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

Dave Robertson Excerpts

Thursday 5th February 2026 Public Bill Committees

Even with regulations that look quite straightforward, such as those on data centres, we have to bear in mind that any regulation we put on business and industry will impose a burden and have a chilling effect. Do not get me wrong: regulations are important when used proportionately and, as the hon. Member for Harlow pointed out, a lot of the Bill is a balancing act, but we need to make sure that we get the balance right. Every regulation is a harm from the outset; it creates a burden on somebody else to do something.

[Dave Robertson (Lichfield) (Lab)]

I am taken by the hon. Member saying that every regulation is a harm; I cannot hear that and not intervene. Regulations do place burdens on businesses—that is absolutely a thing, and we all understand that—but we cannot afford to look at regulation as only negative.

The hon. Member is making a very good point about SMEs and their access to markets and funding but, if SMEs want to grow and thrive in the UK, they need access to data centres whose security they can have confidence in. Part of what we talked about in introducing this Bill was ensuring that SMEs can be confident about the regulatory environment that we have in the UK and providing such reassurance to them. Later on, we talked about large load carriers. SMEs rely on electricity and power supply, and making sure that we have the correct regulations in place to give them the security and confidence in the knowledge that the supply will always be there comes back to the regulatory framework.

I am not in any way trying to step away from the hon. Member—he also spoke about the balance of regulation, and I think he is right on that—but to use a sentence such as “regulation is a harm” steps too far from that balance. We need to make sure that we also see the good side to this regulation, in creating the business confidence to allow SMEs to operate in an environment where they can have confidence in their access to data and energy.

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[Dr Spencer]

The hon. Member for Lichfield may be aware that my background is in medicine; I used to be a doctor before I came to this place. One of the skills and challenges in medicine is that any medical intervention—apart from a small handful—always has a risk of harm or side effects to the patient. It is always a balancing act between the harm and the benefit. My bread and butter before I came to this place was balancing harms and risks in the best interests of the person in front of me.

Although I have never been a businessperson, and I have certainly never owned or run a data centre, my approach to business burdens is to see the extra things that the Government make businesses do—which are not necessarily what businesses would normally do or see as in their direct interests—as a prima facie harm. I will expand my words a bit if that helps in explaining the logic. The starting point is that it is an extra burden and a harm, but then benefits from other angles can outweigh that harm. It is getting businesses to do something more; if they were doing it anyway, we would not need regulations. It is an additional thing that business is being asked to do. It might be that we have decided that overall it is in the best interests of the sector. Individual businesses cannot regulate and change the sector themselves, so we have decided, “For the good of society, we think businesses should do this.”

I am always a little careful when we politicians say that we know what is better for business in terms of what they are doing. I take the point about how regulatory certainty can be helpful in itself. I also take the point about the overall benefit to society and the business network of having confidence that there are secure and working data centres and that the large load controllers—which we will talk about presently—have control. This Bill is a full-fat compendium of cross-regulations and links. I feel for any business looking through the later chapters and finding themselves subject to those requirements. We have to keep that in mind: all of us in this Committee want our businesses to succeed and do well, and we also want stable and flourishing infrastructure.

Going back to my medical roots, the starting point should be, “Primum non nocere”. That is often misinterpreted as, “First, do no harm”; actually, not doing harm is the main thing that we should do. As a legislator, you should have quite a high threshold before you start saying, “The solution is putting in another law. Let’s create another regulation,” or, “Let’s put another burden on business.”

One of the challenges I had when looking at the Bill when it was first published was understanding why we need it in the first place. What is its starting point? That is something that I have been exploring and thinking about as we have been preparing for this Committee stage. Why is our industry not doing it itself and sorting this out? Why is the Minister here today bringing forward these regulations on business and why is that necessary in the first place as opposed to business sorting it out?

I am sure that this is something that the Committee are going to come back to and explore in more detail when we discuss some of the more high-profile cyber-security impacts, particularly on Jaguar Land Rover and M&S. The hon. Member for Lichfield makes a very good point, and I do not think that this debate is settled in some ways—and I am sure we are going to come back to it quite a few times during the passing of this Bill.

[Dave Robertson]

I think your crystal ball is working today.

[Dr Spencer]

I am certainly going to come back to it a few times—if not other Members—and I will invite the Minister to come back to it a few times.

