Julia Lopez

The whistleblowers continue to raise serious concerns about the structures upon which the Government’s digital identity platform will be built. The hon. Member looks absolutely outraged that I might suggest there are some concerns about the cyber-security risk of a national, mandated digital identity platform. I find it extraordinary that he suggests that I am expressing concerns that a system might be tested. Of course every system must be robustly tested—that is not the point I am trying to make, and the hon. Member is being wilfully ludicrous in suggesting otherwise. This Prime Minister cannot run an economy, keep promises or control his Back Benchers, or his Front Benchers, so how on earth does anybody think he can run a secure digital identity system? At the same time as risking technological lock-in by friendly allies, we are creating new vulnerabilities for adversaries to attack. Just before Christmas, UK intelligence agencies warned about increasing, large-scale cyber-espionage from China, targeting commercial and political information. We discovered from Ministers that the Foreign Office itself was the subject of a major cyber-attack in October, which officials believe was carried out by Chinese hackers, and this came in the midst of a major row between the Government and the Crown Prosecution Service about the prosecution of spies operating here in Parliament. We will be looking closely at this legislation to identify where the Government should be addressing this cyber-reality with much greater force. An approach to cyber-resilience that looks only at introducing new regulations and compliance burdens without thinking through risks such as a mandated identity scheme, dependence on non-sovereign suppliers, the malign intent of other nations, and a failure to build up our own workforce and skills is one that will fail.