Beyond Digital (COVID-19 Committee Report)

Lord Alderdice Excerpts

Wednesday 6th September 2023 Grand Committee

[Lord Alderdice (LD)]

My Lords, it was a privilege to participate as a member of the Covid-19 Committee of your Lordships’ House under the chairmanship of the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox. I want to thank her, as I thank the clerks and advisers to the committee, and indeed all the witnesses, who sent in witness statements or appeared in front of the committee. A huge amount of work was undertaken. This is one of the reports that was produced—there are others—so I want to stick to the subject of this report and not speak to the others. I hope we will get a chance to address them subsequently.

I declare my interest as the executive chairman of the Changing Character of War Centre at Pembroke College, Oxford, because specific issues arise later in what I have to say.

Things moved very quickly, right from the very beginning. It has been said that in your Lordships’ House we moved very quickly. The very first evidence that I had of that was at the end of the debate, which noble Lords may recall, on the massive Bill that we put through the House very quickly. I had spoken on the Bill, and I went to the clerks afterwards and said, “How quickly will we be able to get Her Majesty’s approval?”—she was still with us at that time. “Oh”, he said, “in less than half an hour”. I said, “Oh my goodness. How are you going to get it out to Windsor and back?” because we all knew that that was where she was. “Ah”, they said. “Her Majesty has agreed to do it digitally”. How many years of negotiations that might have taken but for Covid and the creativity and imagination of Her Majesty?

Things changed, and they did so dramatically and quickly. However, the job of the committee was not to look at what was changing specifically at that time, nor was it to look at the problems and challenges of dealing with Covid at that time. Other committees were looking at that. Our job was to look at the future as best we could and to try to say, “What will things be like perhaps in two to five years’ time?” The noble Baroness, our chair, kept saying this to the witnesses as they came, but it was extremely difficult to find witnesses who would speak to the future. People were so preoccupied with the problems of dealing with Covid in the here and now that it was very difficult for them to look to the future. That was a constant struggle that we had.

There is no question that prediction is very difficult, particularly when it is about the future. That is what Niels Bohr said. Your Lordships will remember that he was a Nobel Prize winner in physics. He was doing a question and answer session in Copenhagen. He had been laying out the fundamental nature of quantum physics for the public—I reassure noble Lords that I do not intend to do that—and talking about Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which basically says that you cannot predict where a particle will be at a specific place and time, and vice versa. The question that triggered the answer was: “What influence do you predict quantum physics will have on the world in the future?” He said, somewhat tongue in cheek, given the prominence of the principle he was talking about:

“It is exceedingly difficult to make predictions, particularly about the future”.


It is not just the future that is difficult. There is some argument as to whether Niels Bohr was the first person to say that. Some people say it was the American baseball player Yogi Berra; others say, “No, it was a Danish poet”; and some have insisted that it was actually Mark Twain who came up with it. It is difficult to predict the future; it is not even easy to know what has happened in the past. Both these things apply when we think about the challenges that we had with Covid.

The other problem is that if we cannot predict the future, how can we try to deal with it? I think the answer is that we can plan for the future and we can try to protect ourselves from the future, even when we cannot predict exactly what it will be like. But here is where the problem arose in Covid. We had reports, we had plans, we had those who had set out the possibility that there would be such a thing, but the plans were not implemented. When it came to PPE, it was not that nobody reckoned we might have a pandemic—people knew there would be a pandemic at some point, but everybody hoped it would not be on their watch—but it was very costly to provide PPE and it did not last for ever. One of the questions I have for the Minister is not just how we can plan for problems that arise, but how we can make sure that those plans are actually implemented. There are all sorts of ways in which this is an issue, and I will come back to some of them.

One thing that has been said is that internet access is now a public utility. It is an absolute requirement. On page 15, we actually say that there ought to be

“a legal right to internet access”,

as has been referred to by a number of previous speakers. In a sense, it is now like water and electricity: you really cannot function without it. Perhaps the Minister will say a little about what the Government have done and what they plan to do, because of course we always plan to have everything done marvellously and in no time at all, but let us try to be as realistic as we can.

Hybrid is what we describe, not just digital. It is not just a question of moving everything over to digital, and there are a whole bunch of reasons for that. I was talking to a young general practitioner of my acquaintance not very long ago and he was complaining about the way things are going. I know that the BMA has been talking about how many GPs want digital, but he said, “I did not go into medicine to work in a call centre. I went into medicine to work with people”. That is extremely important, and I speak as a doctor and psychiatrist. It is crucial to be able to have the relationship directly with people and for them to be there.

There is a certain amount that it is possible to do on the internet, but there are other things that you cannot do. My eldest son started a relationship with a young woman in São Paulo, and I said, “How are you going to make out with that? You don’t have the money to go backwards and forwards”. He said, “We’ll be on Skype every day”, and they were. Then they got married, and a while after I said, “Wasn’t it great that you were able to go on Skype?” and he said, “Yes, Dad, but there are some things you just can’t do on Skype”. The reality is that digital—Zoom, Teams, WhatsApp and all these things—is wonderful, but there are some important things about human relationships that you cannot do in that way. As a doctor, there are certain things it is much more difficult to do, such as making diagnoses. It is a lot easier when a person walks into the room with a limp than when they are already sitting down in front of the camera. It is hybrid we are looking to, not just digital. That hybrid may be different for different people—not just for the professionals I have already mentioned, but the patients. Some will prefer digital, but some people find it not just difficult but not to their taste or preference.

That business of working directly also helps to protect us when things run into problems digitally. When we wrote and published this report, there had not yet been an open Russia-Ukraine war—at least not one recognised as such. I mentioned the work of the Changing Character of War Centre. One of our reports looked at the vulnerability of our digital systems to attack. In 2017, there was an attack, probably from North Korea, called WannaCry, which had a huge impact on the NHS. One reason it had that impact was that the Microsoft software used by the overwhelming majority of NHS trusts was no longer supported by Microsoft. Everybody knew it, but they had not transferred to a system that was still supported. Tens of thousands of NHS appointments were missed. It was resolved by a young security researcher in rural Devonshire, who very quickly came up with a solution, but in the meantime a huge number of computers had been infected. It was a really serious problem.

We are now in a situation where it is not just North Korea. Thousands of people are working under the Governments of countries such as Russia and China, as well as North Korea and others, doing nothing but working out how to damage our resilience. I would like the Minister not to spell out exactly what the Government are doing—that would not be wise—but to give some reassurance that they are seriously addressing this. We are in a war, however we characterise or address it. It is a serious one and will go on for a long time. It might go on for longer than some of us are around. All sorts of things will be done.

This is an additional problem, not a replacement. In November 2021, one of the Members in the other place said that he was unhappy about cutting back on defence spending. Boris Johnson said, “Oh, no need to worry about that. Tanks and landmass wars in Europe are a thing of the past. It’s not going to happen at all”. That was about three months before the invasion of Ukraine. He said, “It’ll all be cyber and all that kind of stuff”. He was right that cyber has played a part, but the problem with war is that you do not give up the old ways of doing war, you simply add new ones. I want some reassurance from the Government that, in doing what is recommended by this report, which is grabbing hold of the challenges and opportunities of digital, we maintain hybrid—that is, understanding that we also have to address the old ways of working with things.

These are difficult and dangerous times. We have to learn. We do not have the resources that we would like to have to deal with these things, but all of us would like some reassurance that the Government not only understand but grasp that and can give a degree of confidence that they are dealing with it.