UK Government Strategies During 2025
Elcern Consulting looked at the broad range of strategy documents the government published during 2025 on technology. Our aim was to help organisations be aware of and locate government priorities that may be relevant. We set our findings out in the form of a timeline, and along the way drew some insights we think organisations and even government may find useful. We think that deeper understanding of those strategies, how they interlink and the opportunities they offer organisations should benefit innovation, economic value and growth.
Overview
Overall, across the first 12 months of the new government, we found 19 strategy documents published within a broad scope area of digital technology and supporting services.
For Elcern, digital technology strategy during 2025 encompassed AI, digital, technology, infrastructure and innovation. And in our view, success in those primary areas depended on additional strategies iin support areas like energy, resilience, risk, security, transport and water. For example, an AI strategy would be hard to implement if its electricity and materials supply, security, its impact on national resilience and water supply, and how workers get transported were not considered. (see table of the categories of strategy documents issued during 2025)
Timeline
Looking across the year on a monthly basis, we saw June and July were by far the busiest months for publications, with the more typical rate being 1-2 per month
Three key strategy documents published in January kicked the year off: the AI Opportunities Action Plan (AIOAP), the National Risk Register and the Blueprint for Digital Government.
February was relatively quiet with just the DSIT Evaluation Strategy
March saw publication of the Maritime Decarbonisation Strategy.
June’s 14 strategy publications dominated the year. Crucial amongst them was the Modern Industrial Strategy along with 5 of its Sector Plans (for Advanced Manufacturing, Clean Energy, Creative Industries, Digital/Technology and Professional/Business Services). And arguably, the second most important strategy in June was the UK Infrastructure Strategy. The Strategic Defence Review, Security Strategy, Solar Strategy, Trade Strategy, Transportation AI Strategy and the Water Framework rounded out June.
July proved to be the second busiest month for strategy document. It saw the Modern Industrial Strategy evolved by issue of two sector plans (Financial Services and Life Sciences). Clean energy featured with 2 strategy documents (Onshore Wind Strategy and the Clean Flexibility Roadmap (electricity)). Rounding out July were the UK Compute Roadmap, and the UK Resilience Action Plan
A good gap ensued to September when the evolution of the Modern Industrial Strategy: was completed by issue of the Defence Sector Plan.
The year rounded out for us in November with the Critical Minerals Strategy
That’s not to say there weren’t more strategy documents issued. But for us, the above timeline set the scene for 2025 in areas such as AI, digital and technology and their supporting areas of energy, resilience.
Topics in Focus
Across the year we saw in areas in government focus included: AI, denergy, industry, infrastructure, transport.
Within the June Industrial Strategy the government identified eight sectors of the economy as best positioned to drive inclusive, sustainable, and resilient growth. Those are seen as holding the most potential to create well-paid jobs across the UK, leverage the net zero transition, and giving global influence. Government gave each priority sector a Sector Plan – see insert).
In June the government also issued the Industrial Strategy Zones Action Plan. The Plan set out how it will deliver and support 22 Industrial Strategy Zones (IAZs) in major cities and regions across the UK. Like its AI Growth Zones, the IAZs will benefit from novel planning approaches and central support that assist Local Planning Authorities deal with the resulting large-scale planning applications.
June also saw government publication of four further strategy documents, tackling positions on national security, solar, trade and water (see insert below).
2025 actually kicked off with the government’s publication of two key strategy documents in January: The AI Opportunities Action Plan and its latest UK National Risk Register:
The AI Opportunities Action Plan set out 50 recommendations to proactively shape future AI to drive UK economic growth, and so avoid the UK becoming a passive consumer of other country’s AI.
The Plan’s 4th recommendation, to “Establish AI Growth Zones (AIGZs)”, could in our view be one of the most significant economic developments in the UK. Alongside the 10 or more UK hyperscale data centre investments announced mainly by US operators, these planned AIGZs may bring one of the great concentrations of data centres in the world (see insert of extracts of the UK Government’s AI Plan).
In our view, the AI Opportunities Action Plan's 4th recommendation to establish AI Growth Zones around the country could result in one of the most fundamental changes to the UK economy and landscape. Here organisations can align their bids to build AI Growth Zones with the government’s Industrial and Infrastructure Strategies, and the Industrial Strategy’s Sector Plans.
The National Risk Register identified and assessed risks of major emergencies that might impact the UK, looking ahead two years. Those risks included physical and cyber-attacks, natural and weather disasters, failures in electricity or water supply, major diseases in humans or plants, and many others.
Everyone is expected to play their part in building resilience against emergencies. And, in our view all risk and resilience professionals may benefit from periodically validating their own organisation’s risk assessment against the latest register.
Whilst not explicit, these risks could impact the future AI opportunities, and indeed other 2025 strategies. Electricity outage for example might disastrously impact the viability of AIGZs (see insert on risk titles from the NRR 2025).
So we regard the NRR 2025 as a key risk resource for any strategy. That drove us to include NRR 2025 within this current viewpoint.
The transport sector published its own AI Action Plan during June (see insert). And in March the government’s Maritime Decarbonisation Strategy.
Rounding out the year to date, July saw three further strategies joined the count: compute (roadmap), onshore wind and food. Onshore wind is particularly notable as freeing up the approval of such projects was an early move by the new UK government made to accelerate clean power supplies to industries and homes.
So hopefully you see there’s a lot for organisations to digest in the landscape we have shown above and summarised in the table below.
Organisations aligning with the above government strategies through awareness of content, actions, opportunities may be able to achieve competitive or reputational advantage while simultaneously contributing to UK economic growth.
However, its worth also noting the complexity of this landscape.
That complexity arises initially through terms of the sheer amount of government documentation, its variety of styles and content. Then the lack of some form of landscape setting out the intended strategy coverage is in our opinion a major impediment. That gap leads to a risk or even issue of overlaps between the individual strategies.
We also have reservations about the adequacy and consistency of government monitoring of the actions and their outcomes.
However in summary a lot of work has been delivered by government during the first part of this year in the strategy space alone. And, we know there’s lots more to come, both in terms of further strategy documents and monitoring the status of actions within such documents.
Elcern Consulting is a boutique management consultancy that supports organisations with strategy, business planning, risk management, compliance, business process mapping and training. Within our public sector practice, we maintain a database of 56 UK government strategy documents issued from 2020 to date.
We look forwards to helping organisations get to grips with details of relevant strategies
Do reach out with comments, questions or requests for help in this fascinating field
Doing The Analysis
- EDL tracked over 130 strategy documents issued by the UK government since 2020 just within our chosen scope. That’s an average is 22 per year, or nearly 2 per month - quite a run rate. And in turn that’s quite a body of material to digest for an organisation looking to benefit.
- Our Elcern Data Lake (EDL) tracks many of the strategies and documentation for the scope areas above. EDL maintains a strategy profile for the current year, and its build from 2020.
- Analysis of each government strategy publication uses a standardised protocol. That protocol gives us some consistency on what’s in focus for government, complexity and volume of documentation, actions and implementation plans.
Attributions: This article contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0
Disclaimer: It is important to remember that our list does not attempt a comprehensive coverage of all pertinent strategies, frameworks or plans. Readers should always conduct their own research and draw their own conclusions from the original source documents.