Thursday 25th April 2019

(5 years, 7 months ago)

Commons Chamber
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Urgent Questions are proposed each morning by backbench MPs, and up to two may be selected each day by the Speaker. Chosen Urgent Questions are announced 30 minutes before Parliament sits each day.

Each Urgent Question requires a Government Minister to give a response on the debate topic.

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Jeremy Wright Portrait Jeremy Wright
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The point of the National Security Council is to enable us to discuss matters of national security, and we will continue to need to do that. I suspect that my hon. Friend will have detected in what I have said my view of the importance of those conversations remaining confidential.

Matt Western Portrait Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)
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Today’s Financial Times quotes Rob Joyce, a senior cyber-security adviser to the US National Security Agency, as saying:

“We are not going to give them the loaded gun.”

He said of the oversight board:

“For eight years they have had the cyber security centre there and the last several years there have been some really horrific reports about the quality of that activity and what’s being produced.”

How seriously should we take those comments?

Jeremy Wright Portrait Jeremy Wright
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Of course we take comments of that kind seriously, but it is important when people reach a judgment on these matters that they are in possession of all the facts, all the evidence and all the advice that we receive from many sources, including the security and intelligence agencies. It is difficult for anyone who does not sit around the National Security Council table to have access to all those different materials, but, as I have said, what is important is that we produce a secure system that will deliver safely a 5G from which all our constituents will benefit—including, importantly, those in Warwickshire. That is what we seek to do, and that is what the review is for.