Lord Clement-Jones (LD)

My Lords, I cannot possibly compete with the Shakespearean seven stages—as opposed to ages—of the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron. We support Amendment 72 in its entirety. Voluntary reporting is the bit of the amendment that we particularly like. Our national security services and sectoral competent authorities desperately need early upstream visibility of emerging threat patterns before a full-blown systemic crisis unfolds. In the cyber domain, the precursors to the catastrophic attack—the subtle network probes, the exploratory reconnaissance and near misses—often appear weeks before a critical system is actually breached. At present, the Bill creates a bit of an all-or-nothing trap. If any entity experiences a sophisticated near miss that fails to cross the statutory threshold of an active disruptive breach, it has a powerful legal incentive to keep quiet. It fears that, if it approaches a regulator voluntarily, it will expose itself to regulatory scrutiny, compliance investigations and potential enforcement action. In our view, including a dedicated statutory framework into the NIS regulations specifically for the voluntary notification of near misses, sub-threshold anomalies and early-stage cyber threats would be a significant beneficial addition to the Bill. In effect, it would establish a safe harbour for intelligence sharing. As the recent “Analogue 72” green paper powerfully argued, we must move away from a culture of fear and silence in this area and we must encourage continuous proactive information flows between our critical infrastructure operators and the NCSC. We strongly support this amendment.