National Insurance Contributions (Secondary Class 1 Contributions) Bill

Lord Scriven Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 4th February 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Swire (Con)]

My Lords, I too support my noble friend Lady Monckton of Dallington Forest and thank her for her very moving and informed speech. It triggered a memory for me. I was approached by the Children’s Hospice South West for a fundraiser —my goodness, I think it was 15 years ago—and managed to raise a record amount by putting on an event for it. I saw for myself the astonishing job that hospices do. They provide a level of care and places that many of these people—children, in particular—could not find elsewhere, so the question for the Minister is this: if some of them are to shed staff and therefore be less able to take these very needy children and their relations, where will the Government step in? How will they take up the slack and what, ultimately, will be the cost to the Government?

I have some sympathy with the Minister. He has come here today to hold the Treasury line, of course, but we are wasting our time if, to each and every group of amendments we table, the stock reply is, “The Government need to raise the money. They don’t recognise the figures that the Opposition are presenting”, and we move on to another set of amendments. That does not suggest to me much dialogue or debate. But I congratulate the Minister on one thing: so far in our deliberations this afternoon he has not alluded once to the fictitious £22 billion black hole.

[Lord Scriven (LD)]

My Lords, listening to noble Lords present the case for Amendment 29, I agreed with every single word that was said. However, the noble Baroness, Lady Monckton, said that an exemption was required. Amendment 29 does not ask for that exemption; it asks for an assessment to be done, and therefore it does not mean that an exemption would come, which is why, on day one in Committee, we on these Benches tabled an amendment to say that an exemption for hospices should apply. If we bring that back on Report, I hope that the noble Baroness will support us as we hold our ground.

I want to talk briefly to the other amendment in this group: Amendment 41, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, regarding the increase in the employer allowance to £20,000 for hospices. Just as a matter of fact, the average number of staff per hospice is 81 full-time equivalent employees, and the average salary is £23,626. Therefore, the average total salary bill for a hospice is £1.863 million, so a £20,000 employment allowance will be absolutely useless because hospitals will still be clobbered by the national insurance contribution increase. That is why we put them down for an exemption, and we hold our ground on that.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to my Amendment 41. I support Amendment 29 in the name of my noble friend Lady Monckton of Dallington Forest, who gave an extremely moving speech. She has made such a huge contribution to the charitable sector, as a supporter and a fundraiser. We must listen to her and the evidence that she has gathered in her work in the run-up to this discussion, which shows how important it is to find a way to match the compensation that NHS bodies are getting under the arrangements made for increasing national insurance and reducing the threshold.

That is the purpose of our series of amendments, some of which are probing, some of which we will pursue, because this is an important sector. Hospices are an essential part of our healthcare system, and the Bill will leave many unable to provide the services that they are currently offering. I was glad to have the support of my noble friend Lady Sater for both amendments, and that my noble friend Lord Swire was able to mention the fundraising for hospices which many have taken part in across this House. Indeed, hospices were one of my favourite charities of the year at Tesco, and one of the most moving with staff. We were talking about up to 300,000 people who were engaged in raising money for hospices. That taught us a lot about the difficulties and the wondrous jobs that they do.

My Amendment 41 seeks to increase the employment allowance for hospices, which would ease some of the financial pressures that they are facing at the hands of this Government. The noble Lord, Lord Scriven, intervened, and it was helpful, to say that an exemption would cost—£1.83 million or was it billion?

[Lord Scriven (LD)]

I was pointing out that the average salary bill of a hospice is £1.8 million.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

That is the average salary bill, so the noble Lord is right that an increase in the employment allowance would not absorb all the extra costs.

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[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

My Lords, I will address Amendments 29 and 41. I am grateful to all noble Lords for their contributions. I acknowledge the powerful contribution from the noble Baroness, Lady Monckton of Dallington Forest; I listened very carefully to all the points that she and other noble Lords made.

As I noted in a previous sitting of this Committee, it is important to recognise that all charities, including hospices, can benefit from the employment allowance, which this Bill more than doubles, from £5,000 to £10,500. This will benefit charities of all sizes, particularly the smallest ones. The Government also provide wider support for charities, including hospices, via the tax regime. This tax regime is among the most generous in the world, with tax reliefs for charities and their donors worth just over £6 billion for the tax year to April 2024.

