Ensuring England’s workforce has the right skills for a rapidly changing economy is key to Labour’s hopes of boosting social mobility and kickstarting economic growth.

So it seems unfortunate that more than a week after Keir Starmer’s drastic reshuffle, ministers are still wrangling about exactly which bits of the skills agenda will now move to Pat McFadden’s beefed up Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).

Broadly speaking, the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, is expecting to hang on to responsibility for further education, while McFadden will probably take on apprenticeships and adult skills. Lady Jacqui Smith, the skills minister, will work across both departments.

Labour market experts say there is some logic to the shift: ensuring the right training is available in the right places is one crucial part of tackling the issue of economic inactivity in a rapidly changing employment market, which falls within the DWP’s bailiwick.

But “machinery of government” changes, as official parlance has it, can often bring more disruption than clarity.

Over the past two decades alone, responsibility for skills has bounced around Whitehall, from education into the short-lived Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills (2007-2009) then on to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (2009-2016), back into education again, and now across to DWP.

Perhaps this nomadic status helps account for successive administrations’ chronic neglect. Government spending on adult education halved between 2011 and 12 and 2019 and 2020. It then recovered somewhat as the worst years of austerity came to an end, but by last year it was still £1bn down in real terms.

Meanwhile, despite endless speeches by politicians of all stripes about how vocational skills should have the same status as university (I have sat through quite a few: it is compulsory to mention Germany), the numbers completing apprenticeships have collapsed.

Official figures show that 178,220 people earned an apprenticeship in England in 2023-24 – down by more than a third on 2017-18, when the Apprenticeship Levy was introduced.

Recently rebranded as the Skills and Growth levy, this is charged at 0.5% of the payroll of larger firms. It was meant to encourage a flowering of workplace training, although employers have long complained that it is too rigid.

Since Labour came to power, Phillipson has made some changes, cutting the minimum duration of an apprenticeship to eight months.

Enrolment in apprenticeships has risen this year, by just over 2% but business groups are still hoping for a more substantial shake-up.

Companies have their own significant part to play, too. It must surely be a piece of the UK’s productivity “puzzle,” that according to the Learning and Work Institute, employers’ annual spending on training for each member of staff has fallen by 28% in real terms since 2005, to £1,530, a level less than half the EU average.

Longtime education expert Sir Philip Augur put it well in a recent Institute for Fiscal Studies podcast about post-16 education.

Welcoming the changes to the apprenticeship levy, Augur said: “Employers have to step up to the plate here. For employers, ‘I can’t get the staff,’ is quite often an excuse for bad management. Now on this occasion, they can’t get the staff because the skills aren’t there. But there needs to be honesty and self-appraisal on the part of employers.”

Augure called for the levy to rise “very slightly”, to free up more resources for expanding apprenticeships.

McFadden is, say his team, keen to ensure that young people get the skills they need to benefit from the jobs scheduled to be created by new government investment in defence and green energy. That will mean working with firms and unions to get the training landscape right.

There is plenty of innovative thinking going on at local level. The West Yorkshire mayor, Tracy Brabin, announced plans last week for what she called “skills-led growth”, in Wakefield, the UK’s largest city without a university.

She hopes to establish a new Wakefield Futures Centre, led by employers, where local people can do courses directly linked to finding work in the fastest-growing sectors in the surrounding economy.

The idea is to make the courses flexible so that adults with caring responsibilities, for example, can take up the offer.

This kind of relatively fluid, employer-connected approach might allow mums to pick up new skills, or older workers to switch sector or dip their toe in the market after a period off sick, for example.

It might also be used to tempt young people to think about a wider set of options: in Manchester, Andy Burnham is pushing to set up an MBacc – an EBacc equivalent, a qualification intended to be an alternative to GCSEs, which is tailored to local jobs.

Jobcentres, which are getting a rejig under Labour to present a more encouraging face, can then signpost to local opportunities such as these.

Getting the skills offer right will have to form one crucial part of any genuine effort to bring down the UK’s unusually high economic inactivity rates, and therefore, ultimately, the welfare bill.

Last year’s crass attempt at cuts failed because Labour could not justify to its own MPs the crude way in which it planned to cut eligibility for the personal independence payment (Pip).

If the government wants to have another go – as McFadden certainly does – then a fresh skills and training offer could be part of the package for the hard-to-reach claimants Labour said it had a “moral case” to help last time – but for whom across-the-board Pip cuts would have done nothing.

It’s not a quick fiscal fix by any means, but get it right and the upside, for individuals, employers and the economy, would be significant and long-lasting. The sooner ministers can clear up who takes on which bits of the task, and crack on with it, the better.

There’s a fierce battle underway in Silicon Valley, and there’s one piece of technology at the center of it all: AI.

When OpenAI released its AI-powered chatbot, ChatGPT, in 2022, it introduced large language models to the broader public and was embraced by business leaders. It also cast a glaring spotlight on its competitors, some of whom raced to release their own AI-powered chatbots.

The growing number of LLMs poses a tricky question for companies determining which model to use.

Sriram Thiagarajan, Ancestry’s chief technology officer and executive vice president of product and technology, told Business Insider that the company is taking a more-the-merrier approach.

“We are agnostic to LLM models,” Thiagarajan said. “We use multiple AI models. Be it Azure, OpenAI, Meta’s Lama, or offerings under Amazon Bedrock.”

For Ancestry, a Utah-based genealogy company that sells DNA test kits, the AI model’s brand is less important than the end result.

“We built an abstraction layer — what we call an AI gateway — on top that helps us leverage whatever models better fit our case,” he said. “We have built our own agentic framework in a way that helps us provide that unique family story and personalized experience for our consumers.”

