What do a former head of GCHQ, the author of the MoD’s Defence AI Strategy, a former prime minister and the founder of the Government Digital Service (GDS) have in common? They all left very senior roles in the UK government and public sector for jobs with IT and artificial intelligence (AI) suppliers that supply the UK government and public sector.
Those are the findings of a Computer Weekly analysis that mapped the revolving door between Whitehall and public sector technology suppliers. The dataset holds 63 moves since 2010 – a small number, but one that captures only the very top echelons of the civil service, and the visible tip of a larger flow that no public register records.
In this article, we outline what the data shows, which suppliers attract the most former officials, who some of those officials are, and why 63 is best read as a low figure that becomes much higher when other levels are considered.
What we counted
The analysis traces 63 moves between the UK public sector and 20 IT, cloud and AI suppliers from 2010 to 2026. Every record carries a public source – a Business Appointment Rules decision, a Companies House filing, a civil service organogram or a press report – so each can be checked.
The concentration is striking. Palantir accounts for nine of the 63 moves – more than any other supplier. Deloitte follows with eight, then Anthropic and Public Digital with five each, and BAE Systems, Microsoft, IBM, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Quantexa with four apiece.
The door mostly swings one way. Sixty of the 63 moves run from government to supplier. Just three run the other way, among them Craig Suckling, who moved from AWS to become the government’s chief data officer in 2024, and Doug Gurr, the former Amazon UK boss who became interim chair of the Competition and Markets Authority in 2025.
The names behind the numbers
The most concentrated cluster sits at Quantexa, the London data analytics firm whose software maps fraud and money-laundering networks for banks and governments. Jeremy Fleming ran GCHQ, the UK’s signals intelligence agency, from 2017 to 2023; he is now an advisory board member at Quantexa. He is not the only former public official there. Matthew Gould, who led NHSX – the NHS’s digital and data unit – through the pandemic, went to Quantexa too, as did Lucy Frazer, a Cabinet minister until 2024, and Franck Petitgas, Rishi Sunak’s chief business adviser.
The defence side of the door is just as direct. Laurence Lee served as the Ministry of Defence’s second permanent secretary from 2021 to 2023, overseeing its digital and AI work and co-writing the Defence AI Strategy. In 2024, he became geostrategic adviser to Palantir’s chief executive. In late 2025, Palantir agreed its largest ever UK defence deal, a £240m no-bid contract.
The examples extend beyond data and defence. Rishi Sunak, who as prime minister pitched Britain as an AI superpower, now advises Microsoft and Anthropic. And the people who built Gov.uk – Mike Bracken, Tom Loosemore, Ben Terrett and James Stewart, the founding team of the Government Digital Service – went on to found and lead Public Digital, a consultancy whose clients include HM Revenue & Customs.
The methodology behind the data
The dataset draws on public sources. The Business Appointment Rules registers – ACOBA’s decisions for the most senior officials and the quarterly departmental releases for the grades just below – supply 48 of the 63 moves. Public trade press supplies the remaining 15, most of them the AWS and Amazon records that predate the individual ACOBA publications. Companies House officer records and the twice-yearly civil service organograms provide the surrounding context – the supplier directors and the pool of senior civil servants the moves were drawn from.
The analysis is bounded at Senior Civil Service (SCS) level and above – deputy director and up, plus ministers and special advisers. Below that line, the rules do not require publication, and nothing is recorded.
The tip of the iceberg
The Business Appointment Rules apply only to the most senior grades. A former official one grade below – a Grade 6 or Grade 7 programme lead, or a police or NHS manager outside the SCS system entirely – can move to a supplier without any public register recording the move.
An investigation by The Nerve reported in April 2026 that Palantir had recruited 32 UK government and public sector officials since 2012, most of them below the senior threshold the rules cover. A simple search on LinkedIn for “government Palantir” surfaces former Metropolitan Police and Cabinet Office staff on the firm’s books – people who sit beneath the register.
None of this makes the 63 wrong. It makes the 63 what is publicly countable, and the true flow larger. The rules draw the line near the top, and the top is where the fewest people are.
Good for the suppliers – good for the public?
The 63 moves are, in almost every case, lawful and cleared under the rules that apply. One case stands out: Norman Driskell, the Home Office’s chief digital officer, joined Amazon in 2017 without the required clearance, it was reported at that time.
But the direction of the flow carries a question. The people who wrote procurement specifications, ran public data policy and led digital transformation now sit, in a growing number of cases, on the other side of the table – employed by, or advising, the suppliers that sell to the departments they once served. That flow is self-evidently good for the suppliers, or it would not happen. Whether it is good for the public is a different question, and one the current transparency rules do not let the public answer below the senior grades.