On the specific point made by the noble Lord, Lord Leigh of Hurley, the situation whereby independent contractors, including primary care providers, social care providers, charities and nurseries, will not be supported with the costs arising from these changes is exactly the same as with the changes to employer national insurance rates under the previous Government’s plan for the health and social care levy.

This Government have provided a real-terms increase of 3.5% in core local government spending power for 2025-26, including £880 million of new grant funding provided to social care. This funding can be used to address the range of pressures facing the adult social care sector. We are also supporting the hospice sector with an increase in funding of £100 million for adult and children’s hospices to ensure that they have the best physical environment for care—

[Lord Scriven (LD)]

Can the Minister confirm that the £100 million is capital and cannot be used for revenue?

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

We are also providing an additional £26 million of revenue to support children and young people’s hospices.

As I have said previously, delaying commencement of the Bill would reduce the revenue generated from it and require either higher borrowing, lower public spending or alternative revenue-raising measures. The Government carefully consider the impacts of all policies, of course, including the changes to employer national insurance. As I have also said previously, an assessment of the policy has already been published by HMRC in its tax information and impact note.

Further, the OBR’s economic and fiscal outlook sets out the expected macroeconomic impact of the changes. The Government and the OBR have therefore already set out the impacts of this policy change. This approach is in line with previous changes to national insurance and to taxation. The Government do not intend to provide further impact assessments.

In the light of the points I have made, I respectfully ask the noble Baroness to withdraw her amendment.

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[Baroness Lawlor (Con)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend’s amendment on pharmacies. We must think of the impact. I have spoken to those who have been impacted already and worry that there is an impact not just on community pharmacies, which employ more pharmacists, but on small providers. When we look at what happens in towns and villages across the country, we see that, when a pharmacy closes down, elderly people, families and people looking for their prescriptions have to take a bus and go somewhere else. The impact on town centres of this sort of change can be quite significant. We have 3,560 independent pharmacies today.

In all of our debates today, we have spoken about the impact on each sector and how it might be alleviated, with amendment after amendment proposed from these Benches and from the Liberal Democrats, who spoke earlier in Committee. Barring retail and hospitality, today’s groups of amendments cover what are usually called public services. They are provided by independent providers. Some, such as the early years and hospice sectors, are charitable as well as independent. If they do not provide these services, there will be greater costs to the taxpayer, and they will do so in a much more bureaucratic and less person-sensitive way. The quality will go down and the cover will be broader; in fact, it will not meet the kind of person-to-person approach that we see offered by many independent providers.

I support my noble friend Lord Jackson because we are talking about people and their jobs: 80,000 pharmacists were employed in 2023-24. As well as them, we are thinking of pharmaceutical technicians, of which there are 34,300. These are real people and real jobs, and they are on top of the jobs that we have spoken about day in and day out in this Committee. I implore the Government and the Minister to think about what happens when people’s jobs go: not only do we as communities lose the services that are vital and which we have spoken about; we see an impact on our streets and our communities, and we increase the cost to the taxpayer—that will go further, in addition to the high hike in borrowing and the tax rises that the Government intend. We will see the further damage that will be caused to the economy. I implore the Government to think again.

[Lord Scriven (LD)]

My Lords, I wish to speak to the amendments in this group; I thank the noble Lord, Lord Jackson of Peterborough, for introducing it. I draw the Committee’s attention to the fact that I am the vice-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Pharmacy, so this issue is close to my heart.

The noble Lord, Lord Jackson, aptly outlined the pressure that community pharmacists are under at the moment and the issues that they face. He also mentioned a lot of facts and figures from Community Pharmacy England and the National Pharmacy Association, which have outlined the impact that these national insurance contributions will have on community pharmacy. The reason an impact assessment will not work is that the data is already out there, in terms of data from the industry itself. On average, every week, 10 community pharmacists are closing. There is a crisis in community pharmacy, which means that pharmacy after pharmacy in communities up and down this country can no longer survive and is falling by the wayside. An impact assessment would be useful only to reiterate the information that is already out there from the industry; it will not stop organisations falling by the wayside every single week.

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[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to my Amendments 44, 45 and 46 and to Amendment 34 in the name of my noble friend Lord Jackson of Peterborough. I agree with everything that he said.

Primary care facilities have been hung out to dry. The Government have already acknowledged that the NHS should be exempted from the jobs tax. It is unfortunate that they have made the bizarre decision not to include other healthcare providers, such as GPs, pharmacies and dentists, which serve the same purpose as NHS providers.

