Tag Archives: Practitioner-Led

From Policy to Place: Aligning the UK Cyber Policy with the West Midlands Futures Growth Plan

The UK Cyber Policy 2025 and the West Midlands Futures Green Paper 2025 set bold agendas but risk gaps without practitioner-led delivery. The national policy offers ambition but lacks continuity, metrics, and practitioner voice. The regional plan lays strong scaffolding but underweights cyber, leaning too heavily on AI. A ten-point roadmap shows the way forward: formally recognise cyber as a standalone cluster, unify governance, foster community, attract investment, establish a hub, launch a festival, rebuild narrative, reform SME funding access, enhance talent strategy, and create a regional benchmarking index. Anchored in the West Midlands Cyber Hub, this approach can balance national ambition with regional delivery, making resilience a driver of inclusive growth.

Continue reading

The West Midlands Futures Green Paper (2025): Synopsis, Key Takeaways, Critique, and Recommendations

The West Midlands Futures Green Paper sets a bold agenda, but risks leaning too heavily on AI. Cyber must be treated as a foundational enabler across every sector, from advanced manufacturing to healthcare, and anchored in a practitioner-led West Midlands Cyber Hub. Such a hub can drive assurance, skills conversion, supply-chain uplift, and regional equity, ensuring growth is both resilient and inclusive.

Continue reading

UK Cyber at a Crossroads: Three Essays on Policy, Practice, and Growth, in Reaction to the 2025 Cyber Growth Action Plan

The UK’s cyber policy has made progress but suffers from churn, overlap, and regional imbalance. The 2025 Cyber Policy sets out ambition but lacks continuity and practitioner voice. This three-part series traces the history, critiques the new policy, and argues for a practitioner-led, regionally balanced ecosystem to stabilise the base finally.

Continue reading

Stabilising the Base: From Patchwork to Platform in the UK Cyber Ecosystem

This article argues that stabilisation must be the UK’s priority. Drawing together the lessons of history and the critique of the DSIT Cyber Growth Action Plan 2025, it calls for a practitioner-led ecosystem that ends programme churn, addresses regional imbalance, unlocks university IP, and resists government attempts to build commercial products. The vision is of hubs and networks rooted in delivery and credibility — a cyber base resilient enough to sustain long-term growth. Unless these foundations are secured, the UK will remain trapped in cycles of ambition without durability.

Continue reading