Telecommunications (Security) Bill

Debate between Earl of Erroll and Baroness Stroud

Committee stage
Thursday 15th July 2021 Grand Committee

[The Earl of Erroll (CB)]

My Lords, this point is very important and has been put across very well by the noble Baroness, Lady Merron. Network diversification will increase resilience and security for various very obvious reasons. The main thing is not just the supply chain. How the internet works is that messages are split over a whole lot of different routers going all over the place. Two things happen. First, because it is split up, if they are all going across different vendors, it is impossible to intercept the entirety of the messages. If it is all over one vendor and there is a clever way of monitoring that, it might be possible to put it together. Funnily enough, if you have lots of vendors, it does not matter whether Huawei is in there or not, and you will end up with flaws.

Also, the resilience of the internet is such that if you knock out a good chunk of the routers, it will still work and automatically route around the ones that have not been knocked out. If they are all from one vendor and all have the same flaw in them at some point, whether they are friendly vendors or not, you can take the whole lot out at once. The very fact that you have a good mixture gives you greater resilience and security. Everyone seems to think that it still runs over a copper wire from one end to the other, but it does not. The IP world is very different from that. That is the main thing.

Amendment 20 is also about long-term strategy. My noble and gallant friend Lord Stirrup is right about all these things. Although the amendments are not in this group, I might as well say now, rather than waste the Committee’s time later, that this lies with the principle of Amendments 18 and 25, that we need the right advisers, who can then advise on the issues that we are now discussing in Amendment 24. It all hangs together. We should not be chopping this up and structuring the Bill in a way that makes us vulnerable.

We may think that we have got the right people in, but we have clearly failed to do all this so far. This is the place to rectify our blindness. From the Minister’s comment, I think that the major change is the diversification and proliferation of civil service departments that are involved in security. That really does reduce our security. The lack of coherence will cause confusion like nobody’s business and will be very expensive.

[Baroness Stroud (Con)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 24, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Merron, which adds a new clause to the Bill that would tackle the pressing issue of network diversification.

As we have heard, the amendment places a duty on the Secretary of State to produce an annual report to Parliament on the progress that has been made in diversifying suppliers for our critical infrastructure in our telecommunications networks and services. The report would then be debated in the other place, ensuring that there is sufficient parliamentary oversight of the successes, challenges and opportunities of our diversification strategy. As I think about it, I am not sure why the Government would not want to commit to such an undertaking. As we have already heard this afternoon, the diversification of our telecoms networks needs to be a priority for this Government and an integral part of Ofcom’s reporting on the progress of these networks.

However, it is important to note that we have a Government who understand the seriousness of this issue. Indeed, the Secretary of State told the other place on 30 November 2020:

“We must never find ourselves in this position again. Over the last few decades, countless countries across the world have become over-reliant on too few vendors”.—[Official Report, Commons, 30/11/20; col. 75.]


This should never have been allowed to happen, and as I have mentioned, I fear that without the adequate parliamentary oversight that this amendment could give us, it is at risk of happening again.

Despite the reassuring statements from the Foreign Secretary, as highlighted in Tuesday’s Committee by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, we have seen new vendors come to market that are also high risk. The noble Lord said:

“Last week, we learned that, in a deal estimated to be worth £63 million … the UK’s largest producer of semiconductors … has been acquired by the Chinese-owned manufacturer Nexperia. Nexperia is a Dutch firm but is owned by China’s Wingtech.”—[Official Report, Lords, 13/7/21; col. GC 461.]


On Wednesday, this led to the Prime Minister expressing concern after the Business Secretary had said that the Government were monitoring the situation closely but did not consider it appropriate to intervene at the current time.

This new challenge is set against the backdrop of the noble Lord, Lord Grimstone, who is at the Department for International Trade, telling the House that he wants to deepen trading relations and trade deals with China, and of China having just overtaken Germany to become the UK’s biggest single import market for the first time since records began. Goods imported from China rose 66% from the start of 2018 to nearly £17 billion in the first quarter of this year.