SolarWinds Cyberattack

Lord Holmes of Richmond Excerpts

Monday 25th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, perhaps the noble Baroness has better information than I do on the call between the President and the Prime Minister. The Government are certain that cybersecurity is absolutely at the heart of our overall defence need and defence capability. I repeat: we will work with all friendly allies in that area. The UK considers attribution on a case-by-case basis, but I do not have anything further for the House at this stage.

[Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)]

My Lords, does my noble friend agree that one of the greatest lessons from SolarWinds is that the basics need to be right—password management, multifactor authentication and so on? Can he confirm that this is understood across the public sector and in all arm’s-length bodies, and that securing the supply chain is a constant and urgent need? Further, would he agree that in the UK we have an excellent cyber community, with private firms such as NCC and world-leading public institutions such as the NCSC? The Government should do everything to support this cyber industry so that it can do everything to protect us.

[Lord True (Con)]

My noble friend makes some important points. Obviously recognising the increasing importance of this area, the government security group is leading the development of a government cybersecurity strategy—which will sit underneath the national strategy —to deal with some of the issues my noble friend refers to. We also have a wide range of advice and support to help private sector organisations protect themselves.

Essential Services: Large-scale Technology

Lord Holmes of Richmond Excerpts

Tuesday 12th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Lord makes some important points of which the Government are aware. I refer to lead government departments and their responsibilities. They are tasked to undertake a review of all the critical national infrastructure sectors to ensure that understanding of what is critical and of risk is up to date and relevant. The review is ongoing, with each lead government department identifying the assets and systems which are essential.

[Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)]

My Lords, does my noble friend the Minister agree that there are huge advantages to be gained for system and state, and for local and national government, through the considered, ethical, purposeful deployment of digital and emerging technologies for the provision and transformation of essential and non-essential services?

[Lord True (Con)]

I agree with my noble friend. In a sense, his question balances with opportunity the question of risk, to which attention was rightly drawn in the previous question. Technology brings advantages for the delivery of critical services, as my noble friend said. The rapid development of the job retention scheme, with its online portal by HMRC, is a good example of how technology can bring advantages to all levels in a time of need. However, we are also aware that there are risks associated with reliance on technology.

EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement

Lord Holmes of Richmond Excerpts

Friday 8th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)]

My Lords, there exists a need and an opportunity—a pressing need and a potentially transformational opportunity. The need is for a border fit for the 21st century. The opportunity is for a digitally enabled free-trade-flowing, free-trade-growing border, delivered by the best of our talent, deploying the best of our technologies. Artificial intelligence, distributed ledger technologies, cyber, the internet of things—we have world-leading proponents for all. All can be allied with a utility trade platform, which would benefit all concerned.

Does the Minister share my rational optimism for the border? Could he say what is happening with the 2025 border strategy? What can be done in 2021 to accelerate these plans? As we saw with Covid, it is possible to accelerate the innovation pathway dramatically. We need to do this urgently with the border. We have the technology: a 21st-century, digitally enabled, free-trade-flowing, free-trade-growing, friction-reducing border right around the UK. At Dover, to update Harold Wilson, we are atop the white cliffs of technology.

European Union (Future Relationship) Bill

Lord Holmes of Richmond Excerpts

3rd reading & 2nd reading & Committee negatived & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & 3rd reading (Hansard) & 3rd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & Committee negatived (Hansard) & Committee negatived (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 30th December 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con) [V]]

My Lords, the deal has been struck, and I would like to concentrate on the necessity for a digitally enabled 21st-century border.

For the last decade, the UK has had a comparative advantage in many of the elements of the fourth industrial revolution, not least AI, distributed ledger technology, fintech and cyber. As a result, on 1 January this opportunity—this advantage—now becomes absolutely imperative when it comes to our border provisions. Is my noble friend the Minister aware of the proof of concept around reducing friction in international trade, which I was fortunate enough to be involved in?

I know that we have a great opportunity to deliver at Dover. An excellent, forward-thinking chief executive runs the port there. Also, as other noble Lords have mentioned, there is a key need to get this right around the UK, and that absolutely includes Gibraltar. Will my noble friend the Minister update the House on our 2025 border plans? What will happen in 2021 at scale and at speed to get us to the place where we need to be to have a digitally enabled border right around the UK? Does he agree that, if we get this right, we can enter the 21st year of the 21st century digitally enabled right around the UK, not least at Dover, and look forward with pride from the white cliffs of technology?

