The Liberal Democrats have discovered the solution to Britain’s growth crisis: remove the computers that say no, and replace them with artificial intelligence that says maybe. It is, by any measure, a bold strategy.
Deputy leader Daisy Cooper unveiled the plan at party conference this week, arguing that excessive automation and rigid decision-making systems have choked off business dynamism. Fair point—anyone who has tried to get a mortgage approved or challenge a benefits decision knows that algorithmic gatekeeping can feel absurd. But the Lib Dems’ answer reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of why those systems exist in the first place.
Those “computer says no” rejections? They are usually there because someone, somewhere, decided that lending money to people with no income or approving claims from people who do not qualify for them creates problems. Inconvenient problems. The kind that end up on balance sheets.
Swapping rigid algorithms for probabilistic AI models trained on historical data does not solve this. It just makes the rejection unpredictable. You will not know whether the machine turned you down because of your credit score, your postcode, the phase of the moon, or because the neural network had a bad training day. At least “computer says no” is honest about its refusal.
The real growth problem in Britain is not that computers are too cautious—it is that businesses face genuine structural headwinds: skills gaps, infrastructure bottlenecks, regulatory complexity that no amount of algorithmic optimism will fix. Replacing transparent rules with inscrutable probability distributions is not deregulation. It is just regulation that nobody, including the regulator, can explain.
But it does sound innovative. And that, apparently, is enough.