Cyber Security and Resilience (Network and Information Systems) Bill

Debate between Lord Birt and Baroness Harding of Winscombe

Committee stage
Tuesday 1st September 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Birt (CB)]

My Lords, I think that this is profoundly unsatisfactory. It is not good parliamentary procedure to table so many amendments radically different from anything that we have seen before, which I, for one, have seen only at the last minute, so to speak—I have read them, but I will not claim to have studied them. I do not altogether know what I think, but I readily accept that the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, has had a chance to scrutinise them in a lot more detail than I have.

I do not have anything substantial to say, but I would like to ask the Minister a question. Manifestly, there is a national security risk, which we would all recognise, and we all recognise that something needs to be done about it. But, if this is a national security issue, perhaps the Minister could explain to us why it cannot be dealt with under existing national security procedures. I have had time to go on to the GCHQ website, where one finds an impressive and considered approach to handling different security issues of this kind called the “equities process”—I did not know about it until the weekend, but it is impressive to read. I just do not understand why you would lodge such a set of issues with DCMS rather than the Cabinet Office. DCMS seems to me completely the wrong home for identifying, weighing and working out what to do about things that have such profound ramifications. Perhaps the Minister could explain to us why existing procedures, which are well tested and, by and large, involve GCHQ with a lot of consent in other areas of government activity, cannot be applied here with the same sensitivity that GCHQ has shown on other occasions. We cannot have a meaningful discussion about this today, but I think that the Minister has to think about how we can have a meaningful discussion before we reach the next stage of the Bill.

[Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)]

My Lords, if I may, I will reiterate points that the noble Lord, Lord Birt, has made. A number of us are struggling to keep up. Much of what the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, said made a lot of sense, but I certainly do not feel sufficiently sighted on the amendments and I would like to request from the Minister a proper briefing as soon as we possibly can. We have multiple days in Committee and I feel that we will keep going round the issue of how AI is being addressed in the Bill. At the core, we are all trying to stand on both sides of the fence: we are very nervous of these powers, which appear to have been snuck in without much scrutiny, but, on the other hand, at Second Reading many of us were clear that we want to see AI captured in the Bill. I am very much in two minds and would welcome a proper briefing from the experts.