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

Bradley Thomas Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 3rd February 2026 Public Bill Committees

[Dr Allison Gardner (Stoke-on-Trent South) (Lab)]

Q I should point out that I once worked for the NHS AI and Digital Regulations Service and have also worked for a number of different regulators, including the ICO, so I have experience of the joys and frustrations of cross-regulatory working. We have heard evidence of the challenges experienced by businesses when they have to go to different regulators—I think it is as many as 14—and deal with the conflicting guidance they are often given and the skillset within each regulator. There were calls for one portal for incident reporting.

The ICO is a horizontal regulator working across all sectors. In your experience, would a single cyber regulator be a good idea? What would be the benefits and the challenges? I will allow Ofcom and Ofgem to jump in and defend themselves.

Ian Hulme: I suppose the challenge with having a single regulator is that—like ourselves, as a whole-economy regulator—it will have to prioritise and direct its resources at the issues of highest harm and risk. One benefit of a sectoral approach is that we understand our sectors at a deeper level; we certainly work together quite closely on a whole range of issues, and my teams have been working with Natalie and Stuart’s teams on the Bill over the last 18 months, and thinking about how we can collaborate better and co-ordinate our activities. It is really pleasing to see that that has been recognised in the Bill with the provisions for information sharing. That is going to be key, because the lack of information-sharing provisions in the current regs has been a bit of a hindrance. There are pros and cons, but a single regulator will need to prioritise its resources, so you may not get the coverage you might with a sectoral approach.

Natalie Black: Having worked in this area for quite some time, I would add that the challenge with a single regulator is that you end up with a race to the bottom, and minimum standards you can apply everywhere. However, with a tailored approach, you can recognise the complexity of the cyber risk and the opportunity to target specific issues—for example, prepositioning and ransomware. That said, we absolutely recognise the challenge for operators and companies in having to bounce between regulators. We hear it all the time, and you will see a real commitment from us to do something about it.

Some of that needs to sit with the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, which is getting a lot of feedback from all of us about how we need it to co-ordinate and make things as easy as possible for companies—many of which are important investors in our economy, and we absolutely recognise that. We are also doing our bit through the UK Regulators Network and the Digital Regulation Cooperation Forum to find the low-hanging fruit where we can make a difference. To give a tangible example, we think there should be a way to do single reporting of incidents. We do not have the answer for that yet, but that is something we are exploring to try and make companies’ lives easier. To be honest, it will make our lives easier as well, because it wastes our time having to co-ordinate across multiple operators.

[Bradley Thomas (Bromsgrove) (Con)]

Q What additional resources will you need in order to implement and enforce the requirements of the Bill?

Ian Hulme: Again, to contrast the ICO’s position with that of other colleagues, we have a much larger sector, as it currently exists, and we will have a massively larger sector again in the future. We are also funded slightly differently. The ICO is grant in aid funded from Government, so we are dependent on Government support.

To move from a reactive footing, which is our position at the moment—that is the Government’s guidance to competent authorities and to the ICO specifically—to a proactive footing with a much expanded sector, will need significant uplift in our skills and capability, as well as system development in order to register and ingest intelligence from MSPs and relevant digital service providers in the future.

From our perspective at the ICO, we need significant support from DSIT so that we can transition into the new regulatory regime. It will ultimately be self-funding—it is a sustainable model—but we need continued support during the transition period.

[Bradley Thomas]

Q Are you able to quantify that in any way?

Ian Hulme: At the moment, to give you a few broad numbers our teams are around 15 people, and we anticipate doubling that. In the future, with self-funding, we will be a bit more in control of our own destiny. It is a significant uplift from our perspective.

Natalie Black: The challenge is that the devil is in the detail. Until that detail has worked through secondary legislation, we will have to reserve our position, so that we give you accurate numbers in due course. From Ofcom’s point of view, it is about adding 10s rather than significant numbers. I do not think we are that far off the ICO.

