(1 day, 19 hours ago)
Commons ChamberRead Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
David Reed (Exmouth and Exeter East) (Con)
It is a privilege to lead this evening’s Adjournment debate on improving national resilience. I am also glad that the Security Minister is responding. He is a man for whom I have a great deal of respect. As we have both served in what is now the Special Forces Strike Group, albeit at different times, I know he is one of the few people in this House who has seen the sharp end of national insecurity at first hand.
It has sadly become commonplace to say that we are living through unprecedented times. The international system we have all lived under has fractured, war has broken out across multiple continents and technological upheaval and a warming planet compound to create an increasingly volatile world.
We hear repeatedly across this House that the first duty of any Government is the defence of the realm. It is repeated so often that it risks becoming a platitude, but here is the hard question: are we actually living up to that duty here in the UK in 2026? This evening, I will set out why I believe we are falling short and, more importantly, what we might do about it and how we might build a country and citizenship resilient enough to meet the growing and interconnected number of threats to our homeland.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
I commend the hon. Member. Resilience is about not just defence but health. To cast the mind of the hon. Gentleman and that of the House back to the national emergency of covid-19, the report of the UK covid inquiry mentioned “fatal strategic flaws”. The NHS did not collapse, although it came close and patients often did not receive the standard of care that they were due, and that led to delays in diagnosis and treatment. Does the hon. Member not agree that serious concerns about the lack of the health service’s effective surge capacity need to be addressed in anticipation of another national health emergency and to secure national resilience in the face of medical uncertainty?
David Reed
The hon. Member raises a serious points, which I will come on to, on interconnectedness. We saw how covid-19 affected so many different parts of society—it closed down industry and the economy. We have to start to think about these things cross-departmentally.
The Government’s definition of national resilience is a society’s ability to anticipate, withstand, respond to and quickly recover from severe crises, whether natural disasters, pandemics, geopolitical shocks or deliberate attacks. It rests on a whole-of- society approach in which Government, business and the public work together to protect critical national infrastructure and maintain vital services.
Last year’s strategic defence review made precisely that point. One of its central recommendations was a national conversation on defence and resilience built on that whole-of-society approach and premised on a simple idea: that defending the nation is no longer the job of the armed forces alone. A year on, however, I think it is fair to say that that conversation has barely begun.
One critical central challenge, both to having that conversation with the British public and, more importantly, to making the preparations to be resilient, is that living memory of needing to be resilient in this country is fading. I often speak to my father about this. He was born in 1942 in Plymouth during the blitz. His generation is the last with a direct lived experience of national insecurity on home soil. The contrast is stark. To the young people I speak to about the risks we face, the idea that we might have to defend our homeland, our democracy and our way of life, remains abstract—something that happens to other people in other places.
We are in a more vulnerable position still, however, because beyond the fading of that memory, resilience is no longer woven into our national story. In Taiwan or Finland, the people I speak to have a geographical proximity to the threat, which they feel in their bones: the Chinese dragon across the strait and the Russian bear across the border. Those threats are real and they are close, and that is precisely why those countries do resilience well: their people and their institutions understand in their core the need to be strong. A quotation that has stayed with me since my Royal Marines training puts that well:
“You cannot dream yourself into a strong character: you must hammer and forge yourself into one.”
As a country, we must wake from that dream, and it is incumbent on the Government to have the hard conversation with the public about how we fund our national resilience.
Mark Sewards (Leeds South West and Morley) (Lab)
I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing this debate and making an excellent speech. Clearly, the UK faces malign threats from Russia, from China and especially from Iran, as recent examples have shown. I commend the Government for bringing forward the tackling state threats Bill—reportedly next Wednesday, but we will see the business statement tomorrow—that will allow us to deal with the threats, but the public do not necessarily know just how severe they are. Does he agree that, as well as dealing with the threats, we need to educate the public on just how threatening these state actors are and why we need to deal with them now?
David Reed
There must have been a leak, because I am going to come on to that paragraph straight away.
Beyond the issue of funding, the obvious question that flows from this is who in Government should take the lead in having that conversation with the public about the panoply of threats that we face. That leads to the central argument of this debate: is the British state structured to deal effectively with them? I accept that the machinery of government is a surefire way to send those in this Chamber to sleep, but it is central to the direction of travel we must take.
