Home Secretary: Allegations of Bullying

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Monday 2nd November 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, the Government take bullying very seriously. In 2018, the Civil Service undertook a review of the arrangements for tackling harassment and misconduct within the service. The Ministerial Code is clear that

“harassing, bullying or other inappropriate or discriminating behaviour is not consistent with the Ministerial Code and will not be tolerated.”

That is the position of the Government.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, no wonder trust in the Government is plummeting. In 2019, the Prime Minister updated the Ministerial Code and in the foreword he wrote:

“There must be no bullying and no harassment. The precious principles of public life enshrined in this document—integrity, objectivity, accountability, transparency, honesty and leadership in the public interest—must be honoured at all times.”


There are no qualifications; there should be transparency at all times. Those are his own words. Can the Minister explain in this case how those precious principles can be honoured in the absence of the publication of this report?

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, I refer again to what the Cabinet Secretary said about the process. On bullying, I underline again what I said earlier. The Civil Service helps those who wish to make complaints. In 2019, we ran a cross-departmental “speak up” campaign to encourage individuals to come forward and report poor behaviours. A further campaign is proposed for this year.

Economy

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Monday 28th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

My Lords, I agree with the noble Lord that there needs to be integration. The overriding priority is to crank up the economy again; that is why we have created a group in Downing Street called Project Speed, which is designed to take hold of any opportunity that is being blocked in any way, to shake it and make it happen quicker. I remain optimistic, as I said in response to an earlier question, that we will resolve our difficulties with the European Union and will have some form of workable deal by the end of the year.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, in the other place, the Chancellor was asked four times about help for the 3 million working UK taxpayers who, until now, have had no access to any of the Government’s Covid-19 support packages. Four times he ducked the question. So, in the words of my honourable friend Gerald Jones, I now offer the Minister the opportunity to correct that repeated omission. What assurances can he offer that the measures announced in this Statement, and any ongoing policy, will not continue to exclude them?

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

My Lords, while there might not be individual schemes available for the group of people that the noble Lord talks about, we have made wider funding available through the uprating of universal credit and additional grants to local authorities. I am very aware that there are people in difficulty but we believe that the wider social security safety net is there to support them.

Intelligence and Security Committee: Russia Report

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord True]

My Lords, the noble Lord asked a number of questions there, which no doubt we can return to. On the first point, I do not accept that there is a catastrophic failure, as he puts it. In 2017, the Government implemented the Russia strategy and established the cross-government Russia unit, which brings together diplomatic, intelligence and military capabilities to maximum effect. So far as foreign resources are concerned, illicit money is not welcome in this country.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, it is no wonder that trust in this Government and the Prime Minister is in decline. On 9 July, the Minister claimed that the Government

“always take proactive action to defend our democracy”—[Official Report, 9/7/20; col. 1213.]

against the threat of Kremlin interference. This report, its blocking and the predictable rejection of justified calls for an inquiry into interference in the EU referendum and the 2017 election show his assurance to have been worthless. My noble friend Lord Foulkes high- lighted the most important of the report’s several recommendations, but the Minister did not fully address his question. I respectfully ask if he can confirm which of the recommendations the Government will implement.

[Lord True]

My Lords, the Government have given a very full response to the inquiry. In the short time available, I cannot add further to the details of that response. As for the noble Lord’s question, it is the work of the intelligence and security agencies to assess any new evidence as it emerges; that is a continuing process. Given this long-standing approach, it is not necessary to hold a specific retrospective inquiry. If there were evidence available to be found, it would emerge through our existing processes.

Intelligence and Security Committee: Russia Report

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Thursday 9th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord True]

My Lords, the noble Lord’s statement was certainly not Panglossian, but it was very wide of the mark. An announcement on membership will be made very shortly, and a Motion will be tabled for agreement by both Houses next week. The noble Lord’s wild charges against the Prime Minister are wholly unfounded.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, it is widely known that Russia interfered in the Brexit campaign, with targeted influence operations and disinformation campaigns, and it continues to interfere, presently around Covid-19. The continued obstruction of the publication of the Russia report reinforces the reasons for an already catastrophic decline of trust in this Government, enables the continued undermining of democratic debate and damages the credibility of the ISC and the integrity of our democracy. How can this be justified?

[Lord True]

My Lords, again, I reject the charge of delay or conspiracy of any kind, but I do agree most strongly with what the noble Lord, with his great experience, has said. We know that disinformation is a common tactic used by the Kremlin, and we always take proactive action to defend our democracy. The Government are engaging with international partners, industry and civil society to tackle this threat.