Returning to the point about the dependency on particular sectors, I mentioned the impact that Amazon Web Services had on our society and systems; interestingly, the AWS outage was caused not by a cyber-attack, but it demonstrates the disruption to our lives and businesses that could occur in the event of such an attack. The last Government recognised the vital and growing importance of data centres to the UK economy and people’s lives, as well as the risks of serious interruption to these services. That led to a public consultation on enhancing the security and resilience of UK data infrastructure.

The Conservatives therefore welcome that this vital element of our national infrastructure will be subject to cyber-security regulation. However, for regulation to be robust for cyber-resilience and regulator data centres it is essential that there are high rates of industry compliance. The Government stated in their impact assessment for this Bill that there is an ongoing engagement with the data centre sector. Could the Minister lay out what feedback he has received on the sector’s preparedness to meet the cyber-resilience standards set by the NIS regulations?

Likewise, in terms of ensuring effective regulation, Ofcom will have a dramatically increased role in terms of cyber-security regulation when these provisions come into effect. In view of Ofcom’s current regulatory workload and the challenges with recruitment, which I mentioned earlier and highlighted in the evidence session this week, what ongoing engagement is the Minister having with Ofcom more broadly to make sure that it is sufficiently resourced to play its role?

Before I move on to clause 6, on large load controllers, I feel I need to go back to the discussion about proportionality and the purpose and need for these regulations in the Bill. One of the biggest criticisms of the NIS regulations is that they have not really been enforced. I am not saying that a certain rate of enforcement is a marker of efficacy or compliance, but it is curious, and it has been raised to me, that the level of enforcement indicates that the NIS regulations have not really had teeth or changed anything.

In one bad world, we have regulations that are completely disproportionate and place a huge and unnecessary burden on industry. But in some ways the worst of all worlds, or rather another problem that we would need to deal with, would be for us to legislate, produce this wonderful cyber-security Act, and go away happy as legislators—“Hey-ho, it’s all sorted and finished; we can sleep well in our beds about the cyber-security of the UK.” But if the companies cannot follow the legislation, will not follow it or do not have the resources to do so, then all we will have done is waste our time. Worse, we will have given ourselves a false sense of security, rather than delving into some of the real challenges and problems in the sector, which include overall education, encouraging businesses to take the issue more seriously and encouraging people to do Cyber Essentials.

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[Dr Spencer]

I thank my hon. Friend for his interesting proposal, which attempts to crack the nut of one of the problems subsumed in the Bill.

The Bill cherry-picks certain sectors that need to be regulated entities, and there is a whole host of definitions. Then the Secretary of State can allocate some of the bits that they want to tag on through secondary legislation or the designation of a critical supplier. Then we have the MSP component. But there is something the Bill does not deal with. If I were to ask to the man in the street to identify the biggest cyber-security attack they have heard of in the past year or so, their answer would probably depend on where they live. If they live in the west midlands, they would talk about JLR, which has had a catastrophic effect on the local economy. In other parts of the country, the focus might be on Marks & Spencer or the Co-op. The Bill does not fix that, so what needs to be done? Should there be a threshold based on turnover, so that the process is not so onerous on certain companies, or something to support the insurance industry?

The Bill is silent on this issue, and the Government need to come up with some answers. I totally understand what they are trying to do with the Bill and how it is taking us forward—of course the NIS regulations need updating—but it does not fix the big stuff that has had a huge impact on people’s lives and required a massive bail-out of several billions of pounds-worth of taxpayers’ money. How many more JLRs can the Government afford to bail out until they have to do something to resolve the issue? I suspect we will come back to that, but I am glad that my hon. Friend introduced his ten-minute rule Bill.

We need to have a solution, but at the same time, we should not put onerous burdens on companies that are already struggling because of the Government’s anti-growth agenda and the punitive taxes being imposed on them to pay for profligate spending. This goes back to the discussion about prima facie harms. Taxation is the best example of a prima facie harm.

[Dave Robertson]

Will the hon. Member give way?

[Dr Spencer]

I am very happy to give way on taxation.

[Dave Robertson]

I fear I am about to repeat what I said a moment ago. I am aware that nobody gets up in the morning and is excited to pay tax, but tax pays for our roads, for our infrastructure, for our hospitals, which keep our workforce in good health, for the education of the next round of employees, for our security services, and for the police, who help to prevent crime. It pays for a whole variety of things that are essential for business to succeed, so taking an evangelical view that tax is bad is just not—