“In principle, redirecting finance towards fairer, greener, more socially beneficial forms of growth could usher in the ICT golden age that has long been possible. But while the technologies are there, the politics are not.”
The computing power of modern smartphones is extraordinary. For the last decade, millions of people across the UK have been walking around with supercomputers in their bags and pockets, each one more powerful than those used to guide the 1969 Apollo mission to the moon. However technology policy rarely addresses this potential. Rather than unlocking UK community power, successive governments have deferred to the model of innovation championed by US tech companies and investors, picking corporate winners rather than investing in communities, people and places.
In 2017, former digital Secretary of State Matt Hancock declared that the UK would be “the best place in the world to start a business and the safest place to be online”. Since then, technology policy has been caught in a contradiction of its own making – simultaneously appealing to the world’s most disruptive businesses while attempting to assert boundaries around those companies’ ability to disrupt. The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), formed in 2023 – merging responsibilities from the Departments for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) – has not only inherited that agenda, but done so in an environment remote to social policy. Under the previous government, DSIT’s focus was on pursuing the technological approach to “AI Safety”; shortly after coming to power last year, former Labour Secretary of State Peter Kyle declared DSIT to be an “economic department”. People power has not been on the agenda.
DSIT’s flagship social policy is currently the enforcement of the Online Safety Act, with a side effort to address digital exclusion through (mostly) recycling corporate computers. Otherwise, the department has no remit to address social and economic inequalities, and no agenda to remedy new societal harms created by technological change. Meanwhile, the current government’s pure-play technology policy focuses on top-down measures such as trickle-down economic growth forged chiefly through closer ties with the US, increased government efficiency, and improved national security. In this worldview, technology is a purely exogenous force that happens to us – driven by a combination of big tech firms and academic researchers who are pushing at the boundaries of human knowledge. Digital social policy, which understands and supports what it means to be human in an increasingly digital world, is the missing piece in the cross-government commitment to renewal for the UK.
The new normal
The reality of digital technologies is that they have so far changed, and continue to change, many ways life is lived in the 21st Century and have utterly transformed how communities form in places. They have shifted how many people live, love, learn, earn and relate to one another, and turned utterly mundane processes – from paying for car parking to asking your neighbour for a cup of sugar – into technologically mediated tasks. For the 1 in 5 households that experience digital exclusion of some kind, the prevalence of digital technologies has made it more difficult to participate in everyday life, while those of us who are digitally connected often find we are caught in a firehose of news and information, gleaned from all kinds of sources. Digital policy is no longer something that just happens alongside science and innovation; like it or not, these technologies are a building block of the “new normal” and have more than earned their place in cross-government policymaking. A more resilient, people-focussed approach, in which technologies play a part in improving the lives of more people, and more people have the chance to shape the technologies we all use, will make an essential contribution to a more equitable and cohesive society.
Innovation’s unequal footprint
While the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) makes innovative operational use of digital technologies – creating tools such as Extract to digitise historic planning documents – the ways digital life has changed and is changing communities and social infrastructure do not appear to be a policy concern. For instance, the £1.5 billion Plan for Neighbourhoods (this has been expanded and brought under the Pride in Place banner in October 2025) aims to invest in 75 deprived areas to address long-term deprivation through creating thriving places, building stronger communities to tackle social division and restore collective belonging, and giving people back control of their local areas – yet the only mention of technology in the long list of accompanying powers is a nod to sustainable and green tech. The everyday news and communication environments built on Facebook and WhatsApp groups, TikTok and YouTube don’t get a look in, and there is no correlation with the AI Growth Zones outlined in the AI Opportunities Action Plan or the clusters approach in the Modern Industrial Strategy.
Industry, innovation, and technology are positioned in cross-government policy as taking place in parallel, almost on another plane to neighbourhoods and communities, even though access to good work and prosperity are foundational properties of good places to live, and communities are more likely to be formed on a smartphone than in a community centre.
It is also the case that even close proximity to innovation does not mean its benefits are shared. In London, the ward of St Pancras and Somers Town is home to DeepMind, Google, Meta and the Francis Crick Institute, but it also has the lowest median household income in the borough of Camden and the highest rate of multiple deprivation. Cambridge is ‘the UK’s most innovation intensive city’ but it has a commensurately widening wealth gap, with rising house prices quickly outstripping local wages, which have remained static, and the largest rate of life-expectancy inequality in the UK.
What can be done about this disconnect?
September has seen a policy reset in Downing Street, moving from Missions to a slimmed-down triumvirate of policy priorities, including a change in emphasis from “kickstarting economic growth” and “breaking down barriers to opportunity” to “deliver[ing] higher living standards, so that people actually feel better off”. At the same time, the English Devolution Bill has been renamed the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill, with some seeing this shift in focus as one of Labour’s secret weapons for strengthening the social fabric, creating better places to live, and defeating Reform.
