Kanishka Narayan

It is rare for me to have a point of divergence with the Chair of the Select Committee, given her experience and expertise. However, on that question I am absolutely not saying that Government support is limited only to the certain number of sectors covered by the Bill. There are a range of other ways in which the Government act to support sectors outside of the scope of the Bill. That is the right thing to do. The scope of this Bill—the only Bill horizontally applicable to large parts of the economy—is systematically and specifically set to sectors that are significant as essential services, sectors where there is the risk of significant disruption and threat to life, and sectors where alternative supply is limited. For those reasons, we have excluded retail. Consideration of the scale of the business is not currently in that rubric, because there are also businesses that are small in scale but very material in life-threatening impact. I hope that is a satisfactory answer. I thank my hon. Friends the Members for Dunfermline and Dollar (Graeme Downie) and for Newcastle upon Tyne Central and West for their amendments relating to the risks posed by communications modules made or controlled from outside the UK. Although I am sympathetic to their concerns, the Bill’s approach is intentionally technology and incident-agnostic. Instead of reacting to individual components in isolation, we focus on structural checkpoints and systematic dependencies in this context. There are a range of other levers—investment screening through the National Security and Investment Act 2021; telecoms and cyber data security requirements to protect data and networks; supply chain measures, such as those in the Procurement Act 2023; diversification requirements to reduce dependency and build resilience—all of which are important to respond to the deeply significant concerns raised.