A question for the Minister

05 Nov, 2026

Last Monday, the Minister for AI, Kanishka Narayan, answered the following parliamentary question from Dr Ben Spencer, Conservative MP for Runnymede and Weybridge.

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade, what the evidential basis is for the statement in the AI Opportunities Action Plan that AI adoption could add £400 billion to the economy by 2030; and if he will publish the underlying analysis.

He answered thus:

The £400 billion figure was drawn from a publicly available 2023 report commissioned by Google and produced by Public First, which estimated that generative AI tools could create over £400 billion in value for the UK economy by 2030. The underlying analysis is already publicly available. The Government has since made a more recent assessment. AI adoption and data investment could add 0.4 to 1.3 percentage points to the UK’s productivity growth. These estimates are hugely uncertain, but this would be the equivalent of adding £55-140 billion to UK GVA in 2030. The central adoption estimate is £120 billion.

There are a vast number of questions about the competence of government in making forecasts around the economic benefits of AI arising from this answer. Many of these questions have been raised by Wired.¹

What I want to do is consider this in the light of another number for which the Minister for AI should also be held accountable, which appeared in the inappropriately named Data Centre Covenant, also published last week, two days after this Parliamentary answer.

The Government estimates that to protect our national interest, ensuring that we remain in the conversation internationally and benefit from secure access to AI models locally, will require 6 GW of AI data centre capacity by 2030.

Setting aside the fact that this is so badly written as to be ambiguous between 6 GW total and 6 GW new capacity (I assume they mean the latter), what the Minister needs to be asked is:

Does this estimate depend on the £400 billion forecast or the £55-140 billion forecast?

I would love the opportunity to catch him unawares with that question so we find out if he pays enough attention to detail to know the answer without asking a civil servant. Given the huge and - despite the nonsense in said Covenant - negative impact on the people and environment of this country that building 6 GW of data centres in three years will have, one would very much hope he cares about getting the numbers right.