Ancestry and AI

Thiagarajan said Ancestry had just begun diving into AI and machine learning when he joined the company in 2017.

At that time, Ancestry was trying to find an efficient way to digitize content, which is a massive undertaking for the company. Ancestry collects numerous forms of records, including birth, death, military, land, immigration, census, and newspapers.

“We’ve collected over 65 billion records across 80-plus countries,” Thiagarajan said. “Just to give a scale, that’s about 10,000 terabytes of data on our platform that we use to provide discoveries to our users.”

In the past, processing and identifying troves of records took months.

“About 15 or 20 years ago, when we digitized the 1940 census, it took us about nine months to do it in a manual way at 10 times the cost,” Thiagarajan said.

Then, the company embraced AI.

“We said, ‘Why don’t we apply computer vision AI techniques to automatically digitize content without manual intervention?’ Thiagarajan said. “Fast forward to the 2021 timeframe, we used our own proprietary handwriting recognition computer vision technologies, and we compressed the time to market to under nine days from nine months at a fraction of the cost.”

Still, Sriram said the company relies on humans to fact-check the AI answers “as needed.”

“We’ve built some automated controls and systems that certainly reduce the amount of time we need to spend checking,” he said. “We want to be extra careful in making sure that what we produce using AI is grounded in truth. Grounded in facts.”

These days, Ancestry is going all in on the tech — especially with its employees.

“There are a lot of things we do to drive AI education within the company,” he said. “Be it brown bag lunches, internal forums, or providing an environment where people across departments can experiment.”

Hackathons are also regular events at Ancestry and provide a space for collaboration across teams.

“So encouraging innovation as part of the flow of work, as they call it, as opposed to that residing as a silo,” Thiagarajan said.

An immigration law firm that signed up thousands of asylum seekers and generated income of £1.7m in legal aid in the last year, despite only employing five solicitors to represent them, has had its government contract terminated after concerns about its performance, the Guardian has learned.

The decision leaves many asylum seekers struggling to find new legal representatives at a time when the government is increasing the number of cases it refuses.

In the year ending June 2025 initial asylum grants fell from 58% to 48%, leaving more people having to lodge appeals, something that is difficult to do without a legal representative.

Middlesex Law Chambers’ legal aid income for immigration work dramatically increased from £43,000 in 2021 to £1.7m in 2025. The firm is listed on the Solicitors Regulation Authority website as having 15 offices around the country, many in legal aid deserts such as Peterborough, Plymouth and Crawley.

When the Guardian phoned these offices there was either no reply or a receptionist for the office block where the firm rented a space said it was no longer there.

The director of Middlesex Law Chambers, criminal defence solicitor Sheraz Chowdhry, said the firm had planned to expand into those areas but in most cases had not done so and had now terminated rental arrangements for those office spaces.

It currently has one solicitor employed at its Southall office doing private immigration work, one solicitor at an office in Canary Wharf in east London doing family work and a small team at its Uxbridge office doing criminal defence work. Legal aid contracts continue for those areas of work.

Chowdhry joined the firm at the end of last year just months before the previous lawyer in charge of immigration work, Hina Choudhery, died from complications of cancer.

He said: “Ultimately the firm, obstructed by Hina’s poor health over the last two years or so, has found it difficult to maintain its once very high standards in the immigration department.”

He added he found out about the termination of the legal aid contract for immigration work just weeks ago. “The decision was also only communicated to us via email on 20 August 2025.”

When asked to explain why the firm had expanded its caseload so dramatically and how it was possible to provide adequate legal representation for thousands of asylum seekers with just five immigration solicitors and a mix of 15 junior and more senior caseworkers, he said: “No solicitor was here during the expansion phase. It is difficult for me to explain how the firm suddenly grew so large in such a short space of time. I do not know.”

A typical caseload for a legally aided asylum solicitor or caseworker is 15–20. With the number of staff employed by the firm during its period of rapid expansion each solicitor and caseworker would have had about 164 cases.

Frances Timberlake, of Migrants Organise, which has many migrant members who complained about the service provided by the firm, said: “It is the Ministry of Justice’s duty to ensure that legal advice is available to people who need it. But decades of funding cuts and neglect to the legal aid system have left many people in our communities without any support.

“We urgently need funding for good legal advice and for the government to stop pushing migrants into hostile, expensive legal processes just as a charade for Reform,” she said.

Dr Jo Wilding, a researcher and senior lecturer in legal aid at the University of Sussex and an immigration barrister, said: ‘This was completely foreseeable when one small firm with very few accredited staff set up offices in several new areas, including six serious advice desert areas, and started taking on hundreds of cases.

“It should have been obvious that vulnerable people were being exploited but the Legal Aid Agency doesn’t seem to have identified or recognised that there was a problem. The solution to this is to stop treating legal aid for the most vulnerable people as if it was a market, and to pay that money to a reputable expert law firm or not-for-profit to do the work.”

Rami, a former client of Middlesex Law Chambers, said: “It’s good that the government has stepped in and closed this firm. But it feels too late, because a lot of people like me have already suffered because of the work of this firm. I had to do my asylum interview without any real advice beforehand, holding my evidence in my hand that I had translated on Google because the law firm had not done it. I have lost a lot of time in my life because of this. I have grey hair now when before this I did not.

“People seeking asylum face a lot of problems and a lawyer can help us to get through bad situations. But it is very difficult to find a legal aid lawyer and many people don’t speak English so cannot know which is a good law firm and which is not.”

A Legal Aid Agency spokesperson said: “Middlesex Law Chambers’ immigration legal aid contract has been terminated.

“Firms that hold legal aid contracts are subject to annual reviews. These can lead to financial sanctions or, as in this case, contract termination where standards are not met.”