Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, how many successful applications to cyber skills immediate impact fund there have been; and whether his Department has made an assessment of the effectiveness of that fund.

The Cyber Skills Immediate Impact Fund (CSIIF) acts as an incentive for a broader range of industry designed and led activity to deliver an immediate boost to numbers and diversity in the UK’s cyber security workforce. We identified seven initiatives to support through the initial, pilot phase of the Fund.

Given the level of market interest, and the quality of bids initially received, we recently opened a further bidding round. In parallel, we are commissioning an independent evaluation of the pilot initiatives and the Fund’s overall effectiveness. This will commence in the new year when the pilot initiatives near conclusion and its results will be published.