Speeches by McFadden.

“We have had a dialogue with the victims of these attacks. I have spoken to Marks & Spencer personally several times. I have also spoken about it to the head of the National Cyber Security Centre on more than one occasion, I think, and to the head of GCHQ. We are constantly asking: are they getting the help they need? I…”

“We do use those three words, which are not unique to the way this country views it: promote, protect and partner. I would say that in the last 12 months, on two of those, there has been quite a step change from this Government. In terms of promote, we talked about the industrial strategy. That is the state saying, “Gov…”

“It is a really good question. The first thing to remember about this regime is that it is quite young. In legislative terms, it is only a few years old. It has also had a great deal of ministerial disruption. Until Oliver Dowden took over as the decision maker for the National Security and Investment Act, his predecess…”

“We are balancing things all the time in a very fast-changing world. We are geographically an island, but in trading mentality, we are not an island; we look outward. The United States deal that I referred to a few moments ago is not the only one that we have struck. In recent months, we struck a deal with India. We str…”

“Their starting point would be to read the industrial strategy. You asked me for a list; that is the written one. There is a danger in writing a list of certain sectors, because people will say, “What about me? Don’t you care about me?”—and we do care about others. However, there is a discipline in asking ourselves the …”

“The starting point should be a recognition of what Britain is good at. Actually, what Britain is good at is often a set of things that it has been good at for quite a long time. In one of the answers a few moments ago, I referred to our deep strength in research and innovation. That is not new. It is remarkable that it…”

“The United States will always be muscled up, but the FBI does a different job. It is a law enforcement agency. The NCSC is offering advice and help to companies that are subject to attacks. I hope that it has done the best job it possibly can in these circumstances, but every part of the system should learn from these …”

“It is a good question. I will try to respond not with a list but a starting point.”

“They are set out in the early pages of the national security strategy. If memory serves me right, it is page 14—I could be wrong—where we set out the threat landscape. We have recently had some high-level briefing from the security agencies to the Cabinet on this. In a pure security sense, the biggest change in the thr…”

“I mentioned the Act. We have a system when there is an emergency: we have the Cobra system, with the Cobra team behind it. When there is a crisis or an emergency, that swings into action. It has been there for a while; it has been expanded in physical scope, in facilities and so on since covid. That is how we do it. So…”

“It is certainly agile, and it probably is a bit different from that view of strategic autonomy. That said, we do not have all our eggs in one basket, and we do believe in capability. That is why it was part of our national security strategy. I made a statement to Parliament yesterday on resilience. Sometimes people str…”

“I know that the Committee is interested in this. It is a really interesting question, and I have seen some of the evidence that you have taken on it in recent sessions. On one level, who would be against writing things down? That is what Whitehall does for a living, morning, noon and night: it writes things down. If we…”

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

“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, …”

“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 …”

“I don’t think we thought that there would be food shortages as a result of an attack on one company, but we were very concerned about it, because these are very important and hugely valued high street businesses and the attacks on key retailers show the dangers of what cyber-criminals can do.”

“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;…”

“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.”

“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 …”

“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…”