The UK Government released its Cyber Action Plan on January 6, 2026, positioning it as a core component of the Roadmap for Modern Digital Government. While the plan outlines concrete steps to improve cybersecurity and resilience across government systems, it offers little direct guidance or support for private industry or national critical infrastructure operators.

Instead, the government’s approach assumes that regulation—primarily through forthcoming legislation—is sufficient for the private sector. This stance has drawn criticism for overlooking the operational realities businesses face and for potentially exacerbating existing challenges, particularly around talent shortages.

Cyber risks faced by governments and private organizations are largely identical: ransomware, supply-chain compromise, legacy system exposure, and increasingly fast, AI-assisted attacks. However, policy responses often diverge.

The UK’s Cyber Action Plan is explicitly inward-facing. It addresses how government will improve its own security posture, while positioning regulation as the primary mechanism to drive resilience outside the public sector.

The plan commits £210 million (approximately $282 million) to improve government cybersecurity and digital resilience. It emphasizes secure-by-design principles, reduced attacker dwell time, and improved asset management, monitoring, and incident response planning.

However, for private industry, the plan offers no equivalent investment or collaborative framework. Instead, it references the upcoming Cyber Security and Resilience Bill as the primary response for essential and digital services.

The plan identifies systemic weaknesses contributing to poor resilience, including:

It acknowledges that nearly 28% of government IT systems are legacy technologies and therefore highly vulnerable—an issue equally prevalent in the private sector.

The plan also highlights the need to reduce adversary dwell time, reflecting how modern attacks can rapidly escalate once initial access is gained.

While the plan may improve government resilience, it does little to directly strengthen private-sector defenses. Compliance-focused regulation often becomes another operational risk rather than a practical security solution.

The plan’s supply-chain discussion references the 2024 CrowdStrike outage, which cost the UK economy an estimated £1.7–£2.3 billion, underscoring single-vendor dependency risks. Notably absent, however, is meaningful discussion of open-source software supply chains or emerging risks like “vibe coding,” suggesting a partial view of modern software security.

The Cyber Action Plan highlights well-known security principles but introduces little new insight for businesses. More importantly, it may indirectly make private-sector security harder to achieve.

The government explicitly plans to make itself a more attractive employer for top cyber talent, offering competitive compensation, pensions, and flexible working. In an already constrained labor market, this could further strain private-sector recruitment and retention.

While the plan is worth reviewing as a high-level checklist for organizational resilience, its gaps are notable. It neither provides actionable solutions for industry nor addresses some of the most pressing modern software risks.

In effect, the plan may improve government security while increasing competitive pressure on private organizations already struggling with skills shortages and rising compliance burdens.