stated in July 2025 that the current leadership and the Turing 2.0 strategy were not fit for purpose. As the ELT has trashed all programmes (except defence and specific research areas which it could not touch) it is not surprising that government sees little of value, especially at 20 million a year and with massive overheads. I have worked at Turing for 5 years and never experienced anything like this in my professional life, with staff treated by the ELT with total contempt. My own programme is only able to survive because it has been designed from the outset to be very low-cost, mad management-proofed and is co-overseen by a large number of brilliant colleagues and national and international partner institutions. However the UK side is still heavily affected as the ELT has refused to let apply for any grants so we have no PI funding continuity, and our cloud credits which maintain our open tools have now been stopped.
What has been really shocking to see is that despite UKRI and the government clearly knowing what has been going on (with new Challenge directors resigning last year in disgust at the leadership and its non-existent 'strategy', the December 2024 staff letter to the board and the recent leaked Ministry of Defence letter), the bullying of staff has still been allowed to continue as has the dismantling of successful UK programmes and the loss of AI and data science expertise. There has still been no proper public exposure of what has happened except in terms of the released 2024 letter from Turing academics (which many more of us would have signed if we had known about it) and your blogs. Thank you for these. If anything, Turing is a great example of how a national institution can lose its reputation (despite its use of Turing's name) and squander £20 million of tax payers' money within a couple of years without anyone in government caring and with no effective checks and balances being in place it seems to prevent this happening again.
I was the impact lead at the Turing (let go in December) and I know they were meant to provide an impact report to EPSRC this summer - it might be worth finding out what they said, what EPSRC's reaction was, and why that work hasn't seemingly impacted on government thinking!
There is a particular kind of institutional irony that is hard to ignore. The Alan Turing Institute — the body charged with advising the United Kingdom on artificial intelligence and data science — has no operational map of itself. Its CEO admitted as much at an all-staff town hall: when something needs doing, nobody can reliably say whose job it is.
For example, the ERP implementation that sits at the heart of this dysfunction has been, by any measure, a slow-motion disaster. Three years in development. Three project managers. Millions of pounds of public money. The Finance leadership pushed the transition through and the result has been near-total institutional blindness on the numbers side.
The picture is broader than one failed system. Manual spreadsheets remain standard. Departments operate in silos. Process ownership is undefined. In an organisation that positions itself at the frontier of 2025, the internal reality looks closer to 2005.
Senior leaders appear insulated from this. Decisions are made without a clear understanding of operational dependencies. when things go wrong, the response is more messaging than action.
A recent restructuring has compounded the problem. Experienced, independent-minded staff have been replaced by expensive ones who reinforce existing thinking rather than challenge it. The culture left behind is one that several current employees describe as fearful, with little appetite for the kind of dissent that might surface uncomfortable truths upward.
An organisation whose leaders cannot map what it does, or who does it, is not a body in transition. It is a body flying blind. That this particular body is the one advising Britain on its data-driven future is a contradiction that is very difficult to square.