The Home Office-led consultation will consider proposals include banning all public sector bodies and critical national infrastructure, including the NHS, local councils, and schools, from making ransomware payments in order to make them unattractive targets for criminals. This is an expansion of the current ban on payments by government departments.

This is in addition to making it mandatory to report ransomware incidents, to boost intelligence available to law enforcement and help them disrupt more incidents.

Security minister Dan Jarvis said: ‘These proposals help us meet the scale of the ransomware threat, hitting these criminal networks in their wallets and cutting off the key financial pipeline they rely upon to operate.'

Last year, there was a cyber attack on pathology services run by Synnovis at Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust and King's College Hospitals NHS Trust and the stolen data was published online.