Community empowerment, as seen in the revamped Bill, equates to better governance and expanded Community Right to Buy powers, but modern social organising is not an analogue experience – technologies have a role not just in connecting people but in making it quicker and easier to get things done. And, if other government policies are to be taken as credible, investment in people’s entrepreneurial capabilities and willingness to innovate is the key to unlocking considerable growth and potential.
There is, rightly, much focus on the role of social media and messaging platforms in spreading disinformation and widening social divisions, but they also have a less-storied role in powering activism and community building.
Modern community empowerment and social infrastructure building starts in Facebook groups, Signal and WhatsApp groups, Discord and Slack communities that fill the gap left by community centres, coffee mornings, and jumble sales. As documented in comedian Jayde Adams’ hilarious podcast, Welcome to the Neighbourhood, these groups include all kinds of life and opinions, from the extremely heartwarming to the extraordinarily petty and irritating, and have taken the place of all kinds of physical infrastructure, from noticeboards to street corners. Behind every local football team or running group or community garden there’s a WhatsApp conversation where real-world plans are made.
In my South London neighbourhood, local forums are the places that get people along to community markets, fill empty shops, and unite people with nothing in common save their adoration of an adventurous local cat. They power an economy of favours, freecycling and recommendations – while also being home to plenty of moaning and challenging conversations about everything from ULEZ to flags.
These forums are far from perfect – and there is another essay to be written about the economic and social impacts of Meta’s de facto monopoly on informal public communication channels – but they are places where people gather that are totally neglected in social policy. Local communities that band together to buy their local pub do so not only through meeting in person but via WhatsApp chats and crowdfunding websites. Empowering more communities does not need to be restricted to brick and mortar assets, it can start with active advocacy in these digital communities, and in creating opportunities that are accessible and realisable to people who want to do more than just chat on their phones but just don’t know how.
It is also the case that the place-based innovation model set out in the Industrial Strategy has no equivalent in social policy. As mentioned earlier, beyond the odd coffee shop or highly manicured piece of CCTV-monitored public-private realm, high-intensity innovation in elite institutions does not magically trickle down to adjacent neighbourhoods and, rather than creating opportunities, can lead to increased local social and economic divides.
The recent Careful Industries report “From Hype to Hope: How Networked Neighbourhoods can make innovation work for everyone” explores how the UK lags on many measures of technology adoption, with few robust strategies for diffusion and an overall weak skills pipeline – a situation compounded by the fact that much place-based innovation policy overlooks the contribution of communities to placemaking.
Embedding innovation in everyday places
Successful centres of innovation and production need to be good places to work and live, and the government’s theory of investment in successful clusters does not need to only apply to industry; it also applies to people and communities. The list of powers for the Neighbourhood Plan, which includes pub licensing and limiting anti-social behaviour on public transport, could include the creation of more “Connected Organisations”, community incubators that act as local innovation hubs, fostering relationships, teaching skills, and creating pathways to opportunities. Like start-up incubators for communities, these organisations already exist across the UK and take many forms – some, such as Watershed and Knowle West Media Centre in Bristol, are arts organisations, while others, including Makespace Oxford and DoES in Liverpool, began as co-working centres and maker spaces. And while these grassroots organisations might seem unlikely incubators for technological progress, it is too limiting to see innovation as simply an industrial process: it is a frame of mind, the application of ingenuity, the freedom to get things done that can be shared across the UK to enable greater wellbeing and resilience, higher skills adoption, and more technology diffusion.
While the UK is recognised as a global innovator and leader in research, our technology politics are still very undeveloped – heavily influenced by corporate priorities and 20th Ccentury approaches to progress. The digital society has been here for several decades now, but digital social policy remains nonexistent, while place-based innovation policies are still developed without considering communities.
Taking digital social policy seriously requires looking beyond the arbitrary boundaries of central government and engaging with the messiness of real life – spotting unexpected uses and reuses of technology, enabling people without computer science degrees to recognise themselves as innovators, meeting more people where they are, in the conversations we are all already having.
Giving more people agency over the technologies they choose and use is vital for developing a modern politics that strengthens democracy and increases national resilience – a failure to recognise this risks creating multiple political, economic, and infrastructural vulnerabilities. Our mission at Careful Industries is to make technology work for 8 billion people not eight billionaires. Taking that seriously begins with empowering communities to make and create the technologies that work for them.
Rachel Coldicutt is a researcher and strategist specialising in inclusive, community-powered innovation and the social impacts of new and emerging technologies. Rachel has been working in technology since the 1990s and is currently founder and executive director of research consultancy Careful Industries. She was previously the founding CEO of responsible technology think tank Doteveryone and was awarded an OBE for services to the digital society in the 2019 New Year’s Honours.