Parliamentary Constituencies Bill

Lord Holmes of Richmond Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 27th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Holmes of Richmond (Non-Afl) [V]]

My Lords, I start by congratulating my noble friend the Minister on the clear and comprehensive manner in which he has introduced this important legislation. I wish him luck in steering his first Bill through your Lordships’ House, but given his experience of and in the House and his leadership in local government, its success will not be a matter of luck.

I welcome the Bill, which is certainly a great improvement and a step forward on its predecessor. Perhaps I may gently recommend to my noble friend the Minister the recent report of the Select Committee on Democracy and Digital Technologies, on which I was fortunate to serve under the excellent leadership of my friend the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam. There may be much fertile ground for my noble friend within those pages.

Like others, I associate myself with the comments of my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham. If the Boundary Commission is to do its job in the manner in which it has been charged, it does indeed need to be insulated, so terms like “reasonably practicable” are nowhere near strong enough. Does my noble friend agree that a friendly amendment to tighten those words and put a time and date in would be an excellent improvement to the Bill? He as much as any of us knows that, in political parts, spring tends to come quite late, and often only when the leaves are truly browned off.

I want also to add my support to the protections to be granted quite correctly for Ynys Môn. Does my noble friend agree that, while no man is an island, it is certainly true that some constituencies are indeed just that?

Covid-19: Debt Collection

Lord Holmes of Richmond Excerpts

Thursday 23rd July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord True]

My Lords, noting the noble Lord’s title, I congratulate him on last night’s events at Anfield—all we need now is for Notts County to get back into the league, where they belong. He asked an important question. Local authorities should be sensitive. Obviously, with Covid, the ban on enforcement visits was imposed. As the noble Lord says, that is currently due to come to an end in August, but I follow him in urging restraint on all in the current situation.

[Lord Holmes of Richmond (Non-Afl) [V]]

With his vast experience in local government, does the Minister agree that we need urgently to review the council tax administration and enforcement regulations in the light of the current difficulties? Does he further agree that, post Covid, there is a key role for financial technology—fintech—to help with debt management and enable everyone to have a much greater sense of their finances and how best to manage them?

[Lord True]

Yes, a consistent understanding of the problems of debt using such techniques is extremely important. The regulations on council tax were promulgated, I believe, back in 1992—now a sort of Neanderthal age, when I was in No. 10. The Local Government Minister has announced that MCHLG will update its guidance to councils on collection and enforcement of council tax.

Finance Bill

Lord Holmes of Richmond Excerpts

2nd reading & Committee negatived & 3rd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & 3rd reading (Hansard) & 3rd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & Committee negatived (Hansard) & Committee negatived (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 17th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Holmes of Richmond (Non-Afl) [V]]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lady Noakes, and I agree with all her comments. I also thank my noble friend the Minister for the clear way in which he introduced the Bills. I ask him to join me in paying tribute to all our front-line workers, many of them in the financial sector, who have done so much for so many over this crisis period. Does he agree with me that we owe them all an enduring debt of gratitude?

Basic economics will always remain the same: we can either increase income or take out costs. I believe we have some significant opportunities to do both these things without having economically illiterate taxation or cutting support to people who often need it the most. I agree with many of the comments of my noble friend Lord Blencathra, the noble Lord, Lord Empey, and particularly my noble friend Lord Lamont, who as an excellent Chancellor had his term cut well before it should have been.

I will ask my noble friend the Minister about three areas: payments, central bank digital currencies—CBDCs—and sovereign wealth funds. On payments, has he had a chance to look at the excellent paper from the Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures on the need to transform cross-border payments? As in domestic settings, we pay too much and it takes too long. Does he agree that the Government, as one of the biggest payers, could save multiple billions if we had a true transformation of our payments infrastructure? For example, can he say how much the DWP pays in fees and to intermediaries in making the billions of payments it makes year on year?

Does my noble friend the Minister agree that the current consultation undertaken by the Bank of England in relation to CBDCs is an excellent piece of work and could have truly transformational benefits for the UK?

