YouSaid · the spoken record
Liam Byrne
We hold 35 passages that may be Liam Byrne’s. We do not publish them until we can confirm who spoke. See the correction.
On the record 2004–2026
hansard · podcast
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“Member suggests and our allies have actioned would be a significant step forward in the Bill that he refers to.”
House of Commons5 February 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“If we believe, as I think we should, that economic security is the foundation of national security, that is not a position that can go on. The fact that our allies tell us on the Committee that they worry that we are the weak link is not something that our country should put up with, and it is not something that this House should ignore.”
House of Commons5 February 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“We lament that there is no backstop for the cyber insurance market and we regret that there is no extension of the brilliant Pool Re to provide that insurance for the future. It is also quite obvious to us that the pay scales for our frontline specialists in the war on economic crime are simply not adequate. We look forward to continuing the dialogue constructively with Ministers and I welcome the tone that they struck and the progress that we have made. However, let me conclude with this. Over the last year, as we have set about our work, we have heard consistently from our allies fears and concerns about the economic security regime in this country. We have heard loud and clear from them that they worry that the UK is the weak link in the western defence when it comes to economic security.”
House of Commons5 February 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Today’s Government response says that no such list will be published. We regret that the managing public money framework will not be updated to take into account the need for investments in resilience. The Government response said that the current regime was adequate. That is clearly a nonsense. When ministerial directions are needed to ensure the subsidies that were delivered to British Steel or the underwriting that was delivered to the Jaguar Land Rover supply chain, it is quite clear that the managing public money framework does not give Ministers or officials the right framework for balancing the security needs of our country and the growth objectives of the Chancellor and the Prime Minister. We remain concerned that the tax incentives for improving the resilience of small business are not adequate.”
House of Commons5 February 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“We do not think that the Trade Remedies Authority is fit for the modern day and we believe that significant reform will be needed. We most lament the instances where the Government rejected our recommendations. As a cross-party Committee, we felt that we had some common-sense proposals for Ministers to consider. We regret that there is no clear plan to overhaul Government co-ordination and leadership, as there was for counter-terrorism policy after 7/7 and, indeed, for economic security policy back in the 1920s and 1930s. There is a resistance to publishing a clear list of the sovereign capabilities that we will need as a country. I understood from Defence Ministers at the time of the defence industrial strategy that there would, indeed, be a clear list of sovereign capabilities that we as a country would need to develop.”
House of Commons5 February 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“We welcome what the Ministers have said about the need to get something in place. Our allies already have that infrastructure in place. We welcome Ministers’ recommendation that they will listen to us in this House and our Committee, but we would like a little more specificity from them. Finally, we simply do not think that there has been enough progress on controlling foreign subsidies. The Competition and Markets Authority has been endlessly consulting on that for the last two years. At a time when Chinese industry is six times over-subsidised compared with European industries, we do not think that there is a strong enough regime for policing a level playing field in competition and that imperils our manufacturers.”
House of Commons5 February 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“We are not going to face one threat after another; they will compound and hit us all at once. That is why we need business and Government to be working together to scenario-plan for the future. We welcome some of the progress on critical minerals, but frankly we do not think that the money or strategy put in place is up to scratch, so the Committee concluded in a report it published earlier this week that one of the inquiries we undertake this year will be an inquiry into critical minerals security. In the field of cyber-security, we do not think that the recommendations on software and cyber-security standards were really heard, and we would like to see more progress on mandatory reporting of cyber-ransom attacks. We did not feel that the Government have yet made a clear commitment to developing anti-coercion systems or instruments.”
House of Commons5 February 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“We welcome the commitment that the Government have made to stronger alliances. We welcome the promise of tougher deterrents to bad actors, particularly from Companies House, and we welcome the slightly half-hearted commitment to parliamentary scrutiny of this field of policy in the future. In some areas, the Committee concluded that the Government have made some progress but not gone far enough. First, although there is a promise to improve forecasting of future threats led by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, we felt that the commitment was a little too vague for our taste. Secondly, we are sorry that the national exercising programme does not have a clear commitment to bring together the public and the private sector to wargame the kind of threats that we know will come together.”