Covid-19: Scientific Advice

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Wednesday 17th June 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord True [V]]

My Lords, it is important to remind the House that at the time of the meeting on 11 February there were only eight confirmed cases in the United Kingdom. The Government have always been guided by the best scientific advice. At every stage, scientists have sought to give us the best information about what was a very novel infection—it still is. Ministers and officials tried to take the right decisions in the public interest. We will come out of this best by holding to the sense of national interest and resolve with which we went into it and holding any inquests when the pandemic is beaten.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, despite saying in January that diagnosis capacity was good, by 11 February SAGE said that it was not and—erroneously, as it turned out—that it would not be possible for the UK to accelerate coronavirus testing alongside regular flu testing. Rather than focusing on how to boost it, it asked PHE and SPI-M to develop criteria for when contact tracing is no longer worthwhile and for when it could be stopped. Were the criteria developed and approved by Ministers before contact tracing was stopped, and why were the Government so slow to reverse that flawed decision?

[Lord True [V]]

My Lords, I could not catch all the details of the noble Lord’s question. I apologise on the record to him for not answering fully a previous question he asked. If he does not mind, I will write to him on the subject. I remind the House, having caught enough of his question, that this was an evolving crisis and the Government have done a great deal to procure and deliver testing—now over 200,000 a day—and provide places in hospital beds.

National Risk Register

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Thursday 4th June 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, human disease pandemics are a registered risk. Since 2018, the Government have had a national Biological Security Strategy, which mentions human disease pandemics in its very first sentence. If the Minister has had an opportunity to read this strategy, he will know that its implementation is dependent on the work of the threats, hazards, resilience and contingency sub-committee of the National Security Council. Two years on, this ministerial sub-committee of the NSC does not exist, and it never has. In the absence of this committee, how has the strategy been implemented?

[Lord True]

My Lords, I am not commenting on the meetings of particular Cabinet committees. The noble Lord, who has a distinguished record in this area, needs to understand that very substantial planning was and is in place for dealing with pandemics. However, the public realise that Covid-19 is a novel virus that has presented different challenges. I am impressed by the remarkable resilience shown by so many people in this country, and by so many authorities, in responding to it.

Interserve

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Wednesday 20th March 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham]

On the first point raised by the noble Lord, it is important to understand that what happened to Interserve was totally different from what happened to Carillion, for example. Carillion went bust. Pensioners took a hit. Creditors took a hit. People lost their jobs and there was discontinuity in services. None of that happened with Interserve. It was done with the approval of the pension trustees and the lenders, who wrote off the debt and put £100 million in. There was no discontinuity in services and nobody lost their job. That is important to understand.

The noble Lord asked whether we would have a general review. I announced that we have learned from past lessons; the document to which I just referred has 11 key policy areas in which we can come to better decisions and create a healthier outsourcing market.

The noble Lord is right that Interserve has a general portfolio—it protects the pandas in Edinburgh Zoo. The issue of probation services goes far wider than Interserve, as the noble Lord will know; the MoJ has announced a review of community rehabilitation services, with a view to improving outcomes and better integrating public sector, private sector and third sector providers.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, the annual revenues of Interserve were £2.9 billion, two-thirds of which it got from the public sector. The debt holders got this business for approximately £600 million, and will undoubtedly sell off its profitable parts for more than they were owed. However, the unsecured creditors have been left fighting over £600,000. Were the Government part of that deal? How much was owed to these creditors? Why do the Government think that that amount of money is safe? These people will lose lots of money and many of them are small or medium-sized businesses.

[Lord Young of Cookham]

There is no reason why trade creditors of Interserve should lose any money. The hit was taken by the shareholders and the lenders who wrote off their debt and converted it into equity. The subsidiary companies providing goods and services to the public and private sectors are wholly unaffected by what has happened to the parent company, which has simply changed ownership. The creditors of the subsidiary companies are in exactly the same position as they were before the transaction over the weekend.

Government Policy: Plain English

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Wednesday 19th December 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham]

Like the noble Baroness, I too follow the progress of the Plain English Campaign. A winner this year was an NHS trust, the George Eliot Hospital, which was commended for its publications. So far as advice to government Ministers is concerned, the Government Digital Service runs workshops to help Ministers and civil servants to write clearly. It has had workshops with the DWP and Public Health England, and its content team maintains the content of the most trafficked content. It encourages everybody to avoid jargon but my brief tells me that content on websites should “be updated to improve the end-to-end user journey”.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, on any reasonable measure, all three services of the UK’s Armed Forces are smaller now than when the Government took responsibility for them. The Navy has fewer vessels than it had in 2003 and the Government have no intention of building more than there were in 2003. However, yesterday, in an otherwise pretty vacuous Statement, the Secretary of State for Defence said to the other place:

“The Royal Navy has increased its mass and points of presence around the world”.—[Official Report, Commons, 18/12/18; col. 657.]


