Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:

To ask His Majesty's Government what estimate they have made of the cost of cyberattacks to each subsector of the manufacturing industries for which they have data.

Earlier this month, the government published a set of independent research reports quantifying the impact of cyber attacks on the UK economy. While the government does not hold sub-sectoral data, the KPMG report Economic Modelling of Sector Specific Costings of Cyber Attacks estimates the cost of cyber attacks to individual businesses, broken down by down sector and size.

The report estimates the manufacturing sector suffers some of the highest costs when compared to other sectors, with a significant cyber attack on a UK manufacturing organisation resulting in an average cost of £330,406. This estimate is based on simplified scenarios and generalised inputs to illustrate potential outcomes and should therefore be interpreted with caution.

The 2025 version of the government’s annual Cyber Security Breaches Survey finds that 48% of businesses in the utilities and production sector – which includes manufacturing businesses – suffered any kind of cyber breach or attack in the past 12 months. The survey does not include data on individual sub-sectors.