Industrial Strategy emphasises cyber as a gateway to growth

Cyber set as a main pillar for growth and development in the Industrial Strategy

The newly published Industrial Strategy sets an ambitious vision for the UK to become one of the world’s top three destinations to build, scale, and invest in high-growth technology businesses by 2035. It aims to unlock nationwide growth, security, and opportunity by boosting investment, accelerating R&D, and addressing key infrastructure and regulatory challenges.

Crucially, for our sector, the Industrial Strategy highlights cyber security as one of the ‘frontier industries’ in the Digital and Technologies Sector Plan (one of the 8 growth sectors) that will drive the UK’s economic growth. Cyber security is recognised as vital to economic stability, highlighting its broad importance and the need for implementation across all sectors.

The key interventions for cyber in the sector plan are:

• Accelerating commercialisation of cyber research by investing an initial £10 million to expand Cyber ASAP, enabling support for 25 academic teams each year. This is alongside confirming £2 million in funding for the Cyber AI Hub in Belfast.
• Backing start-ups with an initial £6 million investment to build on the success of the Cyber Runway accelerator. This will support 60 start-ups annually, across all stages of growth, through mentoring, skills training, and access to professional networks.
• Developing domestic tech talent and creating high-quality jobs in underserved regions by offering additional CyberFirst bursaries as part of the TechFirst package. We will also establish new partnerships to deliver skills programmes tailored to support the National Cyber Force and the wider defence and intelligence community.
• Encouraging the adoption of secure-by-design technologies through an initial £24 million investment to drive uptake of the Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions (CHERI) architecture — a blueprint for the next generation of secure computer chips.
• Publishing a Cyber Growth Action Plan in summer 2025, providing a strategic roadmap for future sector growth, informed by independent expert advice from the University of Bristol and Imperial College London.

The Cyber pillar also highlights the building of the new National Cyber Innovation Centre in Cheltenham to foster collaboration between government, businesses and academia striving to tackle current and future cyber threats. This asset is designed to assist the growth of ambitious, world-leading cyber companies and attract an additional £1 billion of investment to the Golden Valley development.