Exchange of Naval Nuclear Propulsion Information Agreement

Baroness McIntosh of Pickering Excerpts

Monday 17th January 2022 Grand Committee

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

I too congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, and the committee for the work they have done and for creating the opportunity to debate this issue and the agreement before us. Like the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, I welcome it. As the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, said, it is particularly welcome as this is a new agreement that covers an area for which there has never been this opportunity before—namely, the Indo-Pacific waters. I hope it presages and prefaces more interplay between the parties involved.

Like the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, I also express my regret at the lapse in diplomatic judgment that led to France being left out in the cold. I say this simply because I have never represented a part of the south; I have always represented parts of either the north or the east of England. But I am mindful that we are extremely dependent on France at the moment regarding the number of migrants who come to this country. Noble Lords must ask ourselves how prepared we would be, if the roles were reversed and this was happening to us, to police our waters and stop migrants coming over. I just leave my noble friend with that thought. I would be grateful for her views on the way the situation was handled with France and if things could have been done in a more diplomatic way. We did not need to offend them.

I echo the concern raised by the noble Baroness in introducing the report regarding paragraph 16 and amendments to the agreement being subject to parliamentary scrutiny. The Minister served in the Scottish Parliament with some distinction and is only too aware of the interest the Scottish nation has in this form of nuclear deterrent. What procedure is envisaged to discuss and debate these amendments with the assemblies of the devolved nations, in particular the Scottish Parliament?

In introducing the report, the noble Baroness said that it was hoped that the agreement would run for 18 months. Can the Minister confirm that? The very useful note provided by the Library in preparation for today says that the agreement will stay in force until 31 December 2023, but it does not say when it will come into force or when all three partner countries will have completed their respective internal procedures to ratify international agreements. I fully accept that it is extremely important that we share the naval nuclear propulsion information that lies at the heart of the agreement, which is why I warmly welcome the agreement before us.

I hope that my noble friend and the Committee will permit me to raise one issue which is even more of a threat at the moment, and which we briefly debated two weeks ago when we discussed an international agreement similar to this one, albeit with Ukraine. I am delighted to say that my noble friend Lord Grimstone has written to us answering a number of questions that were raised then in relation to cyberattacks, which have been identified by the Government as being of great concern. The one causing particular concern was that on Ukraine, which took out a number of Ukrainian Government websites and was presumably committed by a hostile state, in this case Russia.

As is clearly stated on the government website, we have seen an increase in the number of such attacks in this country through 2021, and I welcome the National Cyber Strategy, which the Government published in December 2021. However, that would be even more helpful if it contained some specific advice on how a company might respond if it was in the midst of a cyberattack and on what government resources would be made available to address the increasing number of such cyberattacks on companies. I read with interest that for most of those that have taken place to date, against government bodies either in mainland Britain or in Northern Ireland, no ransom has been paid. It is a matter of record that the clothing company, FatFace, paid a ransom of £2 million to recover its systems. The cyberattack with which I was involved led to a ransom of more than £100,000 being paid. All I could find on cyberattacks was the following statement on the National Cyber Security Centre website:

“Law enforcement do not encourage, endorse, nor condone the payment of ransom demands. If you do pay the ransom … there is no guarantee that you will get access to your data or computer … your computer will still be infected … you will be paying criminal groups … you’re more likely to be targeted in the future.”


I do not believe that this advice goes far enough. If a company is in the midst of a cyberattack which has shut down its systems and if it is not given any help by the Government, the only option it has is to pay the ransom money. There is no doubt that the two cyberattacks that I referred to came from a third state, a hostile state, believed to be Russia. I would draw the conclusion that the moneys raised, the £2 million from FatFace and the more than £100,000 paid recently in bitcoins by the company in North Yorkshire, will go to fuel the troops on the Ukrainian and other borders.

Will the Minister comment on how we are going to meet such cyberattacks going forward?