Speeches by Kane.

“I have a final point before I hand back to the Chair. When you say things like that, given your comment at the beginning about this being so dangerous, and when you set targets such as that and give them to us at a Committee level, we start to put a value on these things, because of the way that we are evaluating the r…”

“T8. The Minister may be aware that SSE is supporting more than 1,000 new homes in rural Scotland to aid energy infrastructure development. Does he agree that the SNP Scottish Government’s failure to get a grip on our rural housing crisis is a major barrier to infrastructure development, and will he urge SSE to expand t…”

“Tomorrow marks 29 years since 16 children and their teacher were murdered at Dunblane primary school. In recent weeks, my constituents have raised with me the alarming fact that adverts offering handguns for sale are appearing on technology platforms such as Google and YouTube. Does the Prime Minister agree that techno…”

“Thank you. We could spend forever on this subject.”

“Do you think it is seeping into the public consciousness? When we talk about cyber, it always strikes me that we are describing attacks from countries and talking about big deployments. Do you think this is getting into the public consciousness as much as it needs to?”

“Let us talk about the constantly evolving nature of this. What assurance can you give us that the Government are keeping up with and ultimately staying ahead of that growing and changing threat?”

“My question was what assurance you can give that the Government can keep up or stay ahead. What I heard there is that staying ahead of the threat is nigh-on impossible, as is reacting to it, because you do not know what the threat will evolve into. Let us park that for a minute and talk about keeping up with the threat…”

“Can I ask about AI? We are talking an awful lot about AI in pretty much every session at the moment, so let us spend a couple of minutes talking about AI and the cyber threat. I want to leave it as almost an open-ended question for comment from you. How is it impacting and what is your thinking around AI and cyber secu…”

“I want to close that off very quickly, because we could spend forever talking about AI in every session that we do. I see AI being used to cure diseases, and it feels like AI is approaching things in a way that humans cannot. Are we headed to a world where the threat actors are going to be just setting AI loose to try …”

“I want to talk about GovAssure, so let me set the scene. Paragraph 2.8 of the NAO Report states: “In April 2023, GSG started agreeing with departments clear and risk-based cyber resilience outcomes that they needed to achieve. It did this by introducing an annual cyber security assurance scheme, known as GovAssure”. Pa…”

“We will cover legacy IT in a minute, so let us stick with GovAssure. It seems like a good idea and a good approach, but what I am trying to work out is this. If we assume that it is a good approach from year one, it is going to be an excellent approach from year x, but what is year x? When does it start to become a sit…”

“Can we explore that a little further? If these are critical systems, what is the barrier to doing more? I take the point that it is disproportionate to use all the resources to do assurance, but if these are critical functions, is it an issue of resource? Would you do more if you had more resource?”

“I could understand if you took all the Government IT systems and said, “The following are critical and the rest are not,” but what I think I am hearing is that while you are identifying what is critical, you are not assuring all the critical systems; which, by extension, means that the non-critical systems, which are s…”

“I am a little confused. If you are comfortable that your responsible officers are giving you that level of assurance, why do we need GovAssure on top of that?”

“I am enjoying the lesson.”

“So GovAssure is not going to ramp up in terms of the scale and pace. It is at almost a fixed pace that you are comfortable with for what it does.”

“Can I ask about the move to make the public sector resilient by 2030? I think the Committee and the NAO Report note that the Government Security Group has the implementation plan for what it is going to do, but there is no strategy implementation plan that sets out what everybody else is going to do, who needs to do wh…”

“We are talking about the public sector and we are a United Kingdom, which has devolved nations, but the cyber threat does not recognise our internal borders. How are you working across the devolved nations to get this 2030 target? Are they included? Is there good co-operation and cross-working?”

“I suppose you can always get learning from the devolved nations, just as they can learn from the UK Government. As a Scottish MP, I am used to robust and ambitious targets being put in place and then not met. On the 2030 target, there is good evidence of what happens when Government Departments put in place targets tha…”

“Good morning, Sir Jim. Happy retirement to you, when it comes. I am the MP for Stirling and Strathallan, so I am a Scottish MP. I am conscious that, when we talk about the tax system, we have our own tax rates in Scotland. I know that this is subject to different reports from the NAO, but it is helpful to talk about it…”