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Lord Markham (Con)

Speaking in the House of Lords on 7 September 2026

Debate

Cyber Security and Resilience (Network and Information Systems) Bill

Contribution

Amendment 174E in my name and those of my noble friends Lord Camrose and Lord Holmes builds on the point I made in the debate last Thursday that the best defence in cyber is, of course, not to present an attractive target in the first place. I go back to my experience of the Synnovis hack when I was Health Minister. The reality was that it did not need to hold any of the detail or data that it had in the first place. When you are doing a diagnostic test of someone, you do not need to know their name; there can be a serial number that can be matched up later. Not only did Synnovis have names, it had whole medical records going back years and years, and there was no deletion policy either. The whole reason that it was an attractive target was its very sloppy standards in the data it held and its retention policy.

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