Baroness Morgan of Cotes (Non-Afl)

My Lords, I will briefly speak to Amendment 358. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Lords, Lord Vaux and Lord Young of Cookham. Because we are going to be discussing this and a later amendment on fraud, I declare my interest as a director of Santander UK. It was a huge pleasure and privilege to chair the Lords inquiry into online and digital fraud, which reported in 2022, and I would like to think that we had some impact in raising the issues, which are of huge importance to the public. Fraud is one of the crimes that people are most likely to be victims of. I know the Minister knows that because he is the Anti-Fraud Minister in the department. Noble Lords have already spoken about the importance of this amendment, the need for the law to be kept up to date as the technology develops, and the fact that allowing as much flexibility in legislation as possible to enable that to happen is important. The reason we talked about the “fraud chain” in the report is that, obviously, people encounter fraud in myriad ways. Fraudsters are, as we have heard, incredibly flexible, and entrepreneurial—for all the wrong reasons. Of course, telecoms—people’s smartphones or phones—is where many people will first encounter the fraudster, who will then try, as we heard in our evidence, to get them away from technology and strike up some kind of relationship which unfortunately ends in people often losing life-changing amounts of money. I do not want to pre-empt the debate on Amendment 367, which I hope we will also reach today, but the question, perhaps now or for later, is whether the Minister is confident that the previous Government’s and this current Government’s ask of the telecoms industry is strong enough given the frequency with which the public encounter fraud via their telephones. I will ask the question now, but I am sure we will come back to it. We are all waiting for the forthcoming fraud strategy from the Government, which we understand is—I hope—close. Can the Minister give us a little precursor of whether that will impose tougher asks and potential penalties on the telecoms companies for the reasons that we have already heard?