But I want to emphasise that this is about quality, not necessarily quantity. Companies want to work with expert regulators who really know what they are doing. Ofcom is building on the work we are already doing under the Telecommunications (Security) Act 2021. It will be a question of reinforcing that team, rather than setting up a separate one. We want to get the best, high-quality individuals who know how to talk to industry and really know cyber-security, to make sure people have a good experience when engaging with us.

Ian Hulme: To add to that, the one challenge we will face as a group is that we are all fishing in the same pond for skills. MSPs and others will also be fishing in that pond from the sector side. There needs to be recognition that there is going to be a skills challenge in this implementation.

Stuart Okin: To specifically pick up on the numbers, we have a headcount of 43 who are dedicated within cyber regulation. That also includes the investment side. We also have access to the engineering team—the engineering directorate—which is a separate team. There is also our enforcement directorate, as well as the legal side of things. The scope changes proposed in the Bill are just the large load controllers and supply chain, so we are not expecting a major uplift. These will be small numbers in comparison. Unlike my colleagues, we are not expecting a big uplift in resourcing.

[Tim Roca (Macclesfield) (Lab)]

Q I was reading the ICO’s response in December, as this legislation was proceeding, and it talks a little about having clarity around secondary legislation, the Secretary of State’s powers and the definition of “significant impact”. What are your concerns about the secondary legislation, or what you would like to make sure is right in it?

Ian Hulme: There are two angles to that. From a purely planning and preparation perspective, it is incredibly difficult, without having seen the detail, to know precisely what is expected of MSPs and IDSPs in the future, and therefore what the regulatory activity will be. That is why, when I am answering questions for colleagues, it is difficult to be precise about those numbers.

Equally, we are hearing from industry that it wants that precision as well. What is the expectation on it regarding incident reporting? What does “significant impact” mean? Similarly, with the designation of critical suppliers, precision is needed around the definitions. From a regulatory perspective, without that precision, we will probably find ourselves in a series of potential cases arguing about the definition of an issue. To give an example, if the definition of MSP is vague, and we are saying to an MSP that we think it is in scope, and it is saying, “No, we are not,” then a lot of our time and attention will be taken up with those types of arguments and disputes. Precision will be key for us.

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[Dave Robertson (Lichfield) (Lab)]

Q Thank you for coming in to talk to us this afternoon. The Bill includes a couple of backstop powers for the Government to compel information and things like that. Are those powers sufficient to guarantee national security?

Chung Ching Kwong: I think that to a certain extent they will. For hackers or malicious actors aiming for financial gain with more traditional hacking methods, it will definitely do a job in protecting our national security. But the Bill currently views resilience through an IT lens. It is viewing this kind of regulatory framework as a market regulatory tool, instead of something designed to address threats posed by state-sponsored actors. It works for cyber-criminals, but it does not work for state actors such as China, which possess structural leverage over our infrastructure.

As I said before, we have to understand that Chinese vendors are legally obliged to compromise once they are required to. The fine under the Bill is scary, but not as scary as having your existence threatened in China—whether you still have access to that market or you can still exist as a business there. It is not doing the job to address state-sponsored hackers, but it really does help when it comes to traditional hacking, such as phishing attempts, malware and those kinds of things.

[Bradley Thomas]

Q For the avoidance of doubt, I will put on the record that I am a member of the IPAC caucus in this Parliament. Thank you for coming in to see us. You have spoken about the threats from hostile and adversarial states. Given the scope of what we are talking about, can you give us any insight on what comparable western nations are doing to protect themselves?

Chung Ching Kwong: The US is probably a good example. It passed Executive order 14028 in May 2021, which requires any software vendor selling to the US federal Government to provide something called a software bill of materials—SBOM. That is technically a table of ingredients, but for software, so you can see exactly what components the software is made of. A lot of the time people who code are quite lazy; they will pull in different components that are available on databases online to form a piece of software that we use. By having vendors provide an SBOM, when anything happens, or whenever any kind of vulnerability is detected, you can very easily find out what happened.

