As the new year begins, the West Midlands Cyber Hub is delivering an ambitious programme of practical, community-driven cyber events from January to March… with more already in development. This programme is focused on building cyber capability, confidence, and collaboration across the West Midlands, supporting organisations, practitioners, and the wider regional economy.
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A first-hand account of the UK Flywheel event at the National Theatre: part love letter to the UK cyber ecosystem, part demolition of the comforting myths around funding, government “capability”, and NCSC’s role. From the NCSC Annual Review to West Midlands Cyber Hub, this is what the day looked like from the founder trenches rather than the podium.
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David Richards MBE is right, the UK’s innovation economy has become addicted to grants, not growth. But the problem isn’t funding itself; it’s design. Innovate UK and its peers were meant to bridge the early-stage gap between research and market, but instead became destinations in their own right. Government now competes with, rather than commissions, the innovators it should empower. The fix is simple: commission outcomes, not applications; fund practitioners, not paperwork.
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2025 has been a year of noise, policy papers, strategies, and growth plans, each declaring the next leap for UK cyber and regional innovation. But noise isn’t movement. Across six flagship reports, DSIT’s Cyber Growth Action Plan, WMCA’s Futures and Growth Plans, the Tech Nation 2025 report, the Midlands Engine Cyber & Defence report, and DSIT’s Cyber Skills 2025, the pattern repeats: good intent, weak execution, no continuity. Together, they map £77 billion in Gross Value Added (GVA), 143,000 cyber professionals, and £17 billion in projected uplift, but no coherent operating model. This paper builds one: treating cyber as economic infrastructure and the West Midlands as the proof-of-concept for a practitioner-led, resilient growth framework.
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The pre-launch of the West Midlands Cyber Hub at Enterprise Wharf brought together over 100 leaders from across the region’s cyber ecosystem, CISOs, CTOs, startups, universities, government, community partners, students, practitioners, and members of the interested public. What began as a vision to give the West Midlands a proper home for cyber has now become real, supported by DSIT, Innovate UK, Aston University, West Midlands Cyber Resilience Centre, Midlands Cyber, TechWM and the Innovation Alliance for the West Midlands.
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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.
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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.
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The West Midlands Cyber Hub marks a long-held ambition to give the region a central home for cyber. Building on the rebooted West Midlands Cyber Working Group (WM CWG), the Hub is designed to strengthen community coherence, increase investment, and connect students, SMEs, enterprises, and universities in a neutral space. Supported by DSIT, Innovate UK, Aston University, TechWM, and the Innovation Alliance for the West Midlands, the Hub will open its first phase at Enterprise Wharf in Birmingham, forming the core of a hub-and-spoke model across the region. The project team, led by Sevgi Aksoy and I (Wayne Horkan), with Rebecca Robinson as PM, is preparing for a pre-launch event on 30th September 2025.
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