Eoin Mulgrew, Head of Digital Transformation at 10 Downing Street, is at the forefront of efforts to transform the UK government’s approach to the adoption and application of data science and AI.
“At the highest level,” Eoin explains, “what we’re trying to do is improve technical capability across government whilst solving problems and making government work better.”
Eoin reflects on his career, the dialling up of ambition at the centre, and the cultural shift needed to make government a place that attracts and rewards technical skills and entrepreneurship
His career has included startups, industry as well as multiple parts of Government, “from reforming how we do digital and data, delivering new infrastructure and dealing with Brexit” he says, “that provides you with quite a personal understanding of the various ways in which the system is working and ways in which it’s not.”
After the 2019 General Election, he joined the Cabinet Office to lead the digital and data aspects of the government’s reform programme. “From March 2020 until I joined 10 DS in March 2023, I worked with teams across government trying to break down data siloes, hire more specialists, adopt lessons from the tech industry and tackle some of the cultural and systemic barriers to change,” Eoin recalls.
At 10 Downing Street, he took on the leadership of the No10 Innovation Fellowship Programme, pivoting it to be used as a means of getting engineers and developers from industry into government.
“The variety, pace and importance of the work we do here actually makes it a really attractive prospect for people on the outside who want to come in for short periods of time. Even if you’re in the tech industry, have really niche skills that command a high price and hadn’t considered government before. Take one of our Fellows last year who spent half their time building a really cool health tech solution that is now going to clinical trial, and the other half playing a leading role in the world’s first pre-deployment safety testing of a frontier AI model. There is nowhere else in the world you could have done that.
“Another, with expertise in applying computer vision and deep learning to analyse the built environment, delivered tools in 48 hours that COBRA and top leadership used to mitigate the impacts of the riots during the Summer. This is really important work and for most people, it’s something they’ll look back on as a career highlight."
The Fellowship recognises this and provides people a means of doing a tour of duty in government before going back to their companies or fields of research. Although most end up staying.
The programme has been significantly expanded this year, with several already recruited and more interviews happening every day. Applications are currently live. This year’s recruits include:
Programmes & outcomes
Whilst the No10 Fellowship is a means of bringing elite technical talent into government, another of Eoin’s programmes (Evidence House) focuses on harnessing the latent power of those skilled, passionate Civil Servants that are already there. Along with the often untapped power of the wealth of data within government.
Eoin describes Evidence House as a mass upskilling programme which has become an internal accelerator programme in its own right, spinning out several successful products and creating a talent pipeline for the No10 Data Science team. “Trying to inject a little bit of the magic you get in places like Entrepreneur First, YC, SoTA into government along with some hands-on upskilling, that is essentially the idea.”
The offer to Civil Servants is simple, if you want to learn how to code, be a data scientist or an engineer then you sign up for the programme and all training is delivered free-of-charge and in person.
This ranges from large boot camps where the team trained 500 people in one day, to two-day residential AI courses in the countryside, to smaller bespoke boot camps (including one that was for Permanent Secretaries and Cabinet Ministers who wanted to roll their sleeves and get hands-on themselves).
“We obviously tapped in o huge demand for in-person technical training. Over the past year we have delivered 24,500 hours of upskilling to over 1,000 colleagues. And now that we’ve amassed this small army of passionate, technically skilled people, we’ve deployed them to help us drive innovation and improve government.”
The most well-known way Eoin and the team have done this is through their regular hackathons where they bring up to 300 people at a time together for three days, hand them powerful data sets and have them compete to solve challenges 10DS and government departments are trying to solve.
“The hacks are great upskilling opportunities, you absorb learning better when you’re trying to solve real problems. They are also a great way of collaborating with industry, building networks of like-minded people and showing leaders what is possible when you break down data siloes and allow people the space to be creative and bold.”
What’s more, Eoin says the hacks have become a catalyst for innovation in government: “We knew the hacks would be great L&D and we hoped they might produce some useful outputs. But I’ve honestly been taken aback by how many great products and insights have emerged from them.
It’s very cool opening up the Sunday Times - not realising you’re about to see a whole page dedicated to a hacky little product that came out of your hackathon not three months prior (this was Red Box, the AI productivity tool for Civil Servants Redbox - Projects - Incubator for Artificial Intelligence - GOV.UK) as well as a bunch of solutions that have been deployed to help departments tackle some of their biggest challenges."
Cultural & structural transformation
Eoin is passionate about fostering a startup-like culture within government: “We’ve created a little corner of government that’s very entrepreneurial and culturally quite different from the rest. It’s somewhere people can go to upskill, geek out, work on solutions together, experiment, collaborate with industry and see what’s possible” he says.
Upskilling existing staff is also critical: “You can’t just let people go and hire new ones. It’s much better to improve the capability of the people you have and we have GREAT people.”
Eoin’s advice for other departments and leaders looking to attract and retain high-performing talent is straightforward: “Create exciting missions, give teams autonomy, and protect them from bureaucracy and the stuff you can do for them.”
Future ambitions
Looking ahead, Eoin envisions quite a different Civil Service “Ten years from now, it will be smaller but denser in specialisms, especially in digital and data” Eoin predicts.
His programmes at 10 Downing Street have become a model for how entrepreneurial thinking can drive meaningful change in government. By empowering technologists, breaking down silos, and fostering a culture of experimentation, these programmes are transforming how the Civil Service approaches digital and data challenges.