That is due to a hack in 2021, in which a tiny, free piece of code called Log4j was found to have a critical vulnerability. It was buried inside thousands of commercial software products. Without that list of ingredients, it would be very difficult for people who had been using the software to find out, because, first, they may not have the technological capabilities and, secondly, they would not even know if their software had that component. This is one of the things the US is doing to mitigate the risks when it comes to software.

Something that is not entirely in the scope of the Bill but is also worth considering is the US’s Uyghur Forced Labour Prevention Act. That is designed to prevent goods made with forced labour from entering the supply chain. The logic of preventing forced labour is probably something that the UK can consider. Because the US realised that it could not inspect every factory in Xinjiang to prove forced labour, it flipped the script: the law creates a rebuttable presumption that all goods from that region are tainted, so the burden of proof is now on the importer to prove, with clear and convincing evidence, that their supply chain is clean.

A similar logic could be considered when it comes to this Bill to protect cyber-security. Any entities that are co-operating with the PLA—the People’s Liberation Army—for example, should be considered as compromised or non-trustworthy until proven otherwise. That way, you are not waiting until problems happen, when you realise, “Oh, this is actually tainted,” but you prevent it before it happens. That is the comparison that I would make.

[Tim Roca]

Q I, too, put on the record that I am a member of the IPAC caucus in this Parliament.

Thank you for speaking to us today. May I turn the conversation a little on its head? We have been talking about national security and the threat from China and others. You were an activist in Hong Kong and made a great deal of effort to fight the Chinese Communist party’s invasion of privacy—privacy violations using the national security law—and other things. Do you see any risk in this legislation as regards civil liberties and privacy? We have had a bit of discussion about how much will go into secondary legislation and how broad the Secretary of State’s powers might be.

Chung Ching Kwong: The threat to privacy, especially to my community—the Hong Kong diaspora community in this country—will be in the fact that, under clause 9, we will be allowing remote access for maintenance, patches, updates and so on. If we are dealing with Chinese vendors and Chinese providers, we will have to allow, under the Bill, certain kinds of remote access for those firms to maintain the operation of software of different infrastructures. As a Hongkonger I would be worrying, because I do not know what kind of tier 2 or tier 3 supplier will have access to all those data, and whether or not they will be transmitted back to China or get into the wrong hands. It will be a worry that our data might fall into the wrong hands. Even though we are not talking specifically about personal data, personal data is definitely in scope. Especially for people with bounties on their head, I imagine that it will be a huge worry that there might be more legitimate access to data than there is right now under the Data Protection Act.

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[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology (Kanishka Narayan)]

Q One of the things that we have heard over the course of the day is that the Bill is just one of a range of different ways in which public authorities engage with companies on cyber-security and resilience. I am interested in hearing about the impact the Police CyberAlarm programme has had on the cyber-security and resilience of organisations. What would you like to see going forward?

DCS Andrew Gould: I love the fact that you have heard of it. One of the things that we struggle with is promoting a lot of these initiatives. Successive Governments actually deserve a lot of credit for the range of services that are provided. We aspire to be a global cyber-power, and in many ways we are. When you look at the range of services, tools, advice and guidance that organisations or the public can get, there is quite a positive story to tell there. I think we struggle to bring that into one single narrative and promote it, which is a real challenge. People just do not know that those services are there.

For those who are not familiar with Police CyberAlarm, it is a Home Office-funded policing tool focused on small and medium-sized organisations that probably do not have the skills or understanding to protect themselves as effectively. They can download that piece of software, and it will sit on their external networks and monitor for attacks. For the first time, it helps us in policing to build a domestic threat picture for small and medium-sized organisations, because everybody has a different piece of the puzzle. GCHQ has great insight into what is coming into the UK infrastructure, but it obviously cannot monitor domestically. Big organisations that provide cyber-security services and monitoring know what is impacting their clients or their organisation, but not everybody else. At policing, we get what is reported, which is a tiny piece of the puzzle. So everyone has a different bit of the jigsaw, and none of it fits together, and, even if it did, there would still be gaps. For SMEs, that is a particular gap.

