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

Debate between Lincoln Jopp and Allison Gardner

Committee stage
Tuesday 3rd February 2026 Public Bill Committees

[Dr Gardner]

Q I am interested in who you report to should you identify a cyber-incident. I am talking about not just data breaches but wider ones that can affect operational systems. Which regulators do you deal with? If it is multiple regulators, do you feel there is a case for having one distinct regulator to cover cyber-resilience and manage that quite difficult landscape?

Brian Miller: That is a great question. I will touch on some different parts, because I might have slightly different information from some of the information you have heard previously. On reporting—Stewart will deal with the data protection element for reporting into the Information Commissioner’s Office—we report to the Scottish Health Competent Authority. It is important that we have an excellent relationship with the people there. To put that in context, I was speaking to them yesterday regarding our transition to the CAF, as part of our new compliance for NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde. If there was a reportable incident, we would report into the SHCA. The thresholds are really well defined against the confidentiality, integrity and availability triad—it will be patient impact and stuff like that.

Organisationally, we report up the chain to our director of digital services, and we have an information governance steering group. Our senior information risk officer is the director of digital, and the chief information security officer role sits with our director of digital. We report nationally, and we work really closely with National Services Scotland’s Cyber Security Centre of Excellence, which does a lot of our threat protection and secure operations, 24/7, 365 days a year. We work with the Scottish Government through the Scottish Cyber Co-ordination Centre and what are called CREW—cyber resilience early warning—notices for a lot of threat intelligence. If something met the threshold, we would report to the SHCA. Stewart, do you want to come in on the data protection officer?

Stewart Whyte: We would report to the Information Commissioner, and within 72 hours we also report to the Scottish Government information governance and data protection team. We would risk assess the breaches and determine whether they meet the threshold for reporting. Not every data breach is required to be reported.

From the reporting perspective, it would be helpful to report into one individual organisation. I noticed that in the reporting requirements we are looking at doing it within 24 hours, which could be quite difficult, because sometimes we do not know everything about the breach within that time. We might need more information to be able to risk assess it appropriately. Making regulators aware of the breach as soon as possible is always going to be a good thing.

[Lincoln Jopp]

Q To come back to Dr Spencer’s original question about the scope of the legislation, the current situation, as I understand it, is that there is a carve-out for small and medium-sized enterprises because we do not want to put too much regulatory burden on them, but, under the new proposed legislation, operators of essential services that are SMEs will be designated by their regulator. That brings us back to the question of which regulator that would be. Do you currently use that designation for operators of essential services, or would you have to do a piece of work, presumably looking at a number of different regulators’ points of view, to designate the operators of essential services?

Brian Miller: We would work with the Scottish Health Competent Authority as our regulator; I cannot speak for other regulators and what that might look like. We are doing work on what assurance for critical suppliers outside the Bill looks like just now, and we are working across the boards in Scotland on identifying critical suppliers. Outside of that, for any suppliers or any new services, we will assess the risk individually, based on the services they are providing.

The Bill is really valuable for me, particularly when it comes to managed service provision. One of the questions I was looking at is: what has changed since 2018? The biggest change for me is that identity has went to the cloud, because of video conferencing and stuff like that. When identity went to the cloud, it then involved managed service providers and data centres. We have put additional controls around that, because the network perimeter extended out into the cloud. We might want to take advantage of those controls for new things that come online, integrating with national identity, but we need to be assured that the companies integrating with national identity are safe. For me, the Bill will be a terrific bit of legislation that will help me with that—if that makes sense.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Gardner]

Q Very quickly—I apologise if I am taking too much time—accountability is slightly different from liability. In the case of a cyber-breach that has caused harm, where would you see the liability lying?

Chris Parker: That is a harder question. There is precedent here—of course, we can think back to the precedents that this great building has set on allowing things such as, post-Clapham train disaster, the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007 putting it very firmly on boards, evolving from the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974. We are not there yet, but do not forget that we are starting to legislate, as is everyone else in Europe and America who are on this journey.

I believe that we will see a requirement at some point in the future. We all hope that the requirement is not driven by something terrible, but is driven by sensible, wise methodology through which we can find out how we can ensure that people are liable and accept their liability. We have seen statements stood up on health and safety from CEOs at every office in this country, for good reason, and that sort of evolution may well be the next phase.

Carla and I talk about this a lot, but we have to be careful about how much we put into this Bill. We have to get the important bit about critical national infrastructure under way, and then we can address it all collaboratively at the next stage to deal with very important issues such as that.

[Lincoln Jopp]

Q I want to come back to that point. Chris, you said something like, “SMEs find it very difficult, if not impossible, to bear the regulatory burden, so we have to be very careful when designating SMEs as operators of essential services.” To me, that says that you think the Bill, as currently drafted, will place too much of a regulatory burden on SMEs. Is that correct?

Chris Parker: I was referring to strategic and critical suppliers, which is a list of Government suppliers. We are advocating that the level of governance and regulatory requirement inside an organisation is difficult, and it really is. It requires quite a lot of work and resource, and if we are putting that on to too small a supplier, on the basis that we think it is on the critical path, I would advocate a different system for risk management of that organisation, rather than it being in the regulatory scope of a cyber-resilience Bill. The critical suppliers should be the larger companies. If we start that way in legislation and then work down—the Bill is designed to be flexible, which is excellent—we can try to get that way.

As a last point on flexibility—this is perhaps very obvious to us but less so to people who are less aware of the Bill—there is a huge dynamic going on here where you have a continuum, a line, at one end of which you have the need for clarity, which comes from business. At the other you have a need for flexibility, which quite rightly comes from the Government, who want to adjust and adapt quite quickly to secure the population, society and the economy against a changing threat. That continuum has an opposing dynamic, so the CRB has a big challenge. We must therefore not be too hard on ourselves in finding exactly where to be on that line. Some things will go well, and some will just need to be looked at after a few years of practice—I really believe that. We are not going to get it all right, because of the complexities and different dynamics along that line.

Carla Baker: This debate about whether SMEs should be involved or regulated in this space has been around since we were discussing GDPR back in 2018. It comes down to the systemic nature of the supplier. You can look at the designation of critical dependencies. I am sure you have talked about this, but for example, an SME software company selling to an energy company could be deemed a critical supplier by a regulator, and it is then brought into scope. However, I think it should be the SMEs that are relevant to the whole sector, not just to one organisation. If they are systemic and integral to a number of different sectors, or a number of different organisations within a sector, it is fair enough that they are potentially brought into scope.

It is that risk-based approach again. But if it is just one supplier, one SME, that is selling to one energy company up in the north of England, is it risk-based and proportionate that they are brought into scope? I think that is debatable.