The Government has published its latest Digital Strategy. It is a cross-government strategy which sets out the government’s agenda for digital policy. It focuses on six key areas:
- Digital foundations: an update on the Plan for Digital Regulation and the supply-side offer to the digital economy. This includes a focus on digital infrastructure, data, regulation and digital markets, and security. It covers various proposed and actual laws such as the National Security and Investment Act, the Online Safety Bill, the Online Advertising Programme and the proposed changes to data protection law.
- Ideas and intellectual property: consolidation of the government’s work to support the innovation ecosystem, including in universities and the private sector. This builds on the Innovation Strategy with a specific focus on digital technology.
- Digital skills and talent: this highlights UK Government’s work to reform and improve its skills and talent provision for the digital economy. This includes: strengthening the digital education pipeline, increasing awareness of the pathways into digital occupations, work to develop an enhanced digital skills base, growing people’s access to digital skills through alternative routes, work with the private and third sectors, and reforms to enable UK firms to recruit the best global talent.
- Financing digital growth: improving access to finance through the British Business Bank and British Patient Capital.
- Spreading prosperity and levelling up: how digital technologies can be used to support the achievement of key strategic priorities: enhancing productivity through technology adoption, improving public services, levelling up, and net zero.
- Enhancing the UK’s place in the world: this focuses on how the UK will aim to influence global decisions for the evolving digital world.
Next steps
Later this year, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy will publish the UK’s first Quantum Strategy. Before the end of the year, the government says it will publish a Semiconductor Strategy covering its international and domestic approach to this sector and a review of the UK’s position in the resilience of the wider global supply chain. A White Paper on AI Governance will also be published later this year which aims to set out a light-touch approach to regulating AI so rules keep pace with fast-moving technology without having an adverse effect on innovation.
