The £400 billion that Labour said AI could add to the economy came from a report commissioned by Google, ministers have confirmed.
The Government’s own newer estimate is far lower, and it admits it cannot say how many people its flagship AI training scheme has reached.
The figure sits at the heart of the AI Opportunities Action Plan, published by Sir Keir Starmer’s government in January 2025. It states that ‘AI adoption could grow the UK economy by an additional £400 billion by 2030 through enhancing innovation and productivity in the workplace’.
Asked by Dr Ben Spencer, the Conservative MP for Runnymede and Weybridge, what the evidence was for that claim, the technology minister Kanishka Narayan said in a written answer on Monday that it ‘was drawn from a publicly available 2023 report commissioned by Google and produced by Public First’.
That report estimated that generative AI tools ‘could create over £400 billion in value for the UK economy by 2030’. The plan’s own footnote cites it as ‘Google’s Impact in the UK 2023’.
Mr Narayan said the Government ‘has since made a more recent assessment’. It finds that 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 to £140 billion to UK GVA in 2030,’ he said. ‘The central adoption estimate is £120 billion.’
The two figures do not measure exactly the same thing. Google’s study counted the ‘value’ created by AI tools, while the newer estimate measures gross value added, the standard measure of economic output. But the plan presented £400 billion as growth in the economy, and the Government’s own central case is less than a third of that.
It is the second AI figure in the plan to be revisited in a week. In an answer published on Friday, Mr Narayan described a £47 billion a year estimate, also in the plan, as ‘the previous £47 billion estimate’. He said it had been a government calculation based on IMF analysis from April 2024.
A separate answer to Dr Spencer, also published on Monday, sheds light on the Government’s AI Skills Boost programme. Ministers have promised to give 10 million workers AI skills by 2030, a target raised from the 7.5 million announced at London Tech Week in June 2025.
Mr Narayan said that ‘more than 2.2 million AI training courses had been completed’ by the end of July. But he added that because learners can take courses with several providers, and data protection rules prevent tracking individuals, ‘the Department cannot provide a verified figure for the number of unique individuals who have completed a course’.
In an earlier answer, Mr Narayan said the 18 foundational courses promoted through the scheme range ‘from around 20 minutes to three weeks in duration’. Because partners report completions in aggregate, the department cannot say how many of the 2.2 million were the shortest courses.
Yet in the House of Lords on 13 July, the minister Baroness Lloyd of Effra told peers: ‘With our AI skills boost, we will upskill 10 million people in work, and we have already reached 1.7 million.’
The awkward questions follow. If the department cannot count unique learners, on what basis can ministers say how many people they have reached? How will anyone know whether the 10 million target has been met? And why did a government plan rest its headline growth claim on a study paid for by one of the world’s largest AI companies?
The department says it is ‘working with industry partners and developing approaches to better estimate the number of workers benefiting from the programme’.
Labour has run the AI programme since it began. The Action Plan was commissioned by Peter Kyle when he was Science Secretary and drawn up by the tech entrepreneur Matt Clifford. Sir Keir launched it at University College London East on 13 January 2025, and it remains Government policy.
Since then, the Government’s own central estimate of what AI adoption could add by 2030 has settled at £120 billion, with ministers calling the range around it ‘hugely uncertain’.
Main image: Keir Starmer and Peter Kyle at University College London East on 13 January 2025, the day the AI Opportunities Action Plan was published. Alecsandra Dragoi, Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0, cropped.
