Lord Reid of Cardowan
Main Page: Lord Reid of Cardowan (Labour - Life peer)My Lords, it is true that there have been incidents, but none as serious as the one that occasioned the “Dear Chairman” review in 2012. Since then, they have not been as serious as that. I assure the noble Lord that the FCA and the PRA are taking this very seriously. They have initiated a second “Dear Chairman” exercise, which has sought to assess the improvements made since the first exercise and the extent to which good resilience practices are embedded with those firms. The regulators are aware that firms are spending considerable amounts on their IT systems.
My Lords, given the significant dislocation and inconvenience caused by recent non-malign interventions on the bank systems, what degree of confidence does the Minister have that they are in a position adequately to protect against malign interventions, such as hacking, breaches of privacy, and theft of financial details and indeed of finance itself?
My Lords, it would be very unwise for anyone to say that they were totally confident that cyberattacks are totally protected against. What I can say is that the Government are taking it seriously, and the Chancellor has announced that they have doubled spending on cybersecurity to £1.9 billion. The Financial Policy Committee has been given a remit by the Chancellor specifically to look at operational resilience. The PRA has financial stability as its core remit.