I was waiting with bated breath to see who the Government would send to respond to the debate this evening, because logic would dictate that the Minister responding should come from the Department that the Prime Minister has charged with leading the national conversation on resilience. Here lies the first problem. The Security Minister sits across both the Cabinet Office and the Home Office. His portfolio is broad, but it clearly does not cover anywhere near the full range of threats set out in the Government’s own definition of national resilience.
The Cabinet Office has a resilience directorate, which does important work co-ordinating civil contingency planning, crisis management and emergency response across national and local levels. I would not diminish the work that it does for a moment, but let us consider its design: a directorate for preparedness and a Cobra unit for crisis response. Risk and response. Notice what is missing. There is machinery to assess the threat and machinery to manage the emergency, but nowhere is anyone charged with turning to the public and saying, “Here is the threat we face, here is your part in it, and here is what is being done in your name.” The national conversation that we need therefore finds no natural home. It does not emanate from the directorates whose remit is risk and response; nor has the Ministry of Defence acted on the strategic defence review’s own call for a national conversation on defence and resilience.
The result is a system in which responsibility is spread so thinly that no single Minister owns the problem. The danger of that is not merely administrative tidiness but that when a crisis strikes, command and control will fracture at precisely the moment it must hold. For example, the Cyber Security and Resilience (Network and Information Systems) Bill—which hands the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology sweeping new powers to direct critical entities—illustrates the trend rather than reversing it. Individual Departments are accruing resilience powers of their own, with each cooking up policies to support their own patch. A whistle must be blown on this approach, because we risk spreading responsibility through legislation so thinly that no one truly understands where it lies.
When I speak to civil servants—all of whom want to see a stronger and safer country—I notice that the word “resilience” has itself become something of a buzzword, a phrase to attach to a business case to secure a bigger departmental budget. That is a sign of a system without a clear centre of gravity, not of one that is working. That led me to research in depth how our near neighbours have approached this problem—countries with national stories like our own and populations whose memories of insecurity have faded, just as ours have.
The clearest exemplar I found is Denmark. The Danes have grasped something that we have not yet acted upon: in an age of interconnected threats—where cyber-attacks become supply shocks become public-safety emergencies—danger no longer respects departmental boundaries. For decades they had run, as we still do, on a principle of sectoral responsibility—each Department minding risk in its own lane. They concluded that a system in which everyone is responsible is one in which, in practice, no one is.
In August 2024, the Danes acted, creating a dedicated ministry of resilience and preparedness, the first of its kind in the region, with a Cabinet Minister in charge. Within months, they established a resilience agency beneath it, drawing scattered functions into one organisation—one ministry, one Cabinet Minister, one clear line of accountability.
If truth be told, it is too early to say with certainty whether the model delivers the better outcomes that the Danes expect. The real test will come in the next crisis, not the last reorganisation. But the logic is sound because the alternative—broadly what we have—is a system where resilience is everyone’s second priority and nobody’s first. As someone who wants to see a smaller and sharper state, the answer is not a new layer of governance, but collapsing many duplicated ones into a single, accountable home. It is an idea that the Government should actively investigate.
I have also been struck by how our Danish and Dutch friends have begun to share the responsibility for resilience with their citizens, reinforcing civic duty in a far more deliberate way than we do here in the UK. Both have started speaking plainly to their people about preparedness and, strikingly, they tell them much the same thing: “Be ready to look after yourself for three days, or 72 hours.” The Dutch Government now tell every household to hold enough to manage for 72 hours in the event of war, a cyber-attack or a major disaster—things such as water, food, medication, a battery radio, some cash and key documents. They did not merely issue advice; they delivered a printed survival guide to every door and published it online in dozens of languages. Its message was carefully chosen, and the aim, Ministers said, is not to frighten people but to prepare them, because those who think through the first 72 hours of a crisis feel safer, not more fearful. The campaign’s slogan is simple: “Think Ahead”.
Denmark’s advice is almost identical, and the reasoning is the same: if ordinary people can get through the first three days, the authorities can concentrate on those who cannot. Denmark sent that guidance to every adult through its secure Government messaging system and placed 300,000 printed copies in libraries and public offices. It does not shy away from naming why, either. Its Defence Minister told Danes plainly that they and their allies face hybrid war and that each of us should prepare to be without power, water or shops for a short while. In both countries, the principle is the same: resilience is not something the state can simply hand to its people; it is a habit that the public must share in.
