Cyber Security and Resilience (Network and Information Systems) Bill

Debate between Baroness Berger and Baroness Harding of Winscombe

Committee stage
Thursday 3rd September 2026 Grand Committee

[Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)]

My Lords, I also support Amendments 74 and 167. My experience is that boards that tell you that their cyber security is really good are the ones you should be most worried about. Boards that are really worried about it and can tell you where they think they are exposed might be in a slightly better place. There are too many organisations that will tell you that they are fine. Boards that are not doing what is set out in Amendment 167 are in trouble. It is entirely appropriate, and I fully support that amendment.

On Amendment 74, I would just like to draw a thread between the financial services senior management regime, what we have learned in the Online Safety Act and Tuesday’s debate about whether frontier AI models are included in the scope of the Bill. We have learned from the financial services senior management regime that when you make individual human beings accountable, they change. There is no doubt that the senior management regime in financial services has served to move the dial on the culture in financial services, and all previous attempts have failed.

Through the Online Safety Act, we have learned that various companies—not ones regulated by this Bill—have not taken seriously fines from Ofcom and simply refused to obey. We are living through an era when the tech sector wants to believe that it is exceptional and that laws from individual countries do not apply to it. It is therefore very important that we put into the Bill liability for senior executives, precisely because of what we have learned: in a sector that is doing it, you get culture change. In other digital legislation, where we do not have this, regulators’ decisions have actively been flouted. This is even more important if the Minister were to accept the amendments we debated on Tuesday—the noble Lord, Lord Tarassenko, has arrived just in time—because I firmly believe that the single most important part of regulating AI is holding the creators of the model accountable for their actions. Given that the biggest cyber security threats we face are the actions of agentic AI, I want to be able to build the framework that enables us to hold the managers and leaders developing those models, who currently say that this has nothing to do with them, accountable for their actions. I may be stretching it a bit, but I hope that Amendment 74 would be the beginnings of a framework that would enable us to hold senior tech titans to account.

[Baroness Berger (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak quickly. I was just checking my records, particularly on Amendment 167. It was just under a year ago that I completed the FT board director programme, which was specifically around cyber risk for boards. In a room of around 50 people, we had a tabletop exercise on a real-life scenario about what one should do in the event of a very serious cyber crisis and cyber risk. I was struck by a number of things. In the room were people with vast waves of expertise and experience, none of whom was a technology expert. All said that no other members of their board had attended training like this. They were there because, having completed a board director programme, it piqued their interest, as it did mine, it was freely on offer and they decided to attend.

Having gone through that session, we covered things such as the regulatory experience, issues around how to challenge management in the event of one of these incidents, how you need to test organisational resilience, how you need to look at the risks involved, and how to respond decisively and to have the expertise and understanding to do so. It was very clear to me, even during that half-day exercise, that that training was not sufficient for me as a board director and member to be able to fulfil that role.

Having gone through that experience, I think for many reasons that this amendment is so important to ensure that boards across this country—be they private boards, FTSE boards or boards of regulated companies—can do their jobs effectively. In this world, which is extending—I echo the points made about AI—it is even more imperative that we have this amendment to ensure that boards are able to fulfil their roles effectively.

Holocaust Memorial Bill

Debate between Baroness Berger and Baroness Harding of Winscombe

Report stage
Wednesday 11th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)]

My Lords, I will address directly the question that my noble friend posed on why collocation is important and why this is the right location. I would just like to dispel a couple of myths in this debate. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Russell, for bringing it, and I think it is a very important and measured debate that we are having. It is an honour to contribute to it at all.

As I said, I have been on the Holocaust Memorial Foundation for a decade. That is my only lived experience of this. But what I have learned in that decade from sitting alongside real experts in Holocaust education is that it is so important that we feel this, as well as learning facts. I remind noble Lords that the leaders of all Holocaust education organisations in this country believe that this is the right place, the right size and the right way to do this as a national memorial. They know a thousandfold or a millionfold more than I do. I have watched them at work over the course of the last decade and I think that we should respect them, as my noble friend Lord Howard said earlier.

It will not be a tribute to British greatness—quite the opposite. It will ask us to think very deeply about Britain’s role in the Holocaust. There are some things that we can proud of but lots that we cannot. I would argue that, tempting though it is to believe that this is like the Cenotaph and that we would walk past and feel the pain of the victims and their families, actually the most difficult part of Holocaust education is not to think, “Oh my God, it could be my family who were victims”. The most difficult part of Holocaust education is to ask yourself “Could you have been a perpetrator?” That is the lesson that could not be more important today.

The sad thing is that, with every week that I have been on the Holocaust Memorial Foundation, it has felt more important that, as a country, we ask people to think about that. Collocating the memorial and the learning centre in the shadow of the Mother of Parliaments, where so many people have fought for liberty and freedom, is why it is the right place at the right time.

[Baroness Berger (Lab)]

My Lords, I was not going to rise in response to this amendment, but I was struck by contributions on all sides of the House from noble Lords that have drawn reference to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. In the course of this debate, I did some investigation to understand why that memorial is underground, and I reflected on the experience of the architect who created Yad Vashem. It is primarily underground, and that was done to create a powerful symbolic and emotional experience for visitors. I have had the opportunity to visit, and have done so on more than two dozen occasions. The architect, Moshe Safdie, designed the museum representing the rupture in Jewish history caused by the Holocaust. Visitors descend into the earth, moving through dark galleries that evoke the descent into one of history’s darkest chapters.

I share that reflection only because there is a good reason why Yad Vashem is underground. Noble Lords can read more about it, if they wish to understand more, but for me, having been there and visited, it is part of the experience and why I shall vote against this amendment if it goes to a vote.