Baroness Berger (Lab)

My Lords, I support the principles behind these amendments. A point was raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, and I wish to make the point in a different way. Many reasons have been shared during this debate, which I share. The noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, referred to the questions asked by Chi Onwurah MP in the other place. It is interesting because I submitted a very similar Question just before the end of the summer in July. I asked: “what proportion of the computing and cloud services used by government departments are provided by suppliers that are … headquartered outside the UK, or … subject to the jurisdiction of a government outside the UK”. I asked that specifically in the wake of recent events and the debate we had in July. The Answer came back on Tuesday. I accept that the Question asked by Chi Onwurah MP was specifically about AWS, but I was asking about all services hosted outside the UK. The Answer was: “This information is not held centrally. Individual government departments are responsible for managing their own commercial arrangements for computing and cloud services and would need to confirm the proportion of services provided by suppliers headquartered outside the UK”. The Government do not know how much they are collectively relying on other countries for our key government digital infrastructure. Our Government’s critical systems, public services and citizens’ data are increasingly reliant on foreign-hosted clouds and data centres. While the Answer refers to “commercial arrangements”, I think it is about much more than that. This is a question of our national security and resilience. I believe we urgently need a digital sovereignty strategy to ensure that we know the answers to these questions, that we can act on them and that we can prevent any future challenges happening to ensure that we are as resilient as we should be.