David Cameron will today sign a landmark cyber security deal with India amid fears that the private data of millions of Britons is at risk of theft from criminal gangs.
Security chiefs have warned Downing Street that bank account, credit card and health details stored by Indian call centres can be stolen easily by fraudsters.
The deal will form the cornerstone of what the Prime Minister hopes will become a new ‘special relationship’ with India.
Yesterday Downing Street revealed that Britain will also help build a series of ‘new towns’ along a 600-mile road linking the country’s commercial capital Mumbai and the tech city Bangalore.
The plans, modelled on the growth of garden cities in 1960s Britain, will see the Government plough £1million into architectural planning in the hope that British firms will win multi-million pound deals to take on the projects.
The vision will be controversial since the UK has said it will end all bilateral aid to India by 2015. But at a time when infrastructure projects at home are stalled, taxpayers’ money is still being used to build transport and energy infrastructure in India.
With the UK economy flatlining, Mr Cameron is leading the largest overseas business delegation ever assembled by No 10 in a bid to drum up business. He said he wanted to make the case that Britain is ‘the best partner’ for India as its economy grows.
Under the cyber security deal Britain and India will join forces to combat cyber espionage and industrial hacking by China.
Cyber-crime costs Britain £27billion every year – more than £1,000 for every family.
Britain and India will tip each other off about hacking attacks, and Indian computer experts will be trained in the UK. A delegation of cyber experts from Britain will visit India in April to check that they are putting protections in place for data held on British people. Police in both countries will also swap expertise.
Mr Cameron made clear that protections for British citizens are at the heart of the plans.
‘Other countries securing their data is effectively helping us secure our data,’ he said. ‘Secondly, I think this is an area where Britain has some real competitive and technology advantages.
‘The threat in terms of cyber security comes from all sorts of different places and organisations – a lot of it is criminal. What the British have done is brought together a strategy to help protect key industries, key infrastructure and key capabilities in terms of cyber security and that’s work we want to share with others.
‘Hacking bothers me wherever it comes from.’
Mr Cameron told an audience of Unilever staff in Mumbai that he wants Britain’s partnership with India to be ‘a really special relationship’ for the 21st century.
‘Britain wants to be your partner of choice,’ said Mr Cameron. ‘We think there are huge ties of history and language and culture and business, but we think we have only just started on the sort of partnership we could build.’
Today Mr Cameron will travel to Delhi to meet India’s prime minister Manmohan Singh and said he will raise the possibility of India buying partly British-made Eurofighter Typhoon jets.
Although he stressed that negotiations were a matter for the UK-German-Spanish-Italian Eurofighter consortium – which includes BAE Systems – Mr Cameron said he would see whether the Indian authorities were ready to ‘reconsider’ their choice of a French rival.
Hopes that Britain could win a share of the £6.4billion contract to supply 126 jet fighters to the Indian air force were revived when French president Francois Hollande returned from a visit to India without a signature on a final contract.
Mr Cameron said: ‘I think Typhoon is a superior aircraft. It has the advantage of all the partner nations behind it.
‘It is an aircraft that, of course, for those countries that want to buy it, we can make some aeroplanes available within months because there are so many countries already using it.
‘I will obviously make clear that Typhoon is still available.’
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