Speeches by Spencer.

“Before the Minister moves on—I was a bit nervous that he was going to finish—I have an additional question about the Crown data centre. What happens if a data centre is providing services commercially to both the public and the Crown? How is that operated within the scope of the Bill?”

“That is a stark message. Going back to my previous point, I struggle to think how many small businesses can really put in the necessary resource to take these sorts of steps on cyber-security. There is a broader point here, which goes back to my opening remarks. A chunk of this involves hostile state actors that are at…”

“As I risk getting into trouble with Mr Stringer, I will not respond to the hon. Member for Lichfield. I look forward to the opportunity to debate this issue again, perhaps in the emergency Budget in the next couple of weeks. Clause 6 brings large load controllers, which provide the flow of electricity in and out of sma…”

“I thank my hon. Friend for his interesting proposal, which attempts to crack the nut of one of the problems subsumed in the Bill. The Bill cherry-picks certain sectors that need to be regulated entities, and there is a whole host of definitions. Then the Secretary of State can allocate some of the bits that they want t…”

“I am certainly going to come back to it a few times—if not other Members—and I will invite the Minister to come back to it a few times. Returning to the point about the dependency on particular sectors, I mentioned the impact that Amazon Web Services had on our society and systems; interestingly, the AWS outage was cau…”

“My hon. Friend will be aware that the issue regarding the bottleneck in the supply of cloud computing, in which I put data centres, compute more generally and access to large language models, in our country is very much on my mind, and we have been raising it with the Government. At the moment, I understand that around…”

“The hon. Member for Lichfield may be aware that my background is in medicine; I used to be a doctor before I came to this place. One of the skills and challenges in medicine is that any medical intervention—apart from a small handful—always has a risk of harm or side effects to the patient. It is always a balancing act…”

“Clause 4 amends the NIS regulations to bring data centres that meet certain thresholds within scope of the regs as operators of essential services. As drafted, these data centres will be regulated by DSIT and Ofcom, but the amendments moved by the Minister propose that Ofcom will be the sole regulator for the subsector…”

“I beg to move amendment 1, in clause 15, page 22, line 15, at end insert— “(f) whether the incident involves failure modes not previously observed in the relevant sector materially involving autonomous or adaptive systems based on machine learning, including where the potential impact of such failure modes was mitigate…”

“Clause 13 requires in-scope data centre operators to provide certain information to their designated competent authorities, which—subject to Government amendment 11, which we passed earlier—will now be solely Ofcom, and to keep that information up to date. The information includes the data centre operator’s address and…”

“I will speak to the amendments tabled by the hon. Member for Dewsbury and Batley (Iqbal Mohamed), but wait for the next group to speak to clauses 15 and 16 and the amendments to them in the name of the official Opposition. From the outset, it is important for me to say that while I have spoken to the hon. Member more g…”

“I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment, by leave, withdrawn. Ordered, That further consideration be now adjourned. —(Taiwo Owatemi.)”

“The Minister is, of course, within his rights to snarkily dismiss the questions that I have raised, but I should point out that the stuff that is debated in Parliament, whether in Committee or on the Floor of the Chamber, is relevant when it comes to future legal disputes after a Bill is passed. The questions I have as…”

“Will the Minister give way?”

“I thank the hon. Member so much for that intervention about the time it would take to find an alternative supplier, because it will bring me on nicely to my point about alternative suppliers. However, before I move on to that point, the hon. Gentleman made a very good point in his intervention, which I will address. To…”

“I really appreciate my hon. Friend’s intervention. It goes incisively to the heart of the concern about how these provisions are currently drafted. I really struggle to see how an OES that is providing a service to another OES could effectively argue that it is not within the full scope of these regulations. We have a …”

“My hon. Friend has figured out what I am going to say in a moment, when it comes to the scoping of the regulator and that communication process. Such is the depth of the rabbit hole that the provision creates that, even though my hon. Friend’s intervention did not go where I thought she was going, another problem has j…”

“Clause 3 will amend the relevant provisions of the NIS regulations, stipulating that operators of essential services are within scope of the regulations whether or not they are operating an essential service in the UK, and regardless of jurisdiction in which they are established. Providers of public electronic communic…”

“The public support a ban on social media for the under-16s, Conservative Members support a ban on social media for the under-16s, and Labour Members support a ban on social media for the under-16s. The Secretary of State has said many fine words about her concerns for children’s safety online, but what we now need is a…”

“Q Thanks for coming to give evidence this afternoon. I have two questions—one for each of you. Chris, from Fortinet’s perspective, what more do you think the Government can do to support SMEs to improve their cyber-resilience, while at the same time ensuring that the burden of regulation remains proportionate, particul…”