We need to get to the bottom of two issues: first, why GPs, pharmacies and dental practices have not been included, as the NHS has, in the exemptions from the increase in employer national insurance contributions; and, secondly, why GPs, pharmacies and dentists will not benefit from any increase in the employment allowance.

The Chief Secretary to the Treasury told BBC “Question Time” in November:

“GP surgeries are privately-owned partnerships, they’re not part of the public sector”,


and

“they will therefore have to pay”.

However, GPs are recognised as public authorities in existing law, such as the Freedom of Information Act 2000. They may be privately owned partnerships, but that does not reflect how they operate. Not only that but because they are legally classed as public authorities, they will not be eligible for the increased employment allowance, so they will have to pay the full national insurance increase.

Section 2(1) of the National Insurance Contributions Act 2014 states:

“A person cannot qualify for an employment allowance for a tax year if, at any time in the tax year, the person is a public authority which is not a charity”.


Section 2(2) defines a public authority as

“any person whose activities involve, wholly or mainly, the performance of functions (whether or not in the United Kingdom) which are of a public nature”.

GP surgeries, whether they are privately owned partnerships or not, exclusively provide NHS services: their activities wholly involve the performance of public functions. The Minister confirmed last week that the employment allowance does not apply to charities, which my research confirms. Does he agree that the allowance should apply to these other vital services—pharmacies, dentists and GPs? That would be a simple change. Previous Conservative Governments recognised this. We fully funded and offset any increases in employment costs for GPs; this is acknowledged by the British Medical Association.

Given that the Institute of General Practice Management, which represents GP practice managers, estimates that the jobs tax will cost the average GP practice around £20,000 a year, it is all the more vital that we offset these costs by allowing GPs to receive the employment allowance, preferably at an increased rate of £20,000, as my amendment suggested. It may not be much but it might help with non-GP staff in surgeries, in pharmacies and in dentists. I am looking all the time at changes and concessions that might not cost the Government too much, but I do not get the feeling that the Government understand the difficulties that some of these sectors are in.

It is not just GPs that will suffer. Community Pharmacy England estimates the cost, as I think we already heard, at £50 million in total. That is part of the treble whammy that we heard about from my noble friend Lord Jackson. I am especially concerned about this because of the impact of these changes across the private-sector end of healthcare, because its work makes life easier for NHS services, reducing pressure on A&E and on other public health services.

I spoke to a local pharmacist yesterday. He is a worried man. He believes that when the new NICs charges come through, he will have too little left at the end of the period to invest in his shop and his vaccine services. So, he will be lacking the crucial application of capital to keep the business up to date and serviceable. He will also look to reduce hours. At present, he is open early and late, providing a superb service to the local community—indefatigable, as he was through Covid. I have to say that the pharmacy in my local Wiltshire village is already closing on Saturday, and it is a half-hour drive to another or to the local A&E. Multiply these types of decision by the hundreds of thousands of pharmacies, dentists and GP surgeries across the country, and you can see that the Government’s failure to compensate for the NICs increases is an act of self-harm. Can the Minister therefore confirm that, as a minimum, the Government will include GPs, pharmacies and dentists, who provide NHS services for the public benefit, in the employment allowance?

[Lord Scriven (LD)]

Just for absolute clarity, community pharmacists can claim the employment allowance. Of the other two services the noble Baroness mentioned, GPs cannot but dentists can if their NHS work is below 50%. It is important that we get that absolutely correct for the record.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

I was actually asking the question about this, as we did on charities. The Minister confirmed the position very helpfully last time, and I am asking him to clarify the position and look positively at trying to extend this. I am delighted that some community pharmacies get the employment allowance and would like to see it increased to alleviate difficulties in the sorts of small chemists I was talking about. If we can find another way, I would be delighted as well, but this 50% rule seems a bit odd, and I wonder whether the Minister could clarify or have a look at it. Frankly, it was very good to hear from the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, in view of his role in community pharmacies, and, more worryingly, to learn from him just how many pharmacies are closing. When I was in retail and we had pharmacies, there was actually a battle to buy extra licences so that more pharmacies could be opened. If it is going in the other direction, that is not good news for our healthcare services, which we all care so much about.

I look forward to a positive response from the Minister on this important area, which is complicated.

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

My Lords, I will address the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Jackson of Peterborough, which seeks to prevent commencement of the Bill until an impact assessment is published for community pharmacies. Delaying its commencement would reduce the revenue generated from it and require either higher borrowing, lower public spending or alternative revenue-raising measures.

