Cyber Security and Resilience (Network and Information Systems) Bill (First sitting)

Debate between Alison Griffiths and Freddie van Mierlo

Committee stage
Tuesday 3rd February 2026 Public Bill Committees

[Freddie van Mierlo (Henley and Thame) (LD)]

Q I want to take a step back and ask a broader question about why this legislation is necessary. I think we agree that it is, but why are companies not already adhering to very high cyber-security standards? Surely it is in their commercial interests to do so; last year we saw the massive impact on JLR, M&S and the Co-op of failing to do so. Why might the state need to mandate companies to be cyber-secure and make them cyber-secure?

Jen Ellis: You have covered a lot of territory there; I will try to break it down. If you look at the attacks last year, all the companies you mentioned were investing in cyber-security. There is a difficulty here, because there is no such thing as being bullet-proof or secure. You are always trying to raise the barriers as high as you can and make it harder for attackers to be successful. The three attacks you mentioned were highly targeted attacks. The example of Volt Typhoon in the US was also highly targeted. These are attackers who are highly motivated to go after specific entities and who will keep going until they get somewhere. It is really hard to defend against stuff like that. What you are trying to do is remove the chances of all the opportunistic stuff happening.

So, first, we are not going to become secure as such, but we are trying to minimise the risk as much as possible. Secondly, it is really complex to do it; we saw last year the examples of companies that, even though they had invested, still missed some things. Even in the discussions that they had had around cyber-insurance, they had massively underestimated the cost of the level of disruption that they experienced. Part of it is that we are still trying to figure out how things will happen, what the impacts will be and what that will look like in the long term.

There is also a long tail of companies that are not investing, or not investing enough. Hopefully, this legislation will help with that, but more importantly, you want to see regulators engaging on the issue, talking to the entities they cover and going on a journey with them to understand what the risks are and where they need to get to. If you are talking about critical providers and essential services, it is really hard for an organisation—in its own mind or in being answerable to its board or investors—to justify spend on cyber-security. If you are a hospital saying that you are putting money towards security programmes rather than beds or diagnostics, that is an incredibly difficult conversation to have. One of the good things about CSRB, hopefully, is that it will legitimise choices and conversations in which people say, “Investing time and resources into cyber-security is investing time and resources into providing a critical, essential service, and it is okay to make those pay-off choices—they have to be made.”

Part of it is that when you are running an organisation, it is so hard to think about all the different elements. The problem with cyber-security—we need to be clear about this—is that with a lot of things that we ask organisations to do, you say, “You have to make this investment to get to this point,” and then you move on. So they might take a loan, the Government might help them in some way, or they might deprioritise other spending for a set period so that they can go and invest in something, get up to date on something or build out something; then they are done, and they can move back to a normal operating state.

Security is not that. It is expensive, complex and multifaceted. We are asking organisations of all sizes in the UK, many of which are not large, to invest in perpetuity. We are asking them to increase investment over time and build maturity. That is not a small ask, so we need to understand that there are very reasonable dynamics at play here that mean that we are not where we need to be. At the same time, we need a lot more urgency and focus. It is really important to get the regulators engaged; get them to prioritise this; have them work with their sectors, bring their sectors along and build that maturity; and legitimise the investment of time and resources for critical infrastructure.

[Alison Griffiths (Bognor Regis and Littlehampton) (Con)]

Q You have both mentioned the risk involved in supply chains. Do you think that, outside regulated industries, the Bill goes far enough to secure supply chains? If not, what would your recommendations be?

David Cook: The legislation talks about secondary legislation, so it allows for an agile, flexible programme whereby organisations can be brought within scope very quickly if concerns make that necessary. What that leaves us with, though, is that although legislation can be changed quickly, organisations often cannot. Where there is a definition, as we see with NIS2, as to which entities are in scope, organisations can embark on a multi-year programme to get into a compliant position. They can throw money at it, effectively.

What this legislation talks about, through the secondary legislation, is bringing organisations into scope and mandating specific security controls or specific requirements on those organisations in terms of security, but while the law might come in over a weekend, organisational change will not necessarily follow. There is a potential issue there. I can see the benefit and attractiveness of secondary legislation being used to achieve that aim, but having a clearer baseline as to what that sort of scope might look like—it could be ramped up or down, and the volume could be turned up or down, depending on need—would be more helpful. Reducing scope while diverging from NIS2 might be a benefit in terms of the commercial reality, but it might be a misstep in terms of security and the long tail that it takes to get more secure.