The British prime minister’s flagship industrial strategy has attracted criticism for a lack of detail.
Whitehall’s long awaited digital plan tells us little we didn’t already know and should be treated therefore, not as a news source, but as evidence of what’s being kept or killed by Theresa May’s new regime
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Hardly surprising, given the very existence of an industrial strategy that marks a break with 40 years of Tory orthodoxy.
Any genuinely new policy will take time to develop.
But the digital strategy has been in preparation for the best part of two years, and still it’s told us little we didn’t already know (universal broadband? Who knew?).
Thanks to Brexit, the main casualty was migration-friendly policy, such as visas for skilled overseas tech workers.
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By GlobalData
In its place, a primary focus on the low- and medium-skilled. Not much cheer for public sector organisations and their suppliers struggling with skills shortages now, made worse by changes to IR35 self-employment rules.
Still, improving universal digital skills is welcome, and it was good to see the tech industry doing its bit.
Naturally, references to the European Union (EU) Digital Single Market have disappeared — but then that’s linked to continuing enthusiasm for public cloud, in which the UK has always been somewhat of an outlier amongst EU member states.
The government has restated a firm commitment to the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) though, presumably thanks to long-term privacy advocate David Davis.
There’s a clear recognition of GDPR’s potentially valuable role in driving improvements to cyber risk management as well as privacy (vendor’s note: public sector organisations desperately need help with both data governance and cyber, which are increasingly coupled together. Those not already doing so should be sharing their own best practices with customers).
Announcements on artificial intelligence and robotics attracted a degree of publicity hardly consummate with just £17m of funding.
But public sector organisations don’t need permission to get on with the most promising applications of AI right now, and the Digital Strategy was still useful in restating government commitment to digital and data-driven economic growth.
Commitment to GDS’s role in delivering GaaP was also restated — now comprising the trio of Verify, Notify and Pay, the first two of which are being extended to local government and the private sector.
