New cyber security and business resilience policy centre, The CSBR, has announced its first two policy programmes for the first quarter of 2025. Unsurprisingly given the UK Government’s intention to bring before Parliament during 2025 its bill of the same name, “Cyber security and business resilience” will be one of the programmes. The other will be “AI and healthcare”.

The organisation also announced that Baroness Neville-Jones DCMG, a former chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee and later the Minister of State for Security and Counter Terrorism at the Home Office, has accepted the role of chair of its advisory board. Impeccably well-versed in the criticality of cyber security, the Baroness supported The CSBR at its launch in the Palace of Westminster at the end of November.

The CSBR is led by former MP and member of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Cyber Security, James Morris. He said: “The new Cyber Security and Resilience Bill announced by the Government is a major intervention to update the law around cyber and resilience. We want to bring experts together to make recommendations so that the Bill when published will meet current and, critically, future challenges. We’ll be considering issues such as what might be missing from the bill and how we anticipate it might need to be strengthened. By having this debate now, we can help to head off the possibility later of a Bill that doesn’t quite fulfil either its needs or its potential.

“The other policy programme that we’ve announced for Q1 2025 is hugely different but no less important. AI clearly has the potential to transform the healthcare landscape, but there are many questions to answer. We want to look at how the healthcare system can be infused with AI to maximise the impact on efficiency and productivity, but without compromising governance and data security. What changes need to be made? What approach should Government be taking? How does the UK compare to other countries? What issues does the use of AI in healthcare raise for cyber security in the NHS in general and for data security in particular? By bringing together top experts who can answer questions like these, and then making their knowledge available to the powers-that-be, we hope to help accelerate the successful, secure introduction of more AI into our NHS,” he said.

Both topics will be addressed in the form of private roundtables, evidence-based research and reports, with policy recommendations as their output. Policy recommendations will be both published and sent directly to relevant stakeholders including Government.

Baroness Neville-Jones, new chair of The CSBR, said: “Cyber security is one of the major challenges of our time.  Maintaining the security of critical national infrastructure is especially important and a task at which we cannot afford to fail. Underestimating the consequences of failure can prove very expensive. Managers need to know how to ensure the resilience of organisations so that cyber attacks, which will occur, are successfully repelled. That in turn means looking closely at the nexus between security and resilience – something CSBR has been set up to do and I am delighted to support its efforts.”