The Government will ‘take seriously’ the question of what provisions must be in place to prevent community pharmacies being affected by future IT disruption, a junior minister has said in the wake of the chaos caused by the CrowdStrike outage last week.

In a debate in the House of Lords yesterday (July 25), Baroness Twycross, a newly appointed parliamentary under-secretary of state in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, said she had “huge sympathy for all those affected” across a number of sectors and confirmed that pharmacy and the wider NHS will be considered in a Cabinet Office review of the incident.

She was responding to a question from Liberal Democrat peer Paul Scriven, who had asked: “One of the public services specifically hit was the NHS, so why are systematic back-up systems not in place for primary care and pharmacy? Who has been asked to take this forward to ensure that such systems are in place as a matter of urgency for those who are ill?”

Baroness Twycross replied: “All relevant departments will take place in the review, and I will feed back the specific points made to the Cabinet Office and colleagues in the Department of Health.”

She added that Baron Scriven’s point regarding specific software systems “needs to be “taken seriously” as Labour moves forward with a cybersecurity and resilience bill that was included in the King’s Speech.  

She said the bill will “strengthen our defences and ensure that more essential digital services than ever before are protected”.

Asked by Lord Clement-Jones of the Liberal Democrats whether Labour’s cybersecurity bill will include a “rethink about critical national infrastructure and our dependence on a few overly dominant major tech companies for cloud services and software” for services that are “replacing reliable analogue communications with digital systems without any back-up,” Baroness Twycross replied that some of these “critical issues” will be reviewed. 

“From my view, the essential point arising from the issues caused by CrowdStrike is the need to strengthen our resilience, which is what this Government intends to do,” she said, adding that any lessons that are learned will be implemented “as a matter of urgency”.

The global Microsoft outage caused huge disruption to a number of crucial services, affecting medicines deliveries and electronic prescriptions.