AI and drones in £800m Budget technology package

Police will be using drones to quicker assess traffic collisions and other incidents, the Treasury says

The Budget will contain an £800m package of technology reforms aimed at freeing up NHS and police time, the Treasury has announced.

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt said ahead of the 6 March announcement that there was "too much waste in the system".

As part of the reforms, AI will be used to cut NHS scan times by a third and the police will deploy drones to incidents such as traffic collisions.

Labour said the package amounted to "spin without substance".

Elsewhere, Mr Hunt also hinted that civil service staff numbers could be cuts by tens of thousands.

The Treasury is hoping that the proposed technological reforms will deliver as much as £1.8bn worth of benefits to public sector productivity by 2029.

"There is too much waste in the system and we want public servants to get back to doing what matters most: teaching our children, keeping us safe and treating us when we're sick," Mr Hunt said.

"That's why our plan is about reaping the rewards of productivity, from faster access to MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) for patients to hundreds of thousands of police hours freed up to attend burglaries or incidents of domestic abuse."

The announcement comes as Mr Hunt is under mounting pressure from his Conservative colleagues to deliver tax cuts when he unveils his Budget on Wednesday.

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The Treasury said the latest move would mean 130,000 patients a year - including those waiting for cancer results - would receive their completed tests quicker as a result of at least 100 MRI scanners in England being upgraded with AI.

In policing, it said the reforms would help to deliver on the Police Productivity Review, which it said found up to 38 million hours of officer time could be saved every year.

Other key measures in the £800m investment include:

• £170m to save up to 55,000 hours a year of administrative time in the justice system through digitising jury bundles and new software to streamline parole decisions

• £165m to cut last year's local authority overspend of £670m on children's social care places across England by making 200 additional child social care places available, reducing the reliance on costly emergency places for children

• £34m to reduce fraud by a wider AI usage across government agencies - a move expected to save $100m

Darren Jones, Labour's shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, said: "Nothing in Britain is better off after 14 years of Conservative economic failure.

"Millions of people are stuck on hospital waiting lists, our schools are crumbling and our streets are less safe. And yet all the chancellor is offering is more spin without substance."

The BBC's Faisal Islam said the Budget came at a time when the government was hoping to have scope to unveil voter-friendly tax cuts ahead of the general election.

It initially hoped for "headroom" of about £30bn to spend at the start of the year after its borrowing costs fell sharply, but the BBC understands this figure returned to its November level of roughly £13bn by the middle of last month.

Speaking to the Sunday Telegraph, Mr Hunt acknowledged the latest forecasts from the independent Office for Budget Responsibility had broadly "gone against us".

"So it's going to be a Budget where we stress... the importance of being responsible with the country's finances, because it's fundamentally unconservative to fund all the things that you would like to do by borrowing money for future generations," he said.

Paul Jonson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, told the BBC that any tax cut in the Budget was "likely to be undone after the next election, whoever wins".

He added: "Whatever the scale of the tax cut announced this week, during this parliament taxes will have risen very substantially indeed."

Mr Hunt also said the government would look to further cut public sector costs by reducing the number of staff in the civil service back to pre-pandemic levels.

According to the Institute for Government, staff levels rose from around 423,000 at the start of 2020 to 496,150 in September last year.

"You had a huge expansion of [the] civil service during the pandemic that was justified," the chancellor said.

"It was an exceptional situation, but we're not in a pandemic now."