Similarly, will my noble friend comment on the work undertaken to look at the potential for a sovereign wealth fund in the UK? We have needed one for decades; I believe we need it now more than ever. Is he satisfied with the level of fintech involvement in all the current government programmes? Could the Government do more to introduce more small and medium-sized enterprises into assisting businesses and individuals who need it most? Does he agree that if we truly deploy all the elements of the fourth industrial revolution—robotics, AI, distributed ledger technology and quantum—we could truly transform the payments infrastructure, take cost out and get income in? That would benefit state and citizen alike.

Covid-19: Public Wealth Investment Fund

Lord Holmes of Richmond Excerpts

Tuesday 9th June 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Agnew of Oulton [V]]

Infrastructure is a vital part of rebuilding from this crisis. I am unsure at this stage whether it will be done through the mechanism of a sovereign wealth fund. At the moment, we have the opportunity as a national Government to borrow cheaply, which, if invested well in infrastructure, could be a simpler approach than a sovereign wealth fund.

[Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con) [V]]

My Lords, we have a tremendous challenge but a real opportunity for an economic bounce out of Covid. It needs a whole-government, whole-economy approach. Will my noble friend salute the consultation currently being undertaken by the Bank of England around a central bank digital currency, and note the positive impact that this potentially could have for the whole of the country and the economy?

[Lord Agnew of Oulton [V]]

I certainly agree with the noble Lord that it is an extremely important consultation. As he implies, any serious crisis such as this gives the country a chance to look beyond the normal way of dealing with problems. I am very hopeful that initiatives such as he has mentioned will be much more evident over the next few months.

Boards of Public Bodies: Representation

Lord Holmes of Richmond Excerpts

Monday 24th June 2019 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Holmes of Richmond]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what action they are taking to ensure that boards of public bodies are fully representative of, and reflect, the society they are set up to serve.

[Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)]

My Lords, it is a privilege and a pleasure to have secured this debate on how public bodies can more represent and reflect the societies they were set up to serve. I thank all noble Lords who have signed up to speak. Perhaps there is a fair degree of knowledge in this House of public bodies and public appointments. Part of the reason for securing this debate is that there is, I suspect, probably less knowledge out there in the country of public bodies and what they do. I will set out the ground as it currently is, run through some of the review I did for Government last year and then set out some recommendations for my noble friend the Minister to consider. I know that they have been under consideration in the Cabinet Office since I published the report in December.

Perhaps a useful start point is to consider what a public appointment is. It is a question that I asked some 17 years ago when somebody suggested that I apply for such a role. In those intervening 17 years, I have been fortunate enough to serve on public bodies on equalities and sport, looking at such issues as access to transport, funding for our Olympic and Paralympic athletes through to 2012 and beyond, bringing major sporting events to the United Kingdom and looking at diversity in UK television. That is just me—a microcosm of what public bodies do. Pick almost any area of society and there is likely to be a public body doing important work there: horticulture, defence, health, culture, media, sport, to name just a few. They are arm’s-length bodies doing incredibly significant work, but how many people in the country know about them, know what they do and, crucially, know how they could potentially play a part and be a member of the board of one of these organisations? Yet, there are 6,000 public appointees in the United Kingdom, with well over 500 public bodies responsible for over £200 billion of public spending. That is a quite significant governance role.

Perhaps the most important point in recent history for diversity and inclusion was in 2017, when my honourable friend Chris Skidmore published the diversity action plan. This was the first time we got to see the data. What was going on with these boards? Who were the people serving on them? What was their gender, ethnicity or disability? It was a key point to really drive home the sense that diversity is not about a leg up or an unfair hand, but about enabling boards to make better decisions to benefit from that diversity, not just of protected characteristics but of creativity that comes from it.

Probably the most important statistic that came out was an ambition for 50% of public appointees to be female and 14% to come from BAME backgrounds. No other targets were set. So how have public bodies performed in the intervening years? There is a tremendously positive story on gender, which demonstrates how change is possible and how we do not have to just accept that it is too difficult and that things cannot be other than what they are. In 2017-18, 47.7% of appointments went to females and in the preceding year it was 45.5%, whereas only four years previously the figure was 40%—a significant change not just by chance but because of real commitment from departments and Ministers engaging across women’s networks and society to see what would make a difference and connect gender to potential public appointments. When we consider the stats, the target of 50% by 2022 looks pretty achievable.

The story is perhaps a little more complicated with BAME, with the number last year falling to 8.4% from 9.1% the year before, with fewer BAME candidates and applications coming through to shortlisting. If the Government were to achieve the 14% target by 2022, it seems that there are many learnings to apply from the approach taken with gender to BAME groups.

