Jonathan Reynolds has been appointed secretary of state for business, innovation, science and trade, returning to the department he led at the start of Sir Keir Starmer’s government, as new prime minister Andy Burnham scraps the independent Department of Science and Technology just three years after it was created.
The appointment gives Reynolds a greatly enlarged empire. The Department of Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), created under Rishi Sunak in 2023, has been disbanded, and most of its functions have been transferred to the new chief minister. According to a report by the Financial Times, officials have been asked to transfer the remaining tasks to the Ministry of Culture, Media and Sports, and overseeing AI in the public sector has been transferred to Cabinet Secretary Antonia Romeo as a minister.
Reynolds held the corporate and commercial role from July 2024 until last September, when he gave the role to Peter Kyle and became the chief whip, a job he made little secret of not enjoying. His first spell was defined by negotiating a trade deal and emergency legislation that secured the future of British Steel’s explosives, and he built strong relationships with employers and trade unions along the way.
For business owners, returns of known value will be acceptable. How he got there is another story. The scrapping of DSIT caused an uproar among tech founders and investors within hours of the plans emerging, and the row now sits squarely on Reynolds’ desk.
The real numbers are huge. DSIT funded UKRI, the funding body that sits on top of Innovate UK grants, and the Government Digital Service. All that equipment is now changing as firms are urged to use AI and invest in innovation.
Julian Harris, chief executive of techUK, and Dom Hallas, executive director of the Startup Coalition, called the proposal “the wrong change at the wrong time” in a letter to the new prime minister when the plans first emerged.
Matt Clifford, who worked as Starmer’s AI feasibility consultant, was still confused. “This would be a big mistake,” he wrote to X. “Now is a critical time for technology as an economic and national security crisis. Tying our top science and technology officials to a reorg wastes time and energy that is much needed for the real thing.”
Burnham’s calculations are that a single, muscular business department serves his industrialization agenda better than a separate science ministry. “I will be the business leader of the Labor Party as I was the business mayor of Greater Manchester,” he said in his first speech as Labor leader. One of the staff told the FT that the expanded department could eventually be renamed the “Industrial Department”.
Business groups are ready to give him the benefit of the doubt, up to a point. Rain Newton-Smith, chief executive of the CBI, said: “We want Andy Burnham and his team to succeed.
That word, execution, is one that SME owners must cling to. Sentiment about the new management is weak, as only 13 percent of firms expect tax to fall under new labor leadership. Reynolds inherits a legacy of goodwill from his first tenure, but also a rewiring department, an open-minded tech industry and a grant program for thousands of growing firms that need to keep operating while nameplates change.
His first job is to prove that a big door means a big business mover, not a slow mover.