For us, we get the threat intelligence to drive our operational activity, which has been quite successful for us. The benefit for member organisations—we are up to about 12,000 organisations at the moment, which are mostly schools, because we know that they are the most vulnerable to attack for a variety of reasons—is that, having the free tool available, it can do the monthly vulnerability scans and assessments. So they are getting a report from the police that tells them what they need to fix and what they need to patch.

We do not publicly offer a lifetime monitoring service, because we would not want the liability and responsibility, and we do not have the infrastructure to run that scale of security operation centre. But, in effect, that is actually what we have been doing for a long time—maybe not 24/7, but most of the time—because we have been able to identify precursor activity to ransomware attacks on schools or other organisations, and have been able to step in and prevent it from happening. There have been instances where officers have literally got in cars and gone on a blue light to organisations to say, “You need to shut some stuff off now, because you are about to lose control of your whole organisation.”

To that extent, it has been really impactful, but the challenge for us is how to scale. How do you scale so that people understand that it is there? How do you make it easier for organisations to install? That is one of the things that we are working on at the moment, so that everybody can benefit from the scans and the threat reporting, and we can benefit from a bigger understanding of what is going on.

The flip side of the SME offer from our point of view is our cyber-resilience centres. By working with some of the top student talent in the country, we can scale to offer our member organisations across the country the latest advice and guidance, help them understand what the NCSC advice and guidance is, and then help them to get the right level of security policies, patch their systems and all that kind of thing. It helps them to take the first steps on their cyber-resilience journey, and hopefully be more mature consumers of cyber-security industry services going forward. We are helping to create a market for growth, but also helping those organisations to understand their specific vulnerabilities and improve from a very base level.

[Bradley Thomas]

Q With regard to ransom payments and extortion attempts, what do you typically see? Is it for monetary gain or intellectual property data—what is the split?

DCS Andrew Gould: That is another really good question. Generally, it is financial, but you will often get what is called the double dip, so there is the extraction of data as well as the encryption of it, so that you no longer have access to it. They might take that data as well, primarily personal data, because of the regulatory pressures and challenges that that brings. There is a sense among a lot of criminal groups that, if they have personal data, you are more likely to pay, because you do not want that reputation, embarrassment and all the rest of it, as opposed to if they take intellectual property, for example. But it is not that that does not happen as well. Primarily, it is financial gain.

[Chris Vince]

Q Part of my concern is the pace of change in the technology that hackers are using, and I am sure that is a concern for you as well. One of the conversations about the Bill is about how flexible or inflexible it should be. What is your view on the changing pace of the threat we face from criminality when it comes to cyber-attacks, and on how the Bill can best be framed to deal with that ever-changing challenge and threat?

DCS Andrew Gould: It is a tricky one. It feels like the technology change is getting ever faster and ever more challenging, but I first went into cyber-crime in the Met back in 2014, and we are giving the same advice now as we were giving then. Sometimes your head can explode with the technical complexity of it, but a lot of the solution just comes down to doing the really boring basics in a world-class way. It is things like patching and doing your software updates. Whether you are a member of the public or running an organisation, finding a way to do those updates and patches means that 50% of the threat has gone, there and then. With something like multi-factor authentication, it seems like most organisations do not want to inconvenience their staff or customers by putting it in place, but that would be another 40% of the problem solved. It is not infallible—nothing is—but if you are thinking about how attacks are still successful, it is pretty basic: a lot of our protections are not in place. Solving that means that 90% of the threat is gone, there and then. That then leaves the 10% of more sophisticated threats—let’s make the criminals work a bit harder.

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[Chris Vince]

Q Thank you for your time, Minister. Listening to the evidence and looking at the Bill, what strikes me is that this is about a balance between the importance of flexibility—particularly given the increase in threat and the complexity of the issues we face—and businesses wanting certainty. Do you feel confident that the Bill strikes that balance, and how have you sought to ensure that it does?

