Somewhat in fairness, they did try to form a permanent civilian colony within 100 years of Cabot, being at Roanoke in 1587. It didn't work. In reality, though, your question remains quite valid as that wasn't exactly on the heels of Cabot's expedition (and I'm pointing it out here not to be pedantic but because that was the first attempt at such a colony by England, and that plays into the timeline). We usually can't definitively say why someone didnt do something, particularly when speaking of a society on the whole. What we can do is look at what potential factors they would face by taking a particular action, how they did engage in a particular pursuit or policy, and/or what they actually were doing at that time. I'm borrowing very heavily from another post I made quite some time back dealing with England's colonial ambitions starting with Elizabeth I, but it didnt focus too much on the why they hadn't yet so I'm also adding upon that aspect. I hope it seams together well, and apologies if it does not - it's already been a long month. The relevant parts of that prior post are quoted below;

There was a desire for colonization pre- Elizabeth I, but it wasn't New World colonization - rather it was much closer to home. ...

Henry VIII decided he really wasn't catholic, and that led to his excommunication by the Pope. Well, the Lord of Ireland was an underruler of the Pope who held actual claim to the land. So Henry VIII changed that by getting the Irish parliamentary body to make it the Kingdom of Ireland and grant him title as the first "King of Ireland", preventing the Pope from rescinding his authority over the domain. The parliament was basically bought by having them surrender their titles and landholdings to the King by granting him that title, then he would grant them immediately back to the same people and thus grant them protection of English law in regards to their inheritance passed on (yet still be an "independent" Kingdom). This was in the 1530's-1540's, not long before Elizabeth I took over. While Cabot (and a couple others) added to North American coastline maps and the Spanish (like de Vaca and Ponce de Leon) wandered through future America looking for fabled cities of gold, the English were certainly forming fundamental colonization practices with settlements in Ireland.

To finish the story and link the two together... One of those Irish colonizers by the name of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who was knighted for his service to Elizabeth I in Ireland which had started in 1566, eventually wound up as a Irish parliament member and instigator of the troubles in Munster in the late 1560s (where he had lined the pathway to his tent with the skulls of locals that resisted his efforts, claiming it to be a very effective negotiating strategy against their surviving kin) before embarking on a new quest in the 1570s by authoring a book about the need to find the northwest passage, which would require a settlement to secure from other nations. That colony could also act as a base for raids on the Spanish treasure fleets further south - and thus was born New World colonization by the English. The Queen agreed and sent him with letters of Patent, but the first trip failed. The second was more successful in that they made it, then crashed. They claimed St John's but failed to establish a colony. On the return voyage one ship survived, the flagship. For whatever reason, Gilbert had stayed on the smaller vessel used to chart the coast and run up river deltas, and it was lost to the sea. At that point Gilbert's rights to colonize were split by the Queen between his brother Adrian Gilbert and his half brother Sir Walter Raleigh - the latter would coin the name Virginia in honor of the Queen in the early 1580s during his efforts to first explore and later colonize North America between Spanish Florida and Newfoundland, where Adrian Gilbert's grant began.

About the same time Richard Hakluyt began [writing] (https://www.americanyawp.com/reader/colliding-cultures/richard-hakluyt-makes-the-case-for-english-colonization-1584/) about the need to colonize for the sake of colonization, and he would become a member of the London Company in 1589, that company later being chartered to start Jamestown. Plymouth Company, the sister to it that founded Popham Colony in conjunction with Jamestown, was led by Popham, who died shortly after its founding, and his second in command - Raleigh Gilbert, the son of Humphrey.

In addition to the linked primary sources, Alan Taylor's American Colonies does a brief yet good job of showing much of this relation of Anglo "pre-colonization" morphing into New World colonization (and the same for the Spanish), and Micheal Guasco's Slaves and Englishmen touches on some aspects as well.

So in the early 1570s, and actually starting in the late 1560s, people were getting together with the idea of forming an English colony in North America but the primary motivator for these men - who also had access to the Queen's ear - was to do so in order to secure the fabled trading passage to China (known as the Northwest Passage). Simultaniously, they would have an unofficial forward operating base from which they could raid Spanish treasure ships leaving the Caribbean and headed back to Europe. All of these folks interconnect, as do many of these families and for generations. Gilbert was a sponsor of and an inspiration for Martin Frobisher; he had sailed west to Labrador and Baffin Island in 1576 prior to any official Patent being issued for English colonization in North America. He didn't form a colony, but he almost did. His intent was absolutely to find the passage but instead he found land and came back to England with rocks, imagining vast gold deposits in them. It was really just rocks, and after a couple more voyages and a lot more rocks over the next couple years they all realized this. That's when Gilbert was given his chance by the Queen, in 1578, and it was good for six years. His first attempt flopped and his second killed him, but it had taken him time to get these expeditions in order. By the time we get to Raleigh in 1584 receiving the southern half of the patent, he was ready (Raleigh had even sailed his own ship with Gilbert on one expedition) and he almost immediately set out towards unoccupied Florida, and on that expedition Captains Barlowe and Amadas "found" Roanoke in modern North Carolina, returning with local men Wanchese and Manteo and subsequently sparking even more interest in London to finance the establishment of colonies. Frobisher had also carried away locals to exhibit in England in the 1570s, and the eventual governor of the failed 1587 Roanoke colony, John White, had painted them (he was an artist specializing in water colors). Frobisher would go on to join Francis Drake, the famed explorer pirate, on his 1585 voyage. Years earlier, in 1577, Drake had set out aboard the ship Golden Hind and would return to England with that lone surviving ship in 1580, becoming the first Englishman to circumnavigate the planet. He also raided a ton of Spanish treasure (which, in truth, was raided from the American continents and the original Americans inhabiting those areas by the Spanish), and I mean ton very figuratively as it was a nearly unimaginable amount of stolen treasure. The haul provided as much as a 4600% return on investment - or some 47£ for every 1£ invested - making every sponsor a huge profit. The Queen paid off her debts and still had over 40,000£ (in 1580 £'s) to use elsewhere from her share. Drake was knighted aboard his ship, and Gilbert would soon after sail aboard a ship named Golden Hind, in honor of Drake's vessel, on his way to claim St John's. Ironically, Drake's Hind would be the only ship to return from his 1577 expedition, and likewise Gilbert's Hind would be the only to survive his fateful 1583 expedition (though he was not aboard it on the return leg nor did he own that ship). Even Raleigh would make enough from one raiding side mission on his 1584 expedition to fund the whole thing and then some. The money was there, but it wasn't in Baffin Island, Labrador, or Newfoundland; it was slowly floating back across the Atlantic a few hundred miles south aboard Spanish galleons.

Cont'd