The Government carefully consider the impacts of all policies, including the changes to employer national insurance. As I have said before, an assessment of the policy has been published by HMRC in its tax information and impact note. Further, the OBR’s Economic and Fiscal Outlook sets out the expected macroeconomic impact of the changes to employer national insurance contributions. The Government and the OBR have therefore already set out the impacts of the policy change. This approach is in line with previous changes to national insurance and taxation and the Government do not intend to provide further impact assessments.

I turn to the amendments tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, and the noble Lord, Lord Altrincham, which seek to increase the employment allowance for those employed in primary care, including in GP surgeries, dentist surgeries and pharmacies. The distinction between those in the public sector who will be compensated and those who will not follows existing practice and is the same as the distinction that the previous Government used for their health and social care levy.

The noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, asked specifically about eligibility for the employment allowance. Eligibility is not determined by sector but depends on the make-up of an individual business’s work. HMRC guidance explains that this is based on whether an organisation is doing 50% or more of its work in the public sector. It is therefore down to individual organisations to determine their eligibility for any given year. The employment allowance was introduced in 2014 by the previous Government. This Government have not changed the eligibility rules on the employment allowance in any way, beyond removing the £100,000 threshold.

The revenue raised from the measures in the Bill will play a critical role in restoring economic stability and funding the NHS. As a result of measures in the Bill and the wider Budget measures, the NHS will receive over £20 billion extra over two years to deliver 40,000 extra elective appointments a week. Primary care providers—in general practice, dentistry, pharmacy and eyecare—are important independent contractors which provide nearly £20 billion-worth of NHS services. Every year, the Government consult each sector about what services it provides, and what money it is entitled to in return under its contract. As in previous years, this will be dealt with as part of that process.

The Government have announced a proposed £889 million uplift for general practice in 2025-26 and have set out the proposed areas of reform which will help us to deliver on our manifesto commitments. This is the largest uplift to GP funding since the beginning of the five-year framework and means that we are reversing the recent trend, with a rising share of total NHS resources going to general practice. We have started consulting with the General Practitioners Committee England of the British Medical Association on the 2025-26 GP contract and will consider a range of proposed policy changes. These will be announced in the usual way, following the close of the consultation later this year.

The Department of Health has entered into consultation with Community Pharmacy England regarding the 2024-25 and 2025-26 funding contractual framework. The final funding settlement will be announced in the usual way following this consultation. The NHS in England invests around £3 billion on dentistry every year. NHS pharmaceutical, ophthalmic and dental allocations for integrated care systems for 2025-26 have been published alongside NHS planning guidance.

In light of these points, I respectfully ask noble Lords not to press their amendments.

[Lord Scriven (LD)]

Again, for the clarity of the record, the Minister has just said about GPs something which completely contradicts what it says on WWW.GOV.UK. It is about whether a GP practice can claim employment allowance. It says:

“There is no entitlement to the Employment Allowance, because the majority of the work done, is wholly or mainly of a public nature”.


Since it says on GOV.UK that GPs cannot claim the employment allowance, can the Minister write to the Committee to clarify the contradictions between the website and what he has just said in his answer?

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

I will happily write, because it is an important point and deserves clarification. Listening to what the noble Lord read out, I do not think the statements are contradictory, because the website is absolutely referring to the 50% or more point. I think it is drawing a conclusion from that, given that most of them are doing more than 50%, but I do not think they are contradictory.

[Lord Scriven (LD)]

I quote again exactly what it says, which is that

“there is no entitlement to the Employment Allowance”

for GPs. That is from “Eligibility for Employment Allowance: further employer guidance” on GOV.UK. It makes it clear that there is no entitlement to the employment allowance for GPs.

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

As I said, I am more than happy to write to clarify that. What it goes on to say suggests it is consistent with that. Perhaps that first sentence is incorrect but I will write to the Committee to clarify.

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[Lord Scriven (LD)]

I understand that the noble Lord may have had other appointments on day one in Committee, but if he had been here then he would have seen that we are totally against it. We gave explanations of how extra taxes could have been done.

While I am on my feet, just to clarify for the Minister, I have looked a bit further at the website and what he said is absolutely correct. The 90% that I was referring to was a specific example of a number of people employed.

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord for that point. I am of course still happy to write, so that we have absolutely clarified the point.

