Cyber Security and Resilience (Network and Information Systems) Bill (First sitting)

Alison Griffiths Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 3rd February 2026 Public Bill Committees

[Freddie van Mierlo (Henley and Thame) (LD)]

Q I want to take a step back and ask a broader question about why this legislation is necessary. I think we agree that it is, but why are companies not already adhering to very high cyber-security standards? Surely it is in their commercial interests to do so; last year we saw the massive impact on JLR, M&S and the Co-op of failing to do so. Why might the state need to mandate companies to be cyber-secure and make them cyber-secure?

Jen Ellis: You have covered a lot of territory there; I will try to break it down. If you look at the attacks last year, all the companies you mentioned were investing in cyber-security. There is a difficulty here, because there is no such thing as being bullet-proof or secure. You are always trying to raise the barriers as high as you can and make it harder for attackers to be successful. The three attacks you mentioned were highly targeted attacks. The example of Volt Typhoon in the US was also highly targeted. These are attackers who are highly motivated to go after specific entities and who will keep going until they get somewhere. It is really hard to defend against stuff like that. What you are trying to do is remove the chances of all the opportunistic stuff happening.

So, first, we are not going to become secure as such, but we are trying to minimise the risk as much as possible. Secondly, it is really complex to do it; we saw last year the examples of companies that, even though they had invested, still missed some things. Even in the discussions that they had had around cyber-insurance, they had massively underestimated the cost of the level of disruption that they experienced. Part of it is that we are still trying to figure out how things will happen, what the impacts will be and what that will look like in the long term.

There is also a long tail of companies that are not investing, or not investing enough. Hopefully, this legislation will help with that, but more importantly, you want to see regulators engaging on the issue, talking to the entities they cover and going on a journey with them to understand what the risks are and where they need to get to. If you are talking about critical providers and essential services, it is really hard for an organisation—in its own mind or in being answerable to its board or investors—to justify spend on cyber-security. If you are a hospital saying that you are putting money towards security programmes rather than beds or diagnostics, that is an incredibly difficult conversation to have. One of the good things about CSRB, hopefully, is that it will legitimise choices and conversations in which people say, “Investing time and resources into cyber-security is investing time and resources into providing a critical, essential service, and it is okay to make those pay-off choices—they have to be made.”

Part of it is that when you are running an organisation, it is so hard to think about all the different elements. The problem with cyber-security—we need to be clear about this—is that with a lot of things that we ask organisations to do, you say, “You have to make this investment to get to this point,” and then you move on. So they might take a loan, the Government might help them in some way, or they might deprioritise other spending for a set period so that they can go and invest in something, get up to date on something or build out something; then they are done, and they can move back to a normal operating state.

Security is not that. It is expensive, complex and multifaceted. We are asking organisations of all sizes in the UK, many of which are not large, to invest in perpetuity. We are asking them to increase investment over time and build maturity. That is not a small ask, so we need to understand that there are very reasonable dynamics at play here that mean that we are not where we need to be. At the same time, we need a lot more urgency and focus. It is really important to get the regulators engaged; get them to prioritise this; have them work with their sectors, bring their sectors along and build that maturity; and legitimise the investment of time and resources for critical infrastructure.

[Alison Griffiths (Bognor Regis and Littlehampton) (Con)]

Q You have both mentioned the risk involved in supply chains. Do you think that, outside regulated industries, the Bill goes far enough to secure supply chains? If not, what would your recommendations be?

David Cook: The legislation talks about secondary legislation, so it allows for an agile, flexible programme whereby organisations can be brought within scope very quickly if concerns make that necessary. What that leaves us with, though, is that although legislation can be changed quickly, organisations often cannot. Where there is a definition, as we see with NIS2, as to which entities are in scope, organisations can embark on a multi-year programme to get into a compliant position. They can throw money at it, effectively.

What this legislation talks about, through the secondary legislation, is bringing organisations into scope and mandating specific security controls or specific requirements on those organisations in terms of security, but while the law might come in over a weekend, organisational change will not necessarily follow. There is a potential issue there. I can see the benefit and attractiveness of secondary legislation being used to achieve that aim, but having a clearer baseline as to what that sort of scope might look like—it could be ramped up or down, and the volume could be turned up or down, depending on need—would be more helpful. Reducing scope while diverging from NIS2 might be a benefit in terms of the commercial reality, but it might be a misstep in terms of security and the long tail that it takes to get more secure.

[The Chair]

Thank you. I am going to bring Allison Gardner in, because she has been waiting. You have two minutes, Allison.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lincoln Jopp (Spelthorne) (Con)]

Q On the question of closer alignment, can you give us a sense from the international picture of whether certain regulatory regimes raise the barrier to terrorists or criminals so high that they are left alone? Is that a national thing or a company-based thing? Where are the flow lines of attack and threat? Is it on a national or a corporate basis?

Stuart McKean: I do not think the cyber-criminal really cares, to be blunt. They will attack anywhere. You can, of course—

[Alison Griffiths]

I am so sorry. Could you possibly speak into the microphone? I cannot hear you.

Stuart McKean: Sorry. I was saying that the cyber-criminal does not care about lines, geographies or standards. They do not care whether you have an international standard or you follow the legislation of a certain country. They will attack where they see the weak link.

