2025 has seen an unprecedented wave of reports shaping the UK’s cyber and growth agenda: DSIT’s Cyber Growth Action Plan 2025, WMCA’s Futures Green Paper, the Tech Nation Report 2025, and the Midlands Engine Cyber & Defence Report. Each has strengths, each identifies real challenges, but taken together, they reveal fragmentation, regional imbalance, and an absence of practitioner voice. Added to this mix is the Cyber Security Skills in the UK Labour Market 2025 report, which provides the hard numbers: 143,000 in the workforce, a shortfall of 3,800, and critical gaps in specialisms such as forensics, secure architecture, and testing. This article compares the five reports, critiques their blind spots, and sets out a practitioner-led roadmap rooted in the West Midlands. The central argument is simple: cyber must be treated as economic infrastructure, not as an afterthought of “digital” or “defence”.