National Insurance: Charity Sector

Lord Scriven Excerpts

Monday 13th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

My noble friend makes an important point. I have not personally received an apology. I would not necessarily expect such an apology to come to me; I would expect it to be made to the nation.

[Lord Scriven (LD)]

My Lords, in the middle of this political shenanigans going on, the average hospice in this country will be hit by a £200,000 funding gap based on the Government’s national insurance contribution rise. What advice would the Minister give to managers of hospices who are now looking at either laying off staff or reducing services?

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

The noble Lord will be well aware of the Secretary of State for Health’s commitment to hospices, including supporting the hospice sector with a £100 million boost for adult and children’s hospices to ensure they have the best physical environment for care and £26 million to support children and young people’s hospices. I am not playing down how hard it is going to be for organisations to find the additional revenue, but not all organisations will find that their NICs bill increases.

Complications from Abortions (Annual Report) Bill [HL]

Lord Scriven Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 13th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Scriven (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, for this Bill. He may not realise that he has highlighted an important issue that needs to be addressed—not the limited and, I may say, misguided focus of this Bill, but the wider issue of robustness of health datasets and the reliability of statistics used to plan, improve and deliver safe services as part of our healthcare system. As a former health services manager, I have taken an interest in this for a long time.

The NHS is one of the most data-rich healthcare systems in the world, yet some of its datasets suffer from weaknesses that can impede its ability to deliver high-quality, data-driven care. These weaknesses can broadly be categorised into areas of data quality, interoperability, accessibility and governance. One of the fundamental challenges lies in the inconsistency and incompleteness of data. NHS datasets often include outdated, duplicated or incorrect information due to variations in how data is recorded across trusts and practices. For example, patient demographics, diagnosis or treatment codes and records might be inconsistently documented, making it difficult to draw accurate insights. This runs into thousands of conditions and treatments, not just this one, which I hazard an educated guess has not been randomly plucked for the attention of this Bill. When you add in the private sector, it becomes near impossible to provide a complete patient journey through statistics to help improve patient care.

If the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, and his supporters want to improve healthcare outcomes for not just women but everyone, and safety and policy built on better data, their Bill should focus on legislating to improve data quality in the NHS. It should be about adopting national standards for data quality, promoting interoperability, enhancing accessibility, strengthening governance and transparency and leveraging advanced analytics. So why pick out just one treatment among thousands with poor and conflicting data in our healthcare system and make the exception of trying to report it to this Parliament? The noble Lord’s reason for exceptionability does not stand up: 55% of ophthalmology cases are provided by the private sector and 30,000 hip replacements are provided by the healthcare sector.

This Bill is a back-door attempt to limit abortion in this country, using statistical jiggery-pokery as a smokescreen. I say sorry to the noble Lord and his supporters, but this just will not wash. The real motives need to be exposed. It is telling that the majority of those actively campaigning for this Bill are the very organisations that are prominent in attempts to restrict or, in some cases, ban abortion in this country.

These Benches will support genuine and effective measures to improve datasets in our healthcare system, to improve safety and outcomes for not just women but all patients, but we will not support the ideas of this Bill, which are not a foundation for effective improvement in healthcare and healthcare safety. We need to be clear: this Bill will not deal with the underlying weaknesses of healthcare datasets. It is the first step in an agenda to restrict women’s choice and, in some cases, restrict abortion altogether.

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[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken in this short debate. My noble friends Lord Frost and Lady Lawlor made important points about patient empowerment, but also about the improvement in medical care that can only follow from a better understanding of what is actually going wrong.

I am also partly grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Miller of Chilthorne Domer, because she supported the principle that the data should be collated—she thought perhaps not by means of an Act of Parliament. I conceded that point in my opening remarks—there are other means of doing it—but she said that she thought the data should be collated.

I find myself less able to express gratitude to the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, who lives in a world that I simply do not recognise. I have not read the American book she referred to. She came dangerously close to suggesting that I was either in receipt of or being influenced by money for this purpose. That would be a contemptible thing to say, and I will happily give way if she indicates that she wishes to distance herself from any such implication.

My noble friend Lady Sugg said that the Bill required abortion complications to be reported for the first time, and that this would be different. It does not. Abortion complications, as the Minister said, are already reported. The question is whether the data is robust and the sources from which it is drawn. My noble friend also said that collecting data could compromise the privacy of patients. Well, of course it could, but it does not, because you collect it without compromising the privacy of patients. Nobody has suggested that the report produced in November 2023 remotely compromised the privacy of patients. All that the Bill does is require that this report continue to be produced on an annual basis.

