Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, what steps she is taking to encourage secure web programming among web developers, software and hardware vendors and site administrators.

As outlined in the National Cyber Security Strategy, the Government is undertaking an extensive cyber security skills programme to ensure the UK has a self-sustaining pipeline of talent providing the skills the economy needs. As part of this programme, we have ensured all Further Education digital courses have a mandatory cyber security component, while Computing Science degrees accredited by the British Computer Society must now include comprehensive teaching on cyber security and have generated some material to support this. This is helping to ensure the current and future generation of IT graduates and professionals have the skills needed for secure programming when developing web-based products.

As part of our cyber skills programme, we are also undertaking extensive work in schools, with apprentices and helping non-cyber professionals, ensuring the UK workforce continues to have the skills needed to keep the digital economy secure. In addition, the Government works closely with industry to promote the need for good cyber security practices. The National Cyber Security Strategy makes it clear we are building a secure Internet and sets out an objective for “the majority of online products and services coming into use [to] become ‘secure by default’ by 2021.