House of Commons5 February 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Friend the Member for Halifax (Kate Dearden), on the Front Bench that we welcome the constructive tone that the Government took in response to our report. We realise that this is a novel, fast-moving field of policy, and where we end up at the end of this Parliament will be very different to where we are today. The Government have clearly accepted four of our recommendations and partially accepted 11. But I lament that they rejected 10 of the recommendations. For the benefit of the House, let me canter through them very quickly. What we felt was good about the Government’s response was that there are some clear principles that will guide our economic security policy for the future. We had lacked those until today, so I am glad that we now have them in black and white.”
House of Commons5 February 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“We then made a number of recommendations, including on how we can improve the diagnosis of threats that we confront, how we develop the sovereign capabilities that we need as a country, how we diversify our supply chains and sources of critical minerals, how we defend our critical national infrastructure against new perils, how we deter those seeking to damage us economically, and—crucially—how on earth we are going to dovetail the efforts of His Majesty’s Government, the private sector and the work of this country and our allies around the world. Those were the recommendations that we made to Government, and today we published the Government’s response to our report. Let me start by saying to the Under-Secretary of State for Business and Trade, my hon.”
House of Commons5 February 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Our conclusions were stark: we found that the institutions, policies, posture, funding, laws and regulation that we now have in place means that this country does not have an economic security regime that is fit for the future. We set out to provide a blueprint for how the Government can overhaul the system that we have in place. We recommended, like our allies, putting our regime on a statutory basis with a cross-Government Minister for economic security and a proper centre for economic security at the centre of Government.”
House of Commons5 February 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The combination of AI-powered weapons, the advent of hostile states, the reality of unpredictable allies, and the need for us as a country to mobilise something like £100 billion of new foreign direct investment means that the threat surface confronted by our businesses is about to multiply exponentially. That is why we need new economic security defences. If we have learned one lesson from Russia’s illegal invasion in Ukraine, it is that economic security is the foundation of national security. Just as we need a whole-of-society approach to defence, so too do we now need a whole-of-society approach to our economic security. That is why the Business and Trade Committee undertook its review last year.”
House of Commons5 February 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Not long thereafter, the Exchequer was required to underwrite the Jaguar Land Rover supply chain to the tune of a billion pounds as it suffered a cyber-attack of unprecedented proportions. All of that took place while our allies in Holland were battling over Nexperia chip supplies and our allies in America were battling China over rare earth restrictions. Five shocks but one message: economic security threats are now a concern to this country’s security. The message from our Committee is that those threats are going to multiply significantly in the years ahead.”
House of Commons5 February 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Let me first express my gratitude to the Backbench Business Committee for making time for this short statement today as the Business and Trade Committee publishes the Government response to our flagship report on economic security, which was published in the summer last year. I want to start not with Committee papers but with people—with workers and businesses. It was just in April last year that we found ourselves in this place on an unusual Saturday sitting to ensure that British Steel was kept alive. Not long thereafter, our agencies were supporting the high street retailer Marks & Spencer as it suffered one of the worst cyber-attacks in our country’s history.”
House of Commons5 February 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“We heard loud and clear from allies in Europe that the divergence of UK policy on China from that of Europe may indeed confound the ambitions of some of us to draw closer to the European Union in future. I know that is not a view that is shared across the House, but it should give Ministers pause for thought.”
House of Commons5 February 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“It is an open secret in this House that every day, every week, there is some controversy between the growth Departments and the security Departments in government. If we are to stand on our feet in the years ahead, we have to make sure that our industry is fighting fit and not undermined by unfair foreign competition. We were grateful to the OECD, whose representatives met the Committee in Paris last week. They set out in black and white the sheer scale of over-subsidies in China—that Chinese industry is subsidised six times more than industry in Europe tells us that the playing field is not level. Yet the CMA has been consulting, without conclusion, on control of foreign subsidies for almost two years.”
House of Commons5 February 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“It is impossible for us to mobilise that money unless the private sector knows where to invest. If we keep the list of sovereign capabilities secret, how on earth will we send the right signals to the private sector to invest in the future?”
