Department for Science, Information and Technology: Abolition

Viscount Camrose Excerpts

Tuesday 21st July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

The noble Baroness is absolutely right about my commitment to and passion about Northern Ireland. I will of course take every opportunity to have a cup of coffee with her. I plan on being in Northern Ireland over the Recess, subject to events, and we will do so then.

[Viscount Camrose (Con)]

My Lords, this appointment of an AI Minister to Cabinet indeed gives a timely prominence to AI policy-making, but does the Minister accept that it also removes a good deal of clarity? Who owns AI policy between DBIST, the Cabinet Office and the Minister himself? What will the AI taskforce do that these ministries will not, and is the purpose to develop new AI policies or to execute existing ones?

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

The noble Viscount is more than aware that the role of the Cabinet Office is to co-ordinate policy across government, hence the establishment of an AI taskforce to make that sure and to support the work of the new Minister. The Office for the Prime Minister and the Cabinet is being overseen directly by both the Prime Minister and the new First Secretary in the Government, while operational matters will be overseen by the Cabinet Secretary. This is about making sure that the Minister, who will obviously have responsibility for the co-ordination and ownership of AI policy, has the support he needs at the top levels of government.

Social Media: Use of X by Government Departments

Viscount Camrose Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend. I had a fascinating conversation with a very young member of my private office. When I suggested to him that the Daily Express had once been in a Labour-leaning newspaper, he was a little surprised; that shows either my age or his.

There is an issue here around making sure that people have access to genuine information sources that are real and accurate. Like me, my noble friend will remember that, in the general election in 1997, more than 80% of people got their information from BBC sources—at least, I believe so; I should say that before I get myself in trouble again over statistics in this space—but that is not the case now. Most people get their news online, which is why we need to make sure that free and fair journalism is protected.

[Viscount Camrose (Con)]

My Lords, does the Minister not agree that the real threat to reliable information is not news publishers but weaponised disinformation published by our enemies using bots? The scale of that is far in excess of anything that Mr Musk might promote or anything that any individual news provider here might promote.

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

The noble Viscount is absolutely right. When Iran shut down its internet to try to stop proper, fair protests in that country, we saw how many cybernats and other accounts went down in the UK for people who were seeking to sow division and separation in the United Kingdom. We know that bad faith actors try every day to undermine the very values for which we stand. That is why we have the Government’s media literacy action plan and why we are working at every level of society to highlight these issues. It is also, from my perspective, one of the reasons why we need to work every day to make things clear and to ensure that platforms take their responsibilities seriously.

Amazon Web Services

Viscount Camrose Excerpts

Tuesday 21st October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Leong (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend for that interesting point. I think most businesses, and government, know that AWS is a provider with significant market share—something like 30% of cloud services. The other providers—Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud—also provide such services. I am not sure what he means by people not being aware of AWS’s services.

[Viscount Camrose (Con)]

My Lords, I feel that I am a member of a large club, as I too submitted an identical PNQ. I note that the whole House will have been deeply concerned by this outage. Although, indeed, it does not appear to have been caused by a cyber or other malicious attack, as the Minister has said, we have to work on the assumption that it will happen again. Can officials please urgently produce a report setting out, first, the cost to the United Kingdom of this outage; secondly, the long-term policy implications for the Government as they seek to enhance our resilience; and, thirdly, the immediate mitigations that are, I trust, being devised or implemented as we speak?

[Lord Leong (Lab)]

My Lords, in respect of the noble Viscount’s point about cost, this happened just yesterday so, of course, we are still working it through; it will take us some time to evaluate how much it will cost the economy. I am sure that economists will be kept very busy for some time working out the costs and the impact on productivity.

We are already taking steps to strengthen the resilience of the UK’s digital infrastructure. Through the national cyber strategy and the national resilience framework, we are working with the National Cyber Security Centre to treat major cloud service providers as part of our critical national infrastructure. This includes measures to ensure that they have robust redundancy back-up and incident response capabilities in place. At the same time, we are consulting with industry on enhanced incident reporting and transparency requirements so that the Government can be alerted immediately to any service disruption that could have national impact.