Talking about clarity, what does that mean?

[Lord Young of Cookham]

Like the noble Lord, I read Patrick Kidd’s article in the Times today that took my right honourable friend to task for some of the verbs and phrases he used in the Statement. My right honourable friend may well be a contender next year for the Plain English Campaign’s Golden Bull Award, which this year was won by a sports commentator who said:

“He’s given the referee no choice but to consider his options”.

Cyber Threats

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Thursday 18th October 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, I draw your Lordships’ attention to my entry in the register of interests, particularly my association with and employment by the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a US-based think tank. I congratulate the noble Viscount, Lord Waverley, on securing this debate and commend him for corralling this massive topic into a 15-minute speech. I congratulate him also on the breadth of the Motion before your Lordships’ House. I am particularly pleased because it allows me to return specifically to a topic that is a minor obsession of mine: the scale and complexity of the cyber threat to major weapons systems, including our nuclear deterrent.

The first step in solving any problem is admitting there is one. That, of course, picks up the theme that a number of noble Lords have referred to. The value of this debate is in raising awareness, and I hope to raise awareness of some threats. It will be difficult for us to engage with them, but I have some ideas about that as well.

Although I have been aware of this threat for some time, I first tentatively raised the issue publicly in January 2013 following the report of the Defense Science Board of the US Department of Defense, Resilient Military Systems and the Advanced Cyber Threat. The top line of that report is, in short:

“The United States cannot be confident that our critical Information Technology (IT) systems will work under attack from … a ‘full spectrum’ adversary”.


Critical IT systems in this context include nuclear weapons systems, and the board knew that cyber was a threat to this, because it had red-teamed it in the United States. The task force went on to say that its lack of confidence applied also to the weapons systems of allies and rivals. The UK is, of course, an ally of the United States, and so that sparked my attention.

In addressing this issue, I have always been measured in my comments, mindful of my noble friend Lord West’s concern that people can get into scaremongering in this environment. But these are existential threats, and there is nothing scarier in my view. Drawing on the specific recommendations of the report, I reminded the then Ministers that they had an obligation to assure us that all parts of the nuclear deterrent had been assessed against the risk of cyberattack and that protections were in place. I explained that, if they were unable to do that, there was no guarantee that we would, in the future, have a reliable deterrent. Quite simply, a deterrent works on the basis that it is a live threat; if a rival knows that they can defeat the deterrent or prevent it being deployed, it does not work.

In 2015, in the run-up to the Trident debate, I repeated this request in the hope that cybersecurity would emerge as part of the debate on our commitment for the next 50 years, apparently, to a deterrent-based approach to nuclear weapons. The response to my reference to a 146-page report of recommendations and appendices was depressingly familiar and platitudinous. I was told publicly that Trident was safe because it was “air-gapped”. The argument appears to be that, because these weapons are deployed in submarines under the water, they cannot be threatened by cyber. This is a complete misunderstanding of the cyber threat and a misrepresentation of the facts. Most of these boats are not at sea all the time: they are hooked up to other systems for a significant period and spend three months or slightly more at sea. But that is what I was told.

In the reporting of my comments by the BBC, a Ministry of Defence spokesperson, while understandably refusing to comment on the details of security for the nuclear deterrent, assured the country that,

“we can and will safeguard it from any cyber threat”.

I know of no expert who would ever give such a comprehensive assurance about anything, but that is what was publicly stated. The spokesperson went on to say:

“We are investing more than ever before on the UK’s defensive and offensive cyber capabilities. Last week the Chancellor outlined a plan for £1.9bn in cyber investment”.


So, essentially, “Move on, there is nothing to see here”.

Thankfully, that is not the US attitude to this. The United States is a much more open society than we are in relation to these issues. I know that is to do with its constitution and the accountability of the Administration to Congress, but the irony of my interest in this is that I can find out much more about these issues in publications in the United States than I can here. That is not proper accountability, but that is an argument for another day.

The Defense Science Board task force on cyber continued its work and produced a final report in December 2017. I do not have time today, even with the 12 minutes that I have, to go into it in any detail but, four years on, the report continues to challenge UK complacency, concluding that Russia and China had significant and increasing ability to hold US critical infrastructure at risk and growing capability through cyber-attack to thwart military response—in other words, to defeat deterrence.

