Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:

To ask the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, what steps her Department is taking to (a) enhance cybersecurity and (b) protect personal data.

Being cyber secure and protecting personal data underpins everything we do in the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT). In accordance with the Government Cyber Security Strategy we are working to ensure our critical functions will be significantly hardened to cyber attack by 2025, with all government organisations across the whole public sector being resilient to known vulnerabilities and attack methods no later than 2030.

In addition, through the government’s £2.6 billion National Cyber Strategy, DSIT is enhancing UK cyber security by strengthening the UK’s cyber ecosystem, improving cyber resilience and taking the lead in the technologies vital to cyber power. When Parliamentary time allows we intend to update Network & Information Systems Regulations to improve cyber security in our essential and digital services. The government is also committed to maintaining high data protection standards. The Data Protection and Digital Information (No. 2) Bill maintains the fundamental data protection principles in the UK GDPR, including requirements for organisations to ensure the processing of personal data is secure.