[Lincoln Jopp]

Q I appreciate that. My question was about where that leads them to attack, on the basis that they will take the route of least resistance. Where is that? Is that an international thing, a national thing or a corporate thing?

Stuart McKean: It is probably across all three, to be quite honest with you. It is very dependent on what they want to achieve, whether it be an economic attack or a targeted attack on a corporate entity. I do not think it has those boundaries—I genuinely think it is across the whole industry and the whole globe. The reality is that cyber-attacks everybody. We are being attacked every day. I do not see it as an international boundary, or a UK thing or a US thing. It is generally across the globe.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sarah Russell (Congleton) (Lab)]

Q Obviously no one wants to put crippling costs on to businesses, but cyber-security costs money—there is no way of avoiding that. We only have to look at the JLR attack to see the scale of the impact on our economy when it does not work, and we are looking at only critical national infrastructure here. Have you had any information from business about whether and to what extent this will promote increased spending on cyber-security?

Jill Broom: We can assume that it will, because if you are in the supply chain or come within scope, you will have certain responsibilities and you will have to invest, not just in technology but in the skills space as well. How easy it is to do that is probably overestimated a bit; it is quite difficult to find the right skilled people, and that applies across regulators as well as business.

Generally speaking, yes, I think it will be costly, but there are things that could probably help smaller organisations: techUK has called for things such as financial incentives, or potentially tax credits, to help SMEs. That could be applied on a priority basis, with those working within the critical national infrastructure supply chain looked at first.

Dr Sanjana Mehta: If I may expand on that, we have been consulting our members and the wider community, and 58% of our respondents in the UK say that they still have critical and significant skills needs in their organisations. Nearly half of the respondents—47%—say that skills shortages are going to be one of the greatest hurdles in regulatory compliance. That is corroborated by evidence, even in the impact assessment that has been done on the previous regulatory regime, where I think nearly half of the operators of essential services said that they do not have access to skills in-house to support the regulatory requirements. Continuing to have sustained investment in skills development is definitely going to require funding. Taking it a step back, we need first of all to understand what sort of skills and expertise we have to develop to ensure that implementation of the Bill is successful.

[Alison Griffiths]

Q Returning to the supply chain risks, I want to ask you about the difference between OT—operational technology—and IT, and whether there is sufficient detail in the Bill to protect that. If you have intelligent electronic devices from single suppliers across multiple sectors, are we confident that there is sufficient detail about what the regulatory role is in saying that suppliers should be within scope? Is more detail needed in the Bill?

Stuart McKean: I am not an expert on the detail, but I would say that there is currently very little detail in the Bill regarding IT and OT.

[Alison Griffiths]

Q Do you think that there should be more or not?

Stuart McKean: The devil is always in the detail, so any more clarity that can be put in the Bill is always going to be a good thing.

[Alison Griffiths]

Does anyone have anything else?

Jill Broom: I think that I will need to come back to you in writing on the specifics of operational technology.

[The Chair]

Feel free to write in, secondary to this session, if you feel that you want to expand on any answers.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Chair]

Very briefly—yes.

Matt Houlihan: My first point is on the scale of the challenge. From Cisco’s own research, we released a cyber-security readiness index, which was a survey of 8,000 companies around the world, including in the UK, where we graded companies by their cyber maturity. In the UK, 8% of companies—these are large companies—were in the mature bracket, which shows the scale of the challenge.

The other point I want to make relates to its being a cyber-security and resilience Bill, and the “resilience” bit is really important. We need to focus on what that means in practice. There are a lot of cyber measures that we need to put in place, but resilience is about the robustness of the technology being used, as well as the cyber-security measures, the people and everything else that goes with it. Looking at legacy technology, for example—obsolete technology, which is more at risk—should also be part of the standards and, perhaps, the regulatory guidance that is coming through. I know that the public sector is not part of the Bill, but I mention the following to highlight the challenge: over a year ago, DSIT published a report that showed, I think, that 28% of Government systems were in the legacy, unsupported, obsolete bracket. That highlights the nature of the challenge in this space.

[Alison Griffiths]

Q I have two specific questions. The first is about OT versus IT. Do you think that OT and its supply chains are sufficiently covered in the Bill? Secondly, given that you are all from commercial organisations, from your direct client experience, what is going to be the thing that moves the dial on board governance, specifically in relation to cyber?

Chris Anley: On the OT versus IT question, we have mentioned specificity versus flexibility. The benefit of the UK sectoral regulator model is that regulators that are in areas where OT is predominant can set specific measures that can reinforce those environments, whereas if you try a one-size-fits-all approach, you run the risk of certain critical OT-based systems becoming subject to successful attacks.

Ben Lyons: The broad approach that the UK is taking is sensible, in that the existing guidance has a range of principles around OT, as well as IT, security. Manufacturing is not in the scope of the Bill, which is probably appropriate, but it is worth looking at what could be done to improve the security of the manufacturing sector, more broadly, probably through non-legislative means. In light of recent attacks, it is important to ensure that guidance and incentives are in place to support that sector.

[The Chair]

I call Freddie van Mierlo for the last question.