Speeches by McFadden.

“We try to prepare for a number of scenarios and think them through. I have taken part in scenario exercises about particular geopolitical situations where we say, “If this happened, what would we do? Where do we think the pressures would be? What would happen to oil prices? What would happen to food prices?” We do go t…”

“If you want a list of things to keep you awake at night, it is not a bad place to start. Could I say that we have covered everything, or that there are risks we have not thought of? I do not think anyone could say that 100%.”

“There could be. As I say, after 12 months of constantly pursuing this, no one should have a closed mind when saying, “Could we add this, or could we do that?” It may well be, but it often is about judgment and weighing up the different factors.”

“The national risk register has them all set out, so we think through how we would respond to them all. As to whether we have done a particular exercise, perhaps not if you pick out a particular two, but the whole thing is set out in the national risk register.”

“A national test was done a couple of years ago. This is the second national test. We have also used it in real life, as it were, on a few occasions with storms during the winter. We did it with a storm in Scotland and a storm that affected south Wales and south-west England. You can never prove a counterfactual and say…”

“Let me mention two that I have announced recently. In September, we will fully test the national alert system—the nationwide messaging system to mobile phones. At about 3 o’clock on Sunday 7 September, a message sent by us will make a very loud noise and will interrupt many Sunday roasts, but I think that is a really i…”

“There are provisions in the Act about information sharing, and I am as bound by them as anyone else.”

“Well, I am appearing before Matt and his Committee on Monday, and I look forward to continuing a number of these discussions.”

“Look, we take into account resilience, not just now but in the future. You should have a view of capability now, but also in the future too, and you should try to think about those dimensions when making such a decision. That is why stock and flow is important. A single investment might not make much difference, but 20…”

“We are actor agnostic in the way that we do this. Other countries can take a particular attitude towards another country. As I said in my answer a few moments ago, in general, I think being a good home for foreign investment is in the UK national interest, but there will be occasions when we will say no to that because…”

“It is a very good question. That happened before the regime was in place. That is not to say that the regime is foolproof. I am not here to say that the regime is foolproof, but it has been put in place since then. Your question of timing is a good one, because it raises the obvious issue of having a new regime, which …”

“I will break that down a little bit. The investment needs of the country are there to see. It has been one of the policies of the Government to try to change the investment trajectory from the one that we inherited. Starting with public investment, that was all set out by the Chancellor at the spending review, with the…”

“Under the Procurement Act, the National Security Unit for Procurement exists to do precisely that. It thinks about vulnerabilities in the procurement supply chain, to advise people and to look at procurement through a national security lens.”

“The Foreign Secretary made a statement to Parliament a couple of weeks ago on the China audit. That statement is there for everyone to see, and at the heart of it were two sides of quite a familiar coin. We have to protect our cyber infrastructure and be clear-eyed about that, and we have to be vocal about it when we e…”

“Richard Horne, who you took evidence from yesterday, would probably say that those businesses that have taken up the toolkits that the NCSC makes available—the cyber essentials toolkit and so on—are much better protected than those who have not. I accept the challenge about how widely it is known that these things are …”

“On critical minerals and critical supply chains, we may be back to our legal protections, if you are talking about investment and so on. But when we talk about the whole-of-society effort on cyber, the three levels that I talked about are a reasonable way to think about it.”

“You can have joint ownership of the phrase! The metaphor for this will not be a soldier standing outside everyone’s door. This is more about sensible security measures and putting them in place. All of us could be subject to burglary, but we all lock our door when we leave the house in the morning. We lock our windows;…”

“Chronic risk. Underneath that, we have the National Cyber Advisory Board, chaired by Sharon Barber, the former chief information officer of Lloyds bank. The board is a business-Government liaison body that exists to talk about the cyber-threat to businesses. Then you get to the SME world. That, I think, is where—to go …”

“Let me talk a bit about how we communicate. At the heavy end—the critical national infrastructure—there will be direct communication sometimes with the intelligence agencies. I have attended meetings with critical national infrastructure and the head of MI5 to advise them about the risks. That is at the top end of it, …”

“May I say something more broadly about business and cyber?”