In July 2015, the other place debated the renewal of Trident, but cybersecurity was virtually absent from the debate. Since then, in updates to Parliament by the Government on the renewal programme, no mention has ever been made of cybersecurity and it has never been fully debated in Parliament or even engaged the Defence Select Committee’s attention. I cannot find any statement by a member of the Cabinet on this issue and, shamefully, Parliament has also been broadly silent on this issue.

External reports continue to be published identifying this and they are always met with the same bland assurances and comments. For example, in 2018 Chatham House published a report, Cybersecurity of Nuclear Weapons Systems: Threats Vulnerabilities and Consequences. Again, the Ministry of Defence response came in the form of a statement from an anonymous spokesperson. Apparently, the MoD has,

“absolute confidence in our robust measures to keep the nuclear deterrent safe and secure”,

invests significant resources into regularly assuring its protection against cyberattacks and other threats, and again we were reminded that the UK,

“takes cyber security very seriously across the board, doubling its investment in the area to £1.9bn”.

In every case where this £1.9 billion is quoted, it is never said by any of the anonymous spokespersons that this money was committed in 2015 for five years of cybersecurity for every aspect of government. I am assured by experts with whom I worked closely during my time in the United States that is an inadequate amount of investment given the scale of the challenge to our weapons systems.

Until April last year, for three years I lived and worked for the NTI in the US. There I found in government, Congress and the expert community more awareness of the threat to our military systems than here in the UK. In the US, NTI brought together high-level former senior military and government officials, policy experts and cybersecurity experts to form a cyber nuclear weapons study group. I co-chaired this group with former Senator Sam Nunn and former Secretary Ernest Moniz. The group examined the implications of cyber threats to nuclear weapons and related systems and developed a set of options for policies, postures and doctrines that will reduce this risk.

The NTI study group report was published last month. The ink was not long dry on it when, on 9 October, the Government Accountability Office of the US published the report, Weapon System Cybersecurity: DOD Just Beginning to Grapple with Scale of Vulnerabilities. Believe it or not, this report was prepared in response to a request from the Senate Armed Services Committee ahead of plans to spend $1.66 trillion to develop its current weapons systems.

The report concludes that the department,

“likely has an entire generation of systems that were designed and built without adequately considering cybersecurity”.

Specifically, the report states that,

“from 2012 to 2017, DOD testers routinely found mission-critical cyber vulnerabilities in nearly all weapon systems that were under development. Using relatively simple tools and techniques, testers were able to take control of these systems and largely operate undetected”.

They were able to guess a password on a weapons system in nine seconds, access weapon systems where open source or commercial software had been installed and the installer failed to change the default passwords, partially shut down a weapons system simply by scanning it—a technique so basic that it apparently “requires little knowledge or expertise”—and take control of some weapons. In one case, a two-person team took just one hour to gain initial access to a weapon system and one day to gain full control of the system. They could also access and stay in a weapons system for weeks, during which time the DoD never found them despite the testers being intentionally “noisy”. In other cases, automated systems detected the testers, but the humans responsible for monitoring those systems did not understand what the system was trying to tell them.

The GAO estimates that the vulnerabilities the DoD knows about likely comprise a small proportion of the risks in their systems. The tests leave out whole categories of potential problem areas such as industrial control systems, devices that do not connect to the internet and counterfeit parts. This unclassified report is about a classified matter and consequently refers to various systems without identifying them. I will come back to that important point in a moment.

Further, the report underscores a troubling disconnect between how vulnerable DoD weapons systems are and how secure DoD officials believe they are. This echoes what I am told in the United Kingdom. The officials who oversee the systems appear dismissive of the results, not understanding that when they dismiss these results, they are dismissing testing from their own department. The GAO did not conduct any tests; it audited the assessments of DoD testing teams. In some cases, officials indicated that their systems were secure, including systems that had not had a cybersecurity assessment.

In its findings, the GAO describes the DoD as only “beginning to grapple” with the importance of cybersecurity and the scale of vulnerabilities in its weapons systems. Public reporting of this report describes this as a “wake-up call” for the DoD. It should be a wake-up call for us too. We have almost certainly bought and deployed some of these weapons systems. We have certainly bought and installed in our weapons systems software programmes, the testing of which has informed this report.

Essentially, I have two questions for the Government. When are we going to have a proper debate, in government time, on the cyber threat to and cybersecurity of our weapons systems, including the deterrent? Now that this GAO report has been published, what steps are the Government taking to follow up on the implications of this report for our military capabilities with the US Government and the DoD in particular?

Nuclear War: International Conference

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Wednesday 6th November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

As regards attendance at a conference that is still four months away, British officials have had conversations in Mexico City, Geneva and New York about