Kanishka Narayan: The primary thing to say is that the range of organisations—commercial ones as well as those from the cyber-security world more generally—coming out to welcome the Bill is testament to the fact that it is deeply needed. I pay tribute to the fact that some of the provisions were engaged on and consulted on by the prior Government, and there is widespread consensus across industry and in the regulatory and enforcement contexts about the necessity and the quality of the Bill. On that front, I feel we are in a good place.

On specific questions, of course, there is debate—we have heard some of that today—but I am very much looking forward to going through clause by clause to explain why the intent of the Bill is reflected in the particular definitions.

[Bradley Thomas]

Q Would the cyber-attacks on JLR and M&S that took place last year be in the scope of this Bill?

Kanishka Narayan: I am shy of making comments on specific incidents, but as a broad brush, clearly the food supply or automotive manufacturing sectors are not directly in scope of the Bill, for reasons I am very much happy to discuss.

[Bradley Thomas]

Q Do you think they should be within scope?

Kanishka Narayan: Let me place the focus of this Bill in the global context. As we have heard, there is a range of legislative as well as non-legislative measures on cyber-security. It is deeply important that every organisation, whether in scope of the Bill or not, acts robustly, and we will look at that, not least through the cyber action plan, which I know industry welcomed earlier today and which we are looking forward to publishing very soon.

The particular focus of this Bill is on essential services, the disruption of which would pose an imminent threat—for example, to life and to our economy—in the immediate context. For reasons that we can dive into, if you look at a market such as food supply, the diversity, competitive nature and alternative provision in that market are so obvious that to designate it as fitting the definitional scope I have just highlighted would not be an evidence-led way of engaging.

[Bradley Thomas]

Q But would you like to see a Bill that goes further and has broader scope?

Kanishka Narayan: As I have said, this legislative vehicle is focused on really high standards of rigour for essential services. I am very keen to ensure that, in the first instance, we are engaging with those companies through the cyber action plan and the National Cyber Security Centre’s framework and to ensure that, as a consequence of those, they are in a robust place.

[Bradley Thomas]

Q With regard to skills, given the acute shortage and the growth of this industry, what do you propose to ensure that the public sector is adequately resourced, given what will undoubtedly be a very lucrative private sector appeal for that talent?

Kanishka Narayan: This is a great question. There are two things on my mind. One is that the Government have published a cyber action plan, the crux of which is to make sure that, from the point of view of understanding, principles, accountability and, ultimately, skills, there is significant capability in the public sector. The second thing to say is that we have a very broad-based plan on skills more generally across the cyber sector, public and private. For example, I am really proud of the fact that, through the CyberFirst programme, some—I think—415,000 students right across the country have been upskilled in cyber-security. It is deeply important that the public sector ensures that we are standing up to the test of hiring them and making the attraction of the sector clear to them as well. There is a broad-based plan and a specific one for the public sector in the Government context.

[Tim Roca]

Q The Committee heard this morning about the public sector’s level of technical debt. This Bill is important in terms of safeguarding essential services, but we heard that an important factor—notwithstanding this Bill—is tackling the enormous number of legacy systems. How do you see us running the two in parallel?

Kanishka Narayan: That is a great question. Broadly, the Bill takes a risk-based and outcomes-focused approach, rather than a technology-specific one. I think that is the right way to go about it. As we have heard today and beyond, there are some areas where frontier technology—new technology such as AI and quantum, which we talked about earlier today—will pose specific risks. There are other areas where the prevalence of legacy systems and legacy database architectures will present particular risks as well.

The Bill effectively says that the sum total of those systems, in their ultimate impact on the risk exposure of an organisation, is the singular focus where regulators should place their emphasis. I would expect that individual regulators will pay heed to the particular prevalence of legacy systems and technical debt as a source of risk in their particular sectors, and as a result to the mitigations that ought to be placed. I think that being technology agnostic is the right approach in this context.