House of Commons5 February 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“My hon. Friend is right. I salute her work on the Committee, which is far stronger for her contribution. The bottom line is that the Government has said, in strategy after strategy, that sovereign capabilities are important and that they need to be developed. What we have in the response that has been published today is a clear statement that those capabilities will remain secret, that we will publish a few of them in the defence industrial strategy and maybe if a defence equipment plan is ever published, we might see more in there too. The point here is quite stark. If we are to ensure our economic security is stronger in future, we have to mobilise the private sector and private sector investment consistently and at scale over a long period of time.”
House of Commons5 February 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“When we published the report, we sought to compare the regime that we have in this country with the regimes that are in place among our allies in Japan, Europe and the United States. It became clear that, unlike our allies, we have a loose collection of strategies—some might unfairly label them strategy by stapler—that are basically collated together but which lack any statutory basis to ensure consistency and persistence over time. Again, we must remember what we are trying to do. We are trying to ensure that public and private sector are able to work together on big risks over a long period of time. If we leave policy unpredictable, inconsistent and subject to the changes of wind each day, we cannot provide that signal. Ensuring that there is a proper statutory basis for economic security in the way that the hon.”
House of Commons5 February 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“So will the Prime Minister now follow up his meetings last week and publish a strategy, co-ordinated with our allies, so we can take out the guesswork and put in place the guardrails for this important relationship?”
House of Commons2 February 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I want to welcome the Prime Minister’s serious engagement with serious power: it is essential to safeguarding our national interest. The complexities of China require from Britain a whole-of-society approach, which is completely impossible until the Government publish a clear China strategy to explain what is off limits and how we are going to rebalance competition with Chinese industry that is six times over-subsidised compared with our firms. Last week in Europe, I heard very clearly from our partners that they are worried that the lackadaisical approach to policing Chinese competition risks deeper integration with Europe. The EU has 143 trade measures in place against China; we have none.”
House of Commons2 February 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The £4 billion package in the Budget is very welcome, but the manifesto commitment was to replace the business rates system, not tinker with it or subsidise it. Pubs alone will see bill increases of 4% this year. Alongside that, VAT thresholds are strangling hospitality businesses on the high street, and that is on top of a tax compliance bill of £25 billion for small business, not least because His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs does not answer 4 million phone calls a year. I repeat the question posed by my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Dame Meg Hillier), the Chair of the Treasury Committee: when will the Government table comprehensive, radical reform that meets the test of the manifesto commitment?”
House of Commons19 January 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“May I welcome the deal with the United States to set zero tariffs on pharmaceutical exports? Together with the British Business Bank’s investment of £100 million in biotech, that is a real boost. However, the US offer was for just three years, whereas the price adjustment we have promised for the NHS is permanent. When the Secretary of State met the Secretary of Commerce and the United States Trade Representative in America last night, what assurance did he get that the Americans will not come back and reimpose tariffs on UK pharmaceuticals in three years’ time?”
House of Commons11 December 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I am afraid that it is vital that we begin opening talks with our closest neighbours in the European Union about the kind of economic security union that could draw our countries closer together, and help provide the economic support and growth that rearmament will require.”
House of Commons11 December 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The language of the US national security strategy is deeply regrettable. Frankly, it is not hard to see the rhymes with some extreme right-wing tropes that date back to the 1930s. The publication of this document came at the same time as the collapse of talks about the UK joining the European Union Security Action for Europe programme to help boost rearmament, so it is now essential that, as my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington (Matt Western) said, the Government specify the sovereign capabilities that we have decided to adopt in this country. It is essential that we now implement the recommendations of the Business and Trade Committee’s report on economic security.”
House of Commons11 December 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The steps that we have heard from the Minister go some distance towards helping us deliver on the spirit of new clause 17. I am very grateful to him for his announcement today, which could unlock billions of pounds for affordable homes, clean energy and comfort in retirement for millions of the people we came to this House to serve.”
House of Commons3 December 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“That clarity, if we get it right, could avoid the need to resort to the mandating powers that some Members of this House have objected to. It could unlock investment by giving schemes confidence to act, rather than making them fearful and hesitant. We in this House have a profound duty to ensure that the maximum amount of pension savings in this country not only yield a return to give comfort to savers in their golden years, but do a double duty: they should help to provide the productive investment that we need to build a bigger and richer country. After all, a nation that invests is a nation that builds, and a nation that builds is a nation that will grow its pension pots to help ensure that pension savers enjoy their golden years in comfort.”
