Democratising Cyber for Economic Growth: a mission-economy case for public cyber resilience

Britain treats cyber security as a product every organisation must buy for itself. But security behaves like a public good: one supplier’s weakness can halt a car plant, and one breached pathology lab can cancel operations across a city. The 2025 attack on Jaguar Land Rover cost the UK economy an estimated £1.9 billion and touched more than 5,000 organisations. Meanwhile, the number of nationally significant incidents handled by the NCSC has more than doubled in a year. Over a quarter of central government’s systems are legacy, and we are racing to deploy AI on top of them.

In this seminar, Prof. Dan Jeffery argues that markets alone will not close this gap. He draws on three sources: Keynes’s call for the state to do “those things which at present are not done at all”; Eisenhower’s interstate highways as national defence infrastructure; and Mariana Mazzucato’s mission economy. From them he makes the case for a state that shapes the cyber market rather than paying to repair it.

At the heart of the lecture is a practitioner’s account of building the NHS’s national Cyber Security Centre and Local Interventions Service Offerings after WannaCry through to the COVID pandemic. National monitoring, local interventions, and a Secure Boundary were all provided free at the point of need. Dan sets out what that model delivered and what a national mission would cost: an indicative £4–7 per person a year. He also explains why it could return several times that outlay.

The lecture closes with a proposed mission for 2032, and an invitation to test where the argument stresses, strains, and breaks.

Schedule

• 11:00 – 11:30 | Registration & Refreshments (in-person only)
• 11:30 – 12:30 | Seminar (in-person or online)
• 12:30 – 13:30 | Lunch (in-person only)

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