Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)

I apologise, I stand to speak to a whole other group of amendments that suffer from the same challenge of needing to be repeated four times, which is why I suggested to the clerks that we degroup them, otherwise we would have got into a real muddle. This group seeks to address the obligation to report incidents to customers, as the Minister referenced in her remarks earlier. Currently, the Bill requires notification only where a customer is, “likely to be adversely affected”. The obligation is to explain the nature of the incident and why the customer is affected. My amendments seek to broaden and deepen that duty. Customers must be notified where an incident has caused or has the potential to cause severe operational damage or financial loss, where I hope my drafting has not fallen prey to the issue that my noble friend Lady Neville-Jones, addressed in Amendment 17. If it has done so, we obviously need to address that. The duty is extended to cover related natural or legal persons who could suffer considerable damage as a result. The regulated entities must also advise customers on what measures to take in response. Probably most importantly in this group of amendments, the entities must keep customers updated until the incident is resolved, whereas at the moment the Bill only requires them to notify customers once and then leave them hanging, waiting to find out what is going on. Together these amendments would ensure that customers are told promptly what to do and are kept informed throughout the incident until it is resolved. They also follow the NIS2 directive in requiring advice on protective measures and go a little further by making it a requirement to communicate to related persons as well. Sadly, I have personal experience in this, not from my TalkTalk times but much more recently. I suspect anybody who is on a board or who has chaired a business has experienced this. An organisation that I chair is the customer of a managed service provider that recently experienced an incident. It did not tell us. The incident was to do with some of our staff payroll information, so it was sensitive and important. When it did tell us, it then did not keep us informed about what was going on. So I feel that pain. I know that some noble Lords may have concerns that we do not want to create panic by endless notification. I absolutely agree. Hence my attempt to define this as severe operational damage. I would very much welcome input between now and Report if we can tighten that wording to make sure that this does not represent lots of unnecessary email alerts telling you that a system three stages back in the tech stack might have been affected. But when your customers’ data has been exposed in a cyber attack through a managed service provider, data centre or digital service that you use, it is entirely reasonable that those companies have a requirement to inform and keep you updated during the incident. That is all that these amendments seek to do. I beg to move.