Viscount Camrose (Con)

My Lords, I start by thanking my noble friend Lady Neville-Jones for introducing this group and setting out her stall so clearly and compellingly. I apologise that some of the amendments that have been looked at here I had in my record as being part of the next group. So, if I do not cover them all now, they will be covered by my noble friend Lord Markham as we get into the next group. Let me begin by outlining the amendments in my name and those of my noble friends Lord Markham and Lord Holmes of Richmond. The need for action on ransomware has never been higher. The NCSC handled 204 nationally significant ransomware attacks in the year to September 2025 that we know about—up by 130% on the year prior, leading the NCSC to name ransomware as the most pressing threat to the country in its annual report. Of course, one of the challenges we face with ransomware attacks is not knowing when they happen, to whom and how often. The victims too often have strong reasons, generally associated with legal liability, not to report them. This makes it challenging, if not impossible, for any government agency seeking to identify commonalities across attacks to pursue repeat offenders and warn vulnerable organisations. We could seek to make reporting of such attacks mandatory, but at the risk of placing hacked organisations in an impossible position where public reporting creates a legal bind that worsens the damage already done by the attack. I take on board the cogent concerns expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, but the moral hazard occurs today where companies do not report ransomware attacks, thereby damaging our collective ability to defend others yet to be attacked. Our amendment therefore seeks to find a channel that reports the facts of the hack and the metadata around it in a way that is not disclosed beyond the agency charged with cyber protection and does not become public knowledge. I do not pretend that this will be straightforward. For instance, we would have to understand how to deal with FoI requests and so on. That is why we propose a consultation. But if we were able to achieve something on this basis, we would greatly enhance our ability to protect UK PLCs from these hugely damaging attacks. Amendment 172 seeks to require a review on the impact of the new reporting requirements introduced by the Bill. Again, this is fairly straightforward. The strengthened incident reporting requirements are being introduced to allow the regulators and the Government to help with providers and suppliers who have been attacked. Whether these requirements actually serve that purpose, and whether they do so at the expense of providers, cannot yet be known, but we must be able to form an assessment and adjust if necessary. Everyone in this Room would accept that we need statutory agility in the face of fast-moving technology, and a review on these lines could and would enable just that. For a similar reason, I support the desire for transparency in Amendment 165 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones. This may even overlap with our own amendment; we could probably think about merging the two in some way. It seems clear that both Houses of Parliament should be informed as to what the reporting regime is being used for and whether it is fulfilling its function. I hope that the Minister agrees. I very much support Amendment 17 in the name of my noble friend Lady Neville-Jones. We are going from an incident constituting an actual adverse event on the security of network and information systems to it being capable of having such an effect. Arguably—the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, made this point very well—almost any incident would meet this condition. We need language that expresses genuine risk to avoid all incidents being caught in the net. This seems wholly pragmatic to me and I commend it to the Minister, to whose response I look forward.