Can the UK become a digital maker instead of a service taker?

Before the seeming ubiquity of the cloud platforms we’re accustomed to today, UK companies and our Government had a decades-long history of strong and healthy information technology development and delivery.

From the mid-1980s mainframe to networked PC migrations; through the client-server, ERP, internet and e-commerce decade of the 90’s, and; the emergence of web-services, SOA, web 2.0 and the early cloud by the late 00s – the UK wasn’t just good at innovating, developing and delivering solutions: We were acknowledged as among the very best in the world.

While those of us who worked through that period certainly didn’t realise it at the time, these were very much the halcyon days of our domestic digital delivery. We were – as the outgoing Prime minister recently put it – a nation of digital makers, not digital takers.

We knew how to do stuff

This was a position borne out of two things: We knew how to do stuff, and we had no other choice. If we didn’t build the capabilities ourselves there was no-one else likely to build or run them for us, and as a result, we innovated constantly out of the necessity to do so.

When cloud computing began to emerge as a new operating paradigm, it was therefore natural for the UK to attack it in exactly the same way as we had all the new technologies in the decades before; we set out to build it.

Development of what we called the UK national cloud started in 2009 when we began to problem-solve the governance, technical, and security challenges it introduced. Within a year the UK was identified by the European Networking and Information Security Agency as the global leader in nation-centric cloud services. Within 18 months we were walking away from that work completely.

It might be surprising now, but a full decade before thoughts across the rest of the world started to coalesce around Sovereign Cloud, the UK was already building it. But clearly we didn’t follow through. So what happened?

The simple answer would be to say “a change of government”. A two-party coalition replaced 13 years of Blair/Brown government, the latter half of which fostered the most explosive adoption of national digital transformation we’d ever seen.

Hyperscale cloud footholds

Other factors played a part as well, however, including the onset of public spending austerity, and the rise of aggressive cloud provider companies who were desperately keen to secure governmental anchor clients and found a listening ear in the UK’s new administration.

Collectively these led to a profound change in policy that has cast a long shadow. The UK did not need to be a creator of such services (went the logic), when it could simply buy them from an open market. The government decided we would buy, not build.

Under this new policy, self-build would continue only for the most sensitive data or nationally critical services. For everything else – wherever it was possible to do so – we would use cloud.

To make this happen, the new administration also unpicked some of the established pillars of national policy that were seen as cloud adoption blockers. They changed how we classified our data, introduced new framework-based procurement models, and simplified how we bought services – whilst wielding the threat that those who did not conform to the changes would find their budgets cut.

There were several casualties along the way – domestic providers who had set up to offer national cloud platforms went bust, whilst our existing technology providers found their profits falling as contracts dried up, and only those able to pivot to support reseller models survived.

Digital takers, not makers

The result today is that the UK consumes a lot more than it creates in the digital technology space. We have become a nation of digital takers, not makers.

Worse than that, we have developed a near absolute dependency on offshore service providers and have lost our digital autonomy.

This puts us at odds with our European neighbours, who also chose to make use of commodity global public cloud, but did so in a more measured and strictly conditional way.

Having decided to now prioritise domestically-provided cloud platforms they’re finding that much easier to do. Meanwhile, their national suppliers have responded positively and quickly to their government’s request, resulting in a cross-sector industry uptick.

Sovereignty has become a tangible business growth mechanism in Europe, whilst in the UK we continue to sit in the digital doldrums waiting, presumably, for the right type of wind.

This might come in the form of a change of government leadership, which should reasonably be attended by some changes in policy and priority. We can all hope for that, but that likely won’t be enough on its own, because the UK has a more deeply-rooted problem that we can no longer avoid talking about, so steel yourself. 

Namely, the UK is no longer a thought-leader in digital technology or services.

We haven’t in fact been one for well over a decade, and although successive Government papers continue to suggest we are “global leaders”, that’s either hubris or the ghost of digital empires past talking: It’s just not true.

Conversely, however, we’ve certainly not fallen back to being a digitally developing country. We have infrastructure, hundreds of still viable datacentres, and millions of miles of fibre in the ground – plus we still have pockets of the know-how needed to build stuff from first principles.

We’ve not backtracked ourselves into a digital dark age, but we are absolutely a country in need of digital re-development.

Not in the dark ages, but digital development required

Before we can hope to move forward, we need to come to terms with that status – uncomfortable as it may be. If we want to become once more a digital maker we first have to accept that today we aren’t one. That’s the first step to recovery.

Even so, it will most likely take all of this government’s remaining term and most of the next to recoup our position if we are minded to do so. We can’t expect to unpick a decade and a half of being a high-spending cloud consumer in anything less than five to seven years.

Nor will this come at no cost – on the contrary it’s likely going to cost a lot, just as it always does to effect a transition. But just as we have made great steps towards renewables from fossil fuels in the past few years, so we can equally regain our digital autonomy should we choose to do so.

To make this happen we need clarity, not another strategy document. A clear statement from Government that domestic digital capability is a national priority – followed by procurement and investment decisions that demonstrate it – would change the calculation for every domestic provider who has spent a decade waiting for a signal that never quite arrived. Those companies exist. That expertise has not entirely evaporated. What is missing is a government willing to anchor the market by backing what it says it values.

There is genuine appetite for this among what remains of our domestic technology sector. Among companies that would rather build and operate than resell, and architects and engineers who remember what it felt like when this country was setting the pace rather than following it. That appetite has consistently run ahead of government willingness to match it. Each time policy has implied a commitment without following through, some of that appetite has curdled into resignation. We cannot afford many more cycles of that.

There is something else that has not yet fully entered the mainstream conversation, but will. The decisions now being made about how this country builds its AI and datacentre infrastructure will shape our national grid, our water supply, and our sovereign position in the digital economy for the best part of a decade. Those decisions are being taken now, largely in favour of foreign-owned, foreign-governed infrastructure at a scale our grid and water systems were not designed to absorb. The window in which a credible domestic alternative can be established – before the current wave of investment decisions locks in the landscape for 2028 to 2032 – is measured in months, not years.

The question for whoever next leads this country is not whether recovering our digital autonomy is possible. It is. The capability to do so exists in this country today. The question is whether this Parliament will begin the work – or leave it as an inheritance that the next one will find considerably harder, and more expensive, to address.