IN Brief:
- Stage 1 opened on 3 August and closes at midday on 27 August 2026.
- Development projects may receive up to £350,000 and must deliver a TRL 6 or 7 demonstration.
- Focus areas include cyber threats, secure information sharing, protective security, vehicle screening, and crowd monitoring.
UK Defence Innovation has opened the first cycle of a security technology competition seeking proposals from British industry and academia for Home Office and National Protective Security Authority requirements. Selected projects will be expected to produce technology demonstrations at Technology Readiness Level 6 or 7 and show a credible route towards operational impact within two years of completion.
The Security Open Call uses a two-stage assessment process intended to remove unsuitable concepts before applicants commit to a full technical and commercial submission. Stage 1 opened at midday on 3 August and closes at midday on 27 August 2026, with applicants limited to a 1,000-word outline covering strategic fit, technical maturity, exploitation potential, scope, and delivery timescale.
UKDI expects to announce the first-stage outcome on 30 September. Shortlisted organisations will then be invited to submit detailed proposals during October, with funding decisions scheduled for 14 December and applicant feedback due in January 2027.
The timetable moves from initial screening to a contract decision within slightly more than four months. That is relatively compressed for programmes spanning cyber security, physical protection, data sharing, detection technology, and operational trials, placing a premium on proposals that already have a defined technical baseline and customer problem.
Three project structures are available. A conventional development project can run for up to 12 months and receive no more than £350,000, ending with a TRL 6 demonstration in a relevant environment.
Applicants may add an optional testing and trialling phase, extending the programme to 18 months and taking the technology towards TRL 7. Projects concerned solely with testing and trialling are capped at six months and £150,000.
The competition has no stated minimum value, although UKDI requires expenditure to remain proportionate to the engineering work, programme duration, and expected security benefit. Projects must be led by a UK-based organisation, or the British-registered entity of an international organisation, and the funded activity must be performed in the UK.
The Home Office requirement covers problems extending across policing, government, border security, and public safety. Areas of interest include secure information sharing between organisations, technology for detecting and responding to online harms, new approaches to technology-enabled crime, resilience against cyber and hybrid threats, and tools supporting the disruption of organised immigration crime.
The National Protective Security Authority element concentrates on physical and personnel security against terrorism and state threats. Published requirements include low-cost vehicle screening for explosives and weapons, extended-reality technology for protective-security training, systems capable of detecting concealed threats in crowds, and ground-based warning equipment for hostile vehicles.
The authority is also seeking responses to narrower technology risks. One requirement concerns equipment for testing device-to-vehicle USB-C data blockers, illustrating the breadth of the competition: it ranges from large-area physical protection to small electronic interfaces capable of creating an exploitable path into connected systems.
Successful proposals will need to do more than describe an interesting product. Applicants must identify the operational problem, explain how the approach differs from existing equipment, describe the expected security improvement, set out the intended route to market, and address technical, ethical, legal, and regulatory risks.
They must also state the technology’s maturity at the beginning and end of the project. That requirement should expose proposals that use ambitious terminology without having a credible development plan, test method, or definition of what constitutes a successful demonstration.
The competition excludes consultancy exercises, literature reviews, and demonstrations of standard commercial products requiring no experimental development. UKDI is also refusing proposals without a credible path into operational capability or little prospect of outperforming existing technology.
Those exclusions matter because public innovation programmes can attract mature products relabelled around a newly published requirement. The TRL structure is intended to fund genuine development while avoiding open-ended research that has no defined user, delivery point, or exploitation route.
The target maturity creates a demanding middle ground. The competition is not financing basic scientific work, but neither is it simply procuring completed equipment. Applicants must build enough evidence to demonstrate a prototype in a representative environment while retaining a viable route through qualification, production, procurement, and support.
The optional trial phase will be particularly relevant to technologies whose performance depends heavily on environment and operator behaviour. Vehicle screening, crowd monitoring, secure communications, and cyber-defence tools can appear convincing under controlled conditions but behave differently around public infrastructure, variable data, existing equipment, and users with limited training time.
A credible trial plan will require access to representative sites, end users, measurable performance criteria, and sufficient time to correct weaknesses found during deployment. UKDI requires applicants to identify travel, third-party facilities, specialist sites, and other trial costs, reducing the scope to leave operational testing as an undefined activity near the end of the project.
Commercialisation sits beside technical development throughout the call. Applicants must explain how the technology could enter the security market after the funded work, whether through direct procurement, integration with an established supplier, licensing, or wider adoption across government and critical infrastructure.
The first substantive measure arrives on 27 August, when the initial submissions will show whether the broad remit has attracted organisations with sufficiently defined customers and engineering plans. Funding decisions follow in December, but the programme’s value will ultimately be measured by whether the selected technologies progress from protected demonstrations into deployable systems.