The noble Lord, Lord Scriven, was massively keen to improve the quality of NHS data, but the moment he sees a report from the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities, which clearly improves the quality of data, he retreats into a sort of conspiracy theory.

[Lord Scriven (LD)]

If you are going to have end-to-end patient data, it needs to include A&E, GP, private, in-patient and out-patient. The statistical analysis that the Bill puts in place is a complete gap and does not give end-to-end patient data. Therefore, it becomes a totally ineffective use of statistics.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

With respect, it is true that the report, which the noble Lord has obviously read carefully, does not include data from GPs or from 111. That would have been an onerous task and, as the Government have said, this was a first and experimental effort. This is an argument for going further and improving the collection of that data, not for giving up the attempt altogether and seeing it as a conspiracy, which is what the noble Lord appeared to do.

We are really all on one page about this—or at least he and I seem to be. What is so strange about the advocates of choice in this debate is that they are so defensive; they speak as if they are surrounded by conspiracy. I do not actually think they are. If I thought I was surrounded by conspiracy, I would want to live in a world of facts and not hide myself from them, which is what they seem to be doing. The proposal is that data produced by an arm of the NHS should continue to be produced, whether by statutory or administrative means. That is all it is.

I know that there are other things happening today, so I turn finally to the remarks of the Minister. I am grateful to her for being one of the few people to treat the Bill seriously and to look at what the words in it say. She wandered slightly from that into the worlds of strange contexts, but in fact a great deal of her speech was an echo of my speech. On the history and the factual and contextual issues here, we are largely agreed. I agree that the Bill exceptionalises abortion to some extent because, as I said, abortion is exceptional, in that its statistics are generated from different data sources, which is very different from the majority of NHS procedures that take place inside a hospital. I grant that the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, has a point that there are other exceptional cases. I did not say that abortion was unique; I said it was exceptional. There are differences between the two words, and he is right about some hip operations and so forth taking place in the private sector, where similar issues might arise as well.

The Minister says that there are different and other ways of collecting these statistics: non-statutory means. I conceded that point, too, in my opening remarks. What she did not say is that she would use a different, non-statutory means of collecting these statistics. I remind her that when she signs her letters, underneath her name it says: “Minister for Patient Safety and Women’s Health”.

We need better statistics on complications arising from abortions. I am disappointed that the Minister has not committed herself to that and agreed that, even if a Bill is not necessary for this purpose, she will set herself to do so. Sadly, she has not.

Public Procurement: Data Offshoring

Lord Scriven Excerpts

Tuesday 8th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

I think the security piece and the development piece can and should go in tandem, otherwise neither is sustainable. Three in every four people in England have already downloaded the app. This Government want to establish adoption through improved patient experience and system benefits, and to expand the services offer. This is part of making sure that more people can access the services they require.

[Lord Scriven (LD)]

My Lords, Microsoft gave a view to the Scottish Government in June this year that it could not guarantee that data held by public services on its Microsoft 365 and Azure hyperscale cloud infrastructure will remain in the UK. What mitigations are the Government looking at in the light of this statement by Microsoft?

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

I refer back to my initial Answer, which is that each contracting authority should carefully consider, and make risk-based decisions on, whether and where data can be offshored. We can get really hung up on offshoring, onshoring or where the data is stored, but we have to make sure that all data and cybersecurity are central to how we move forward with this type of procurement. This is why the Government are introducing a cybersecurity and resilience Bill, which will help ensure our cybersecurity for the future.

Global IT Outage

Lord Scriven Excerpts

Thursday 25th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord for his question, which packed a lot in. I agree that the dominance of any particular software company or IT system is a risk to resilience, as government has known for some time. But we need to look at this as a whole and—I do not want to sound like a broken record—this will be covered by the cybersecurity and resilience Bill as it proceeds through the House.

[Lord Scriven (LD)]

My Lords, one of the public services specifically hit was the NHS, so why are systematic back-up systems not in place in the NHS for primary care and pharmacy? Who has been asked to take this forward to ensure that such systems are in place as a matter of urgency for those who are ill?

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

All relevant departments will take part in the review, and I will feed back the specific points made to the Cabinet Office and colleagues in the Department of Health. Going back to the previous point about the widespread use of specific software systems, this needs to be taken seriously as we move forward with the proposed legislation.