Baroness Kidron (CB)

My Lords, I am very sorry that I missed the early part of that debate because I feel it might impact on some of the things I say. However, when I read the government amendments, I could not see anything in them that made the amendments unnecessary, so I will read carefully all aspects of the first group but I intend to progress with the amendments that I have tabled. I will speak to Amendments 3, 8 and 13 in my name and in the names of the noble Baronesses, Lady Harding, Lady Berger and Lady Morgan. Together, they would expand the scope of services in the Bill so that so-called “small but risky” services were included. Amendment 3 stipulates that smaller data centres could be included if Ofcom considers that an incident affecting the data centre would have a significant impact on the economy or on the day-to-day functioning of society in the UK, taking into account the data centre’s customer base and its role supporting other essential services. Currently, data centres that are for an enterprise purpose only are covered in the Bill only if the rated IT load is 10 megawatts or greater. This is a mid-size data centre. However, there are commercial data centres that can be much smaller than this and are threatening. Perhaps most notable is a recent example from Denmark where the small cloud hosting providers, CloudNordic and AzeroCloud, suffered a ransomware attack that resulted in the paralysing of all company systems and the servers being shut down. Their hundreds of customers lost all their data, and it was unrecoverable. “Customers” is a bland word, but imagine that you are a hospital treating patients, a university conducting years of scientific research or a small business with its entire operation at stake: the loss of your data risks lost livelihoods, and possibly even lives. Meanwhile, many experts are calling for an expansion of smaller data centres. They are less taxing on the natural and local environment, more embedded in local communities and are in contrast to mid and large centres, whose environmental costs hit local communities, use up water, increase the strain on the grid, are possibly noisy and ugly and favour the hyperscale business models of big tech. If smaller data centres are an attractive alternative to unpopular larger ones, it is even more essential that they are in scope of these regulations. Amendment 8 stipulates that a relevant digital service provider would be included if the ICO or AISI determines that the provision of a service poses a risk to public safety, national security or the security of network and information systems. Amendment 3 would do something similar for relevant managed service providers, with the ICO establishing whether a managed service provider poses a risk. Currently, services are excluded if they have fewer than 50 employees and a turnover equivalent to below £8.5 million—it is actually given in euros. I anticipate that the reasoning is not wanting to impose unnecessary burdens on small and micro-sized businesses with fewer employees and resources. I recognise that that is as a concern, but it is equally important to understand that small businesses of all kinds, including those that host critical services and infrastructure in the UK, are regularly victims of cyber attacks. The Government’s own Cyber Security Breaches Survey for 2025-26 records that 42% of micro-sized business and 46% of small businesses in the UK have been the target of cyber attacks. It is simply not the case that small means that risks are contained. The Government’s own figures show that, of the more than 100,000 UK tech companies, 95% have fewer than 50 employees. These amendments would replicate the rationale of amendments to the then Online Safety Bill from the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, on Report. I know that she would have liked to be here to speak to them, but she is unable to be here today. Her amendments stipulated that services under the Online Safety Bill should be categorised by risk or size. I will not rehearse what noble Lords have heard many times, but the lesson of that Bill is that the Government of the day got it wrong, as did the regulator. In the connected world, a small component of a global system can cause havoc. When this Bill first entered the other place, I went to a briefing by Politico where its four experts spoke repeatedly about how narrow the Bill was and how focused it was on providing for a small subset of issues relating to cyber security and safety with a vision of hyperscale vendors. They were a combination of exasperated and incredulous that, even as we saw the increasing cost to the economy, the damage to businesses caught up in it and the devastation to individuals, as well as what all agreed was a national security threat, the Government had not sought to offer a vision for how all these might be protected. When it came to questions, the first was to ask why the experts thought the Government had been so unambitious. The answer was unedifying: to prevent the Lords hijacking the Bill. I hope that the new Administration who start today have moved on and that we will have a more collegiate approach. I have read all the amendments currently laid, including the ones in this group, and in almost all cases they seek to do what is the stated intention of the Bill: to make the country more resilient. In the world of cyber security, size is not a proxy for risk; it is much more complex than that. The amendments in my name and those of others seek to ensure that we learn lessons from the Online Safety Act. I beg to move.