Adrian Ramsay (Waveney Valley) (Green)
I thank the hon. Member for bringing this debate and in particular for his focus on the need for cross-Government action and to address the range of threats we face. Does he agree that as part of the resilience planning, addressing the risks attached to climate breakdown and nature collapse are absolutely central? On his point about transparency, does he agree that the two suppressed reports from the Joint Intelligence Committee and from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs’ futures team need to be made available if the Government and Members across parties are to work clearly to address these issues and inform the public?
David Reed
The hon. Member raises an important point. For anyone who understands the science and sees the effects globally, climate change is happening, the planet is warming up, and we will all feel the effects of a heating planet. What that does to our critical national infrastructure, to businesses and how they operate, and to our energy systems will be profound, and it is something that I do not think we talk about enough. We talked about it a great deal a few years ago, but it sort of slid off the agenda. However, I also understand the challenges that the Government are facing at the moment: there are international threats, which seem to be conjoining, and climate change seems to be a further away problem. I understand the issues, and I hope the Minister can draw that subject in to show the interconnection of threats and how we will deal with them.
The uncomfortable part is that in terms of national messaging Britain has said and tried to do the same thing, but we say the words without a plan behind them, the public get alarmed, the moment passes, and nothing changes. Denmark and the Netherlands said those words and built them into the life of the nation, and that, in a sentence, is the difference between talking about resilience and doing it.
Let me close with three concrete asks of the Government. First, will the Minister confirm whether any Department or Minister has been formally charged with delivering the national conversation on resilience called for by the strategic defence review? If not, that gap must be filled—I think we would all agree on that. Secondly, will the Government commission a review, led from the centre, into whether the current dispersal of resilience responsibilities across Whitehall is fit for purpose, with the Danish and Dutch models considered explicitly? Thirdly, will the Government speak plainly to the British public about the threats we face, and back those words with a sustained public preparedness campaign, not a single statement that fades within a week, but a message built into the life of the nation?
I return to the statement that is made repeatedly in this House, which is that the first duty of any Government is the defence of the realm. Meeting that duty requires a state that is structured to lead, and a public who are prepared to follow. We are not yet that country, but I have faith we can be.
The Minister for Security (Dan Jarvis)
I begin by paying tribute to the hon. and gallant Member for Exmouth and Exeter East (David Reed) for his previous service, including in the special forces support group. I also thank him for bringing this vital matter to the House, as this debate is central to our national security and our duty to the public. He made a number of helpful and important points. I completely understand why he mentioned the importance of the national conversation, and he can expect to hear much more about that shortly. He was also right to draw a comparison with other countries, and I am proud that many of the UK’s resilience structures and capabilities serve as examples of best practice. For example, the National Situation Centre, established under the previous Government, is highly regarded internationally, and the UK Resilience Academy, which I visited just the other day, is an important part of the skills and engagement offer.
Liam Conlon (Beckenham and Penge) (Lab)
The Crystal Palace transmitting station in my constituency is such an iconic feature of our south London skyline that people often refer to it as Crystal Paris. It is also vital communications infrastructure. Will the Minister join me in recognising it not only for its everyday role in broadcasting television and radio to millions across our capital and beyond, but also for the contribution that such infrastructure makes to our national resilience in times of crisis and emergency, when trusted, reliable communications matter more than ever? Will he also join me in thanking the engineers, technicians, operators and all the staff who maintain and run that critical national infrastructure, often behind the scenes, ensuring that the public stay informed, connected and safe?
Dan Jarvis
I am happy to join my hon. Friend in paying tribute to the work done at the Crystal Palace transmitting station. As he knows better than I, it is an iconic feature of south London, so I am happy to take the opportunity to thank all those involved for their work ensuring that the public stay informed, connected and safe. While I am on that subject, let me also thank all those who work at Emley Moor in West Yorkshire who do similar work. I was privileged to meet them just the other day.
Let me return to the remarks by the hon. Member for Exmouth and Exeter East about international comparisons. There are many similarities with our international partners, but as he will acknowledge, each nation’s approach is influenced by its history, geography, and societal approach to resilience.
Building on the good work of the previous Government, we have set out our strategic vision on resilience. Take for example our work following the covid-19 inquiry: we considered the findings and made deliberate updates to our resilience plans, including strengthening our relationships with the devolved Governments through the four nations ministerial group.
