National Youth Strategy
Debate between Lord West of Spithead and Baroness Twycross
Baroness Twycross (Lab)
We encourage all young people involved in existing schemes to take part and get engaged with the formation of the strategy. I will take the noble Lord’s point back to the department and write to him to ensure that happens.
Lord West of Spithead (Lab)
My Lords, further to the point just raised about the cadet forces, they are amazingly successful. As our military is getting smaller and smaller, and the world is getting more and more dangerous, there is a lot of merit in ensuring we can get youngsters into these forces. Will the CCF element of that now have increased funding? It has been shrinking, and therefore fewer schools have CCF units.
Baroness Twycross (Lab)
We are really keen to see the Combined Cadet Force grow, and the MoD funding in this academic year supports the ambition to grow to 60,000 cadets in 500 school cadet units across the UK. That is in addition to the annual cost to the MoD of the Combined Cadet Force, which is estimated at more than £42 million a year.
Public Procurement: Data Offshoring
Debate between Lord West of Spithead and Baroness Twycross(2 months, 2 weeks ago)
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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.
Lord West of Spithead (Lab)
My Lords, further to the question from my noble friend Lord Browne, I think that the response from the MoD is not satisfactory. These Belarusians, although they might not have had access to highly classified information, were writing software that would be used within our nuclear deterrent. This cannot be satisfactory. Can the MoD give an answer, maybe through the Minister, to say that this is no longer allowed to happen? We all know how you can use software in various clever ways to cause real damage.
Baroness Twycross (Lab)
I will speak to my noble friend Lord Coaker and ask him to provide a letter responding to that point.
Global IT Outage
Debate between Lord West of Spithead and Baroness Twycross(4 months, 4 weeks ago)
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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.
Lord West of Spithead (Lab)
My Lords, one area of weakness is PNT, so how will we ensure that we still have traditional navigational and time signals of the correct type to enable all our systems to work? Will we maintain a task group to work in this area to try to resolve it by next year?