My interest in diversity and inclusion has been since I began, really, which is why, when I was asked last year by the Minister for Implementation at the Cabinet Office, Oliver Dowden, to conduct a review into opening up public appointments for disabled people, not only was I delighted but I realised that this was an opportunity not just to see how we could potentially increase the number of disabled people on public bodies but actually to make recommendations that would benefit all people. I wanted the review to be absolutely rooted in the golden thread of talent. We are talking not about giving somebody a guaranteed interview as a favour, or having a more open or accessible application process, because that will give someone an unfair advantage. It might be the difference between enabling somebody to apply in any event.

I bracketed the work into four areas, which I will go through briefly: data and transparency, attracting talent, applications and interviews, and beyond. Data is obviously essential to this, and a key point is to consider whether we should have a central application portal, so that we can take a real grip on the data. We found patchy data that was different across departments and being collected in different ways, with different uses of the monitoring form—a form that definitely needs changes for consistent and inclusive language. I thank the Business Disability Forum for all the work that it did on that.

When we went to Scotland, where they have a central application portal—admittedly on a smaller number of public appointments—we found that they knew the disability status of 96% of their applicants. Currently, we know the status of only 65%, which is a huge difference. Coming back to those targets—50% on gender and 14% BAME—currently only 3% of people on the boards of public bodies are disabled, as far as we know. So data is absolutely critical, not only to ask the questions at application but to have an annual review, because obviously people’s circumstances change.

In terms of attracting talent, role models are incredibly important. When we launched the review in December, we had three excellent examples of disabled people doing great work on very diverse public boards. We advised the Government to have a mentoring scheme, having seen the difference that can make in other areas of diversity, and also, critically, to look at people who may be near misses at each beat of the application and interview on-boarding journey, to keep them in the loop and see how they can be assisted to the next potential application.

We looked at multipliers, conduits and connectors. Which outlets should we be looking at to raise the awareness of these opportunities? We looked at a huge use of social media, connecting with people in different ways, rather than the more traditional approaches to advertising public appointments. Also, critically, we need to look at executive search and its important role, and the need for guidance along Business Disability Forum lines, to ensure that it plays such a positive role for people who may seek to be involved in these roles.

When it comes to applications, perhaps the most important point is to consider disability confidence. There is such a range of views on this. Probably; as one person said, it is not great but it is better than what we had before. Having a sense of all public bodies being disability confident—as indeed their parent departments are—makes such a difference and shows that some thought has gone into how we enable disabled people to come on board and be part of this.

Finally, on interviews, if we want different results we need to look at different approaches—and maybe not just with the panel but with shadowing and mock boards, to put real innovation into that approach. Ultimately, it is about change. If we want different results, if we want public bodies to fully represent and reflect the society that they were set up to serve, we need to look at doing things differently. The gender case shows that it is entirely possible. I look forward to boards that fully represent and reflect the society they were set up to serve. I look forward to the contributions of noble Lords this afternoon, and to the Minister’s comments.

Public Appointments: Diversity

Lord Holmes of Richmond Excerpts

Thursday 9th May 2019 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Holmes of Richmond]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to increase diversity in public appointments.

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, the Government are committed to improving diversity in public appointments. We have made good progress. New appointments of women, candidates from BAME backgrounds and those with a declared disability have all increased since 2013-14, but there is more to do. We aim to publish around the end of June a refreshed public appointments diversity action plan alongside a response to my noble friend’s excellent review into opening up public appointments to disabled people.

[Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for everything that is happening in the Cabinet Office. What is happening across Whitehall and in all government departments, which obviously have to play a role in this incredibly important issue?

[Lord Young of Cookham]

My noble friend is quite right. Although the Cabinet Office has overall responsibility for this topic, the actual appointments are made by individual government departments. One reason that we have taken a little longer to publish the document to which I have just referred is that we are anxious to get buy-in from all government departments to hit the ambitions that we are about to set out. I know from experience that Ministers in individual departments take public appointments very seriously. They are accountable for them, there is a Commissioner for Public Appointments to make sure the code is observed, and I know that Permanent Secretaries also take seriously the process of sifting applications before they go to Ministers. I will draw my noble friend’s remarks to the attention of relevant Permanent Secretaries and Ministers.