As I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will also recognise, successive Governments have for more than 20 years anchored the national security risk assessment as the foundation of their approach to the complex resilience landscape. That landscape continues to evolve and the risks that we face today are volatile, varied and interconnected. They include cyber-attacks, threats to energy security, global supply chain pressures and, of course, armed conflict. I am pleased to be able to talk about the Government’s approach to those areas, but first let me say something in response to the hon. Gentleman about accountability.
Under the lead Department model, each risk is owned by a single Department, ensuring those with the relevant expertise are responsible for the work to keep us protected against that particular risk. To support that, the Government will publish a refreshed expectation set for lead Departments. That will clarify how they are expected to deliver their responsibilities, as well as the role of other Departments in supporting them.
The Government have also taken steps to clarify accountability and enhance our readiness for the highest impact whole-of-system crises. We have explicitly embedded the leadership role of the Cabinet Office in our central crisis management doctrine, the Amber Book, and we have strengthened governance on risk planning and mapped key cascading impacts of catastrophic risk to ensure a true whole-of-Government response, so if a catastrophe should happen, no Department can be in any doubt about its role.
Let us take a national power outage as an example. The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero remains the lead Department across the whole risk cycle, from assessment to recovery, and continues to lead on the Government’s relationship with the energy sector. The role of the Cabinet Office is to step in to help lead the response, given the significant cross-cutting impacts that a national power outage would bring. That central co-ordination function allows all responding Departments to respond to their impacted areas, with the Cabinet Office providing situational reporting of the whole-system impacts of the risk. That way, the Government collectively understands and is prepared for the risks that the UK faces.
The Cabinet Office also leads on the overall response to severe weather. This is underpinned by the severe weather resilience network, where crucial inputs from the Met Office, which I know the hon. Gentleman will be very familiar with, are shared with individual Departments that lead on the response planning and resilience of the sectors that they represent. That ensures that when the weather turns, our response is unified, rapid and robust.
Our work is not just about how we plan for responding to emergencies; we have informed our understanding of their impact as well. We know that emergencies impact people unequally, and to address that we have developed the risk vulnerability tool and provided further guidance to local resilience forums, so that they can better identify and support those who are most vulnerable.
The UK Government are proud to be a part of an international community in which we can both learn from others and share our learnings, but I would not want anyone listening to think that planning and response is all down to Departments. Local resilience forums are a critical part of our resilience system. In fact, the stronger LRF trailblazers programme moves beyond legacy structures to build a local network that is agile, accountable and capable of protecting citizens at the neighbourhood level. The resilience action plan envisages a whole-of-society approach, redefining national resilience as a shared mission where citizens, communities, civil society, businesses and the public sector all play a vital and active role.
Finally, building a truly resilient society requires a fundamental cultural shift in the way that emergency preparedness is thought about. That includes being clear about the risks that we face and the actions that we can all take to improve our collective resilience.
Adrian Ramsay
On the point about transparency, the Joint Intelligence Committee’s national security assessment was partially released in January—it was a redacted version—only after a freedom of information request from Green Alliance. That report highlighted that biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse are a threat to national security. What action is being taken following that report? In particular, when will the full version of the report be made available to Members of this House?
Dan Jarvis
I absolutely share the hon. Gentleman’s concerns. Let me give an undertaking to come back with the technical detail about the report that he has raised, but I hope he can be assured of the seriousness that the Government attach to such matters. All of us in this place, I hope, understand the nature of the climate crisis and the impact it is having now and will have in the future, and we in Government have an absolute responsibility to ensure that we are properly prepared for that.
The Government’s Prepare website provides guidance on the actions recommended for individuals, households and communities to increase their own preparedness and resilience. This debate highlights something fundamental: resilience is not an abstract policy objective, but, I hope, a shared national endeavour. The hon. Member for Exmouth and Exeter East has spoken powerfully about the importance of strengthening national resilience in the face of evolving risks. We share his determination, and I would be very happy to continue the conversation with him about these matters.
Let me give the hon. Member some further assurance. Next month, the Government will make their annual statement to Parliament on resilience, which will provide a detailed update on the progress we have been making to deliver against the commitments over the last 12 months or so. I hope that will go some way further to address the points that he has made, but, regardless, I give him and the House an assurance that we will continue to learn, adapt and build a robust future for the United Kingdom.
Question put and agreed to.