Autumn Budget’s £300m NHS Tech Boost

In the Autumn Budget 2025, Chancellor Rachel Reeves confirmed £300 million of new capital investment for NHS technology. The aim is clear: improve productivity, reduce waiting lists, and push services to digital. Alongside this, the government reiterated plans for Neighbourhood Health Centres (over 100 by 2030, within a wider 250-centre ambition) designed to move more care into community settings, supported by better digital tools.

For digital health suppliers and NHS cyber leaders, this is more than a nice headline. Capital funding typically refers to hardware, platforms, and implementation capabilities and the infrastructure that enables ambitious transformations. But it also creates a surge moment: more data flowing, more endpoints connected, and more suppliers embedded in care pathways. That is exactly where cyber risk loves to hide.

Why This Matters for AI in The NHS (and Why Cyber Has to Keep Up)

The £300m isn’t happening in isolation. It lands inside a broader government push to place AI at the heart of national renewal, with billions in private investment and targeted public support for compute, R&D, and regional AI Growth Zones. The intent is to speed safe adoption of AI across critical sectors, healthcare right near the top of that list.

In NHS terms, this funding wave is likely to translate into:

• faster roll-out of AI-enabled diagnostics and decision support

• greater use of ambient/automated admin tools (e.g., voice and workflow automation)

• deeper reliance on the NHS App and connected services as the “front door” to care

• more integrated data pathways across primary, community, and hospital settings.

Each of those is valuable. Each also expands the attack surface.

If you’re an NHS supplier, the simplest way to think about this moment is:
funding accelerates adoption, and adoption accelerates scrutiny.

The Compliance Landscape is Tightening

Two major policy moves in 2025 make the timing especially important:

1. The Cyber Security and Resilience Bill (introduced 12 Nov 2025) proposes tougher, clearer duties for essential services such as healthcare, with stronger enforcement and broader scope. Expect higher expectations on resilience, incident reporting, and supply-chain accountability.

2. The NHS Cyber Security Charter for suppliers (launched May 2025) sets baseline commitments for any organisation selling into the NHS. It’s voluntary in name, but procurement gravity will do the enforcing. The charter asks suppliers to demonstrate things like secure development, strong patching, 24/7 monitoring, and transparent collaboration during incidents.

Put bluntly: the NHS is shifting from “trust me” to “prove it.”
And with fresh capital funding, more new suppliers will be pulled into scope.

Capital investment + AI = three cyber pressure points

Here’s what Periculo expects to be the most common risk/compliance pinch points as this funding turns into deployments:

1. More endpoints, more identity risk

New hardware and community-based digital tools mean more devices in more places — often with mixed ownership models and variable IT maturity. Identity and access management (IAM) becomes the real perimeter. If access controls are weak, everything else is window dressing.

What “good” looks like: enforced MFA, least-privilege access, clear device baselines, and auditable joiner/mover/leaver processes.

2. Faster AI roll-out can outrun assurance

Digital Health reporting has already flagged concerns that capital might prioritise infrastructure and delay “softer” AI enablement — but either way, AI adoption is accelerating. When AI tools move quickly into clinical workflow, assurance is frequently the bottleneck: data lineage, model validation, bias controls, and post-market surveillance.

What “good” looks like: documented validation, explainability for clinical decisions, threat modelling for AI pipelines, and a living post-deployment monitoring plan.

3. AI supply chains are long supply chains

Even a small AI feature can involve hosted models, third-party APIs, data labelling subcontractors, and cloud infrastructure. The Cyber Security Charter and the Resilience Bill both lean heavily on the idea of shared responsibility across suppliers. That includes your suppliers, too.

What “good” looks like: formal supplier assurance, clear SLAs for security controls, SBOMs where relevant, and rapid incident escalation routes.

What NHS suppliers should do now (practical, not theoretical)

If you’re selling into the NHS — or planning to — treat the Budget as your compliance starting gun. A sensible 90-day playbook:

1. Map your NHS exposure
   Which products touch patient data? Which connect to NHS networks? Which rely on third parties? You can’t secure what you haven’t scoped.

2. Align to the Cyber Security Charter
   Even if you haven’t signed yet, line up evidence against every commitment. Procurement teams will increasingly ask for it.

3. Run a targeted pen test or red-team exercise
   Focus on real deployment risk: auth flows, APIs, device integrations, privilege escalation and lateral movement.

4. Prepare for Resilience Bill-style expectations
   Get incident reporting, backup integrity, recovery objectives, and monitoring capabilities up to standard now — before they become hard contractual gates.

5. Bring AI assurance into your SDLC
   If you use AI, build compliance into development: data governance checks, model performance tracking, bias evaluation, and safe-failure behaviours.

This £300m investment is a good thing. It should speed digital modernisation, create space for AI to reduce admin load, and support more connected care. But the NHS has learned the hard way that digitisation without resilience is a false economy.

The winners in this next phase won’t just be the most innovative suppliers. They’ll be the most secure and compliance-ready innovators.