House of Commons3 December 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I hope that if he gets his skates on, he can table an amendment in the other place once the Bill moves from our precious hands, but mere guidance is not enough, because sometimes it can be ignored. Guidance does not eliminate liability risk and does not give trustees a solid statutory floor, so I urge the Minister to ensure that the legislation he brings forward delivers guidance that is statutory in its bite. I urge him to go big, by pairing guidance with underpinning regulation that gives trustees legal clarity; to go broad, by ensuring that every single kind of scheme falls within the ambit of the legislation; and to be specific, by explaining precisely what those powers can be used for and the way in which they can be allowed to ensure productive investment.”
House of Commons3 December 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I am afraid that these cases simply cannot answer the questions that trustees must answer today, and they cannot help with the challenges that trustees face today: globalised portfolios, system-wide risks, intergenerational impacts, and the real-world living standards of their members. That is why the spirit of new clause 17 is so important, modest though it is. It does not alter the statutory purpose of pension schemes, and it does not ask a single saver to accept lower returns. What it does is cut through the confusion and allow the Government to produce regulations and guidance that spell out clearly and consistently what trustees must consider, and what they may consider, when making investment decisions. I warmly welcome the Minister’s commitment to introduce new legislation.”
House of Commons3 December 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“At a recent conference, fewer than one in five practitioners said that fiduciary duty was “completely clear”. I believe that 31 industry leaders have now written to the Minister for Pensions to request that legal clarification, including a dozen chief executives. Publicly, the chief executive of Nest, the provider of the UK’s largest defined-contribution scheme, has said much the same. Fiduciary duty dates back to case law that is centuries old, back to a 19th-century brick factory in Pontefract and, before that, the inheritance of a market lease at some point in 1726.”
House of Commons3 December 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“It is a paradox that I think we can no longer ignore. We ask trustees to act in members’ best interests, yet the law today is so unclear that many of them feel unable to invest in the very things that could secure the long-term interests of their members: growth, productivity, and the living standards on which those members will one day rely. Today’s rules were built to ensure prudence, but what they are doing is creating paralysis. A framework that was meant to safeguard the future is, in practice, preventing pension savers from shaping that future. Scheme providers want to do more, members expect them to do more and our country needs them to do more, but all that can only happen if Parliament now provides the clarity that the courts have not provided. This is not an academic matter.”
House of Commons3 December 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“We want those trustees to have the freedom to invest in good things here, not out of some patriotic flourish but because it is plainly in members’ best interests. When national investment grows, our national productivity rises, and when pension pots get bigger, they will get bigger faster if we have a country that is more productive and growing faster than it is today. When a country grows, the returns that shape retirement grow with it. Many scheme providers today simply do not feel that they have the permission to make those investments. They are unsure of the law. They fear litigation. They worry about the possibility that looking at system-level risks, from low productivity or high housing costs or climate stress, might fall outside their legal remit. This is where the problem lies.”
House of Commons3 December 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“For all its virtues, however, as it is drafted today we are still left with the core problem, and unless we solve that core problem, the Bill’s noble ambitions will be defeated by its notable omissions. We risk creating bigger and better-managed funds that still fail to invest in our country, and still fail to invest in our country’s future. The Bill will fail to channel the investment that we need in affordable homes, in net-zero investments, in cleaner power systems, in affordable transport systems, in the social care that we all need for the future, in regeneration, and in the national infrastructure of growth. It will fail because it fails, as currently drafted, to clarify exactly what it is that pension fund trustees can consider.”
House of Commons3 December 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“What we have instead is confusion, and from that confusion comes a caution, and from that caution comes a world in which pension scheme providers are simply not investing what they could and what they should in the productive assets of our country. The flight of British savings from investment here has long bedevilled the country. It is a sight to behold. We are not short of savings, but we are desperately short of investment. We have somehow magicked a situation in which we have £3 trillion-worth of long-term savings, but we have the lowest investment rate in the G7. I think the Bill will help to turn that around. I think it will help to break that curse. There is much in it that is welcome: the consolidation of funds, the consolidation of pots, the simplification of structures, and a stronger framework for long-term investment.”
