Lord Clement-Jones (LD)

My Lords, I was hoping that there would be other contributors—there will be a double-banking on this amendment. I support Amendment 99, tabled by my noble friend. Throughout our deliberations on this Bill, the Government have placed enormous emphasis on imposing tough, outcomes-based statutory duties on operators and suppliers across our critical infrastructure, but we must confront an uncomfortable truth: we can pass the most sophisticated cyber security regulations in the world but, if our economy lacks the trained, qualified human beings required to design, implement and maintain those defences, those regulations remain completely meaningless. Without a professional workforce capability, this Bill merely codifies what ISC2 has rightly termed “compliance theatre”—an expensive box-ticking exercise that produces mountains of paperwork without making our national networks one bit safer. Look at the scale of the crisis facing our domestic cyber workforce. In its landmark 2025-26 cyber security workforce study, ISC2 revealed that 52% of UK cyber security professionals identify severe skills shortages as their single greatest barrier to complying with cyber regulations. Further, 58% of organisations reported a critical or significant skills deficit, with an astonishing 87% suffering direct operational consequences from missed system patches and delayed vulnerability remediation to active security oversights. Across the civilian economy, the UK currently faces an 88% shortage of certified cyber practitioners. In an environment of such extreme scarcity, how on earth do the Government expect regulated water utilities, transport operators and medium-sized managed service providers to fulfil the heavy duties created by this Bill? Amendment 99, from my noble friend, would provide a structural solution to this workforce crisis by placing the UK Cyber Security Council on a formal statutory footing. Crucially, as she explained, this connects directly to the definition of a skilled person under Clause 43. If the Government are serious about raising our national resilience floor, they must recognise that human competence is just as vital as technological hardware. By embedding the UK Cyber Security Council’s competence mandate in primary legislation, Amendment 99 would ensure that our cyber laws are backed by the skilled workforce needed to defend us. I strongly urge the Minister to accept this amendment. By professionalising our cyber workforce, we would elevate this Bill from more than a compliance exercise to a genuine national capability.