DPA Policy Areas

21st Century Skills Working Group

The DPA’s 21st Century Skills Working Group aims to lead in the development of joint industry/academe understanding of context and needs, and to ensure policy solutions fit for this digital century.

It aims to help create and implement UK/EU education and training policies for a world in which:

demand for basic digital abilities, aptitudes and disciplines may still change slowly, if at all, but the rate of change in the need for specific skills is accelerating;

skills in demand become increasingly cross sector, professional and academic boundaries;

policy must respond to accelerating rates of change in the technologies available for identifying, delivering and assessing talent;

the timescales for delivering new skills shorten;

any limiting factors, including the inflexibility and latency of funding, legislative and regulatory frameworks for skills development, can be lifted.

For further information please see the 21st Century Skills Working Group pages.

Cyber Security and E-Crime Working Group

The Cyber Security and e-Crime Working Group’s objective is to create, identify and support key partnerships to cut online crime and nuisance, reduce risk, increase awareness and confidence in online safety/security and establish UK leadership in Internet policing and governance. This activity has implications for both consumer and business confidence in the online world, as well as delivering a secure consumer/commercial environment which underpins UK competitiveness.

For further information please see the Cyber Security and e-Crime Working Group pages.

Digital Infrastructure Working Group

The DPA’s Digital Infrastructure Working Group aims to bring forward investment in the socially and geographically inclusive, world class, converged, future ready, digital communications infrastructures that are essential for UK business to remain competitive post Brexit.  “Future ready” entails a focus on meeting the needs of smart communities (retail, telecare, transport, buildings, cities etc.) including for the reliability, resilience and inter-operability (including across application areas) of both networks and data.

For further information please see the Digital Infrastructure Working Group pages.

Digital Safety Tech Working Group

Enabling citizens to safely enjoy the digital world they live in.

Principles

1. Citizens have the right to participate in a digital world to the fullest extent possible.
2. Providers of digital services and content directed at children should have a robust, trusted framework to deliver high quality age-appropriate materials.
3. People with parental responsibility or guardianship of children or vulnerable groups should have confidence in the standards and framework to enable permissive content for their children or vulnerable groups.
4. Robust, privacy-protecting age verification must be in place on websites that make age-restricted content and/or services (including user-generated) available to users.
5. The regulatory eco-system should encourage market solutions through a robust framework of accreditation, certification and interoperability.

For further information please see the Digital Safety Tech Working Group pages.

Smart Society Working Group

The DPA's Smart Society Working Group aims to examine new impacts on upcoming policy which may arise from the huge increases in scale, ubiquity, processing capability and interconnectivity forecast for smart devices and the "Internet of Things" (including machine-to-machine interfacing).

For further information please see the Smart Society Working Group pages.

Digital Competition Policy Working Group

A key objective of the Digital Competition Policy Group is to investigate how increasing market concentration affects economic and personal freedom, and to make recommendations to help ensure a thriving social market economy.

For further information please see the Digital Competition Policy Working Group pages.