House of Commons3 December 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“That depth of cross-party support tells us something important: that here in this House is broad and deep support for the principles enshrined in the new clause. There is a shared belief across this House that working people should be able to use their savings to build a richer and stronger country in which to retire. My new clause calls for something very simple. It calls for something that has been missing for far too long. As we know, pension fund trustees have fiduciary duties to the people they represent and the people they serve, but those duties need clarity, and for too long that clarity has been missing.”
House of Commons3 December 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I begin by congratulating the Minister on bringing the Bill forward to this stage. He has been one of the country’s practical idealists since I first began working with him in 2008, and he is demonstrating those credentials once again in stewarding this Bill through the House today with such expertise and intelligence. He, like me, has long been concerned not only by the endemically low investment rates in this country—now languishing at the lowest in the G7—but that we should build up a system of universal basic capital, so that the wealth we create in this country is more fairly shared. I rise to speak to clause 17, which is in my name, and I give enormous thanks to the 33 Members from all parts of the House who have added their names to it.”
House of Commons3 December 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The hon. Lady is absolutely right. Many members would say that they wanted their investments to help to create a more equal country—a less unequal country—not least because we now know from the work of the OECD and the International Monetary Fund that more unequal countries grow more slowly.”
House of Commons3 December 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“That is why we call for a cross-Government Minister and an office of economic security to bring everything together, the restoration of the sub-committee on economic security in the National Security Council, and parliamentary oversight through the reform of section 54 of the National Security and investment Act 2021. We think that much of that should be enshrined in a Bill. We have done this before. After world war one, we comprehensively modernised the state to combat the world of economic warfare. That is a wise lesson and a wise experience to guide us in new times.”
House of Commons27 November 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“We also need to dovetail what we are doing with what our allies are doing: we call for an alliance of free-trading democracies to work together, like the work of the UK and the comprehensive and progressive agreement for trans-Pacific partnership—the Minister has just returned from a CPTPP meeting. The work that we are pioneering in the South Korean trade deal is a good example of the kind of thing that we should be doing more generally. We need almost to be driving forward an economic security union with our closest neighbour, and of course our allies in the United States need to be drawn into this work too. We need to make sure that the blueprint has a backbone.”
House of Commons27 November 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Crucially, we need to make sure we have the right skills in both Companies House and the National Crime Agency. It is ridiculous that there is something like a £28,000 gap between the pay that someone in the National Crime Agency can get and the pay that someone in an equivalent police force can get. That is not the way to ensure that we have the right people on the frontline. We note with concern that Companies House has a 20% vacancy rate in its digital workforce. That is a real risk. Finally, we need to dovetail what the Government are doing with what the private sector is doing. That is why we need new spaces in which they can work together.”
House of Commons27 November 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“That is why we think that the mandatory reporting of ransomware attacks is a good idea, and why we think we should be radically expanding the work of Pool Re so there is a backstop to the cyber insurance market, which there currently is not. We need capital allowances to be modernised, so there are real incentives for small and medium-sized enterprises to invest in cyber-security. Critical SMEs should probably enjoy access to Government support too. In the field of deterrence, we need to ensure that we can fast-track investment into our country from trusted sources. That is why a trusted investor scheme would make a lot of sense. We need to explore anti-coercion instruments in the way that the European Union has. We need to name and shame those involved in sanction breaches much more aggressively than we are today.”
House of Commons27 November 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“We also need to modernise the “Managing Public Money” framework so that Ministers, like the excellent Minister in his place today, are not hidebound and forced to issue ministerial directions every time a strategic investment is needed, as was the case with Jaguar Land Rover and the nationalisation of British Steel. Our third D is diversify, which is well understood. We need to diversify supplies of critical minerals and diversify our critical supply chains, too. The targets for critical minerals published on Monday were important, but there was no investment plan to go with them. We cannot do this alone; we can only do it by acting with allies. We then need to better defend our infrastructure, including our critical national infrastructure and our cyber-infrastructure, in both the public and private sectors.”
House of Commons27 November 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“We need to build on the work of the National Cyber Security Centre to create a proper platform where public and private sectors can work together in new ways to understand the risks that the country confronts. We need to specify the sovereign capabilities that we need to develop as a country. Two or three are defined in the strategic defence review, but that is about it, and the defence industrial policy promised some further definitions. We cannot understand what we are going to decouple from allies—or in some cases from enemies—unless we have a more sophisticated understanding of the sovereign capabilities that we need as a country. We then need to line up the national wealth fund and other resources behind this understanding.”
House of Commons27 November 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“We conclude that it does not make a great deal of sense for policy to be guided by a hard definition of economic security, because things are going to change: this is a dynamic environment, and a hard definition might entail more risks than it solves. However, we believe that this doctrine should be shaped by a set of strategic principles in the years to come. Colleagues across the House will have many ideas about what should go into that. We conclude that our approach should be guided by six Ds: diagnose, develop, diversify, defend, deter and dovetail. On diagnosis, we think there should be a long-term technology forecasting centre in Government that supplies not just Government but the private sector with, if not intelligence, then certainly insight, to shape their understanding of risk in the future.”
House of Commons27 November 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“There have been welcome advances, not least the critical mineral strategy that was published this week, but the risk is that ad hoc papers become strategy by stapler, where we have policy papers published that are not durable for the long term. That is a problem, because only the public sector and the private sector working together can mobilise the kind of investment that is needed to transform the country’s resilience for the threats we will face in the future. We argue therefore that, just as we comprehensively overhauled the doctrine to tackle counter-terrorism after 7/7 with the publication of CONTEST, we now need a new doctrine of economic security in order to ensure that there is a whole-of-Government and whole-of-society approach, all pointing in a similar direction.”
House of Commons27 November 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“What that basically revealed is that many of our allies, such as Japan, but also in a way the European Union, have legislative backing for many of the regimes that they have in place. Our allies in Japan in particular, who have had to think about this for a lot longer than we have, have a very sophisticated set of defences and state machinery. Equally, we could find very durable institutions in the United States and real policy innovation in the European Union today. In this country, we have a number of strategies, which are growing in number, but frankly do not really add up to a comprehensive regime for economic security.”
House of Commons27 November 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“This is all at a time when our country is going to seek to entice around £100 billion extra in inward investment, much of it from abroad and much of it in our energy infrastructure. What Ciaran Martin calls the private ownership of public risk is about to expand exponentially. Yet, right now, we simply do not have the defences in place that we need. The core argument of our report is that just as we need a whole-of-society approach to defence, so we now need a whole-of-society approach to our economic security, but we do not have the systems in place to deliver that today. That is why change is needed over the years to come. In order to help understand precisely the gaps, we worked together with experts at the Royal United Services Institute, gathered lots of evidence, took lots of witness testimony and heard from Ministers.”
House of Commons27 November 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“If we think about the risks we faced this summer, with the Jaguar Land Rover cyber-attack, which ended up costing a £1.5 billion state guarantee; the struggles that our Dutch allies went through with Nexperia; and the struggles that our American allies went through in the spat with China over rare earth technology exports, we can now see that the question of economic security is front and centre for businesses and policymakers, each and every day. The warning that we sound is that the risks are going to multiply significantly over the years to come. The threat surface that most businesses now operate is much bigger than in the past. Artificial intelligence is going to transform cyber-aggression. We now have states and state-backed actors operating in this space.”
House of Commons27 November 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“It is a privilege to serve with you in the Chair, Ms Lewell. Let me record my thanks to the Backbench Business Committee for making time for this debate; to a brilliant team of Select Committee members—it is a privilege to serve alongside them—and to a first-class team who help to ensure that the Select Committee does its work so expertly. The report we present today sounds a note of agreement, but is also designed to sound a warning. The note of agreement is this: we agree that national security is economic security. But the note of warning is stark: we do not find that our economic security regime is fit for the future.”
House of Commons27 November 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I am grateful to the hon. Member for the question and for his sterling work on the Committee as our inquiry has been driven forward over the last seven or eight months. I have not. It was striking to compare the evidence we took with history lessons from the 1920s and 1930s. As a country, we have developed infrastructure to tackle these kinds of threats in the past. Indeed, the forces that we assembled in the 1920s and 1930s were so important that they became known as the fourth fighting service. It was certainly crucial in helping us to stand up the Ministry of Economic Warfare in world war two with the speed that we did. We are now in a world of chokepoints, coercion and weaponised interdependence, and today’s cyber-attacks will be nothing compared with those in future. Frankly, the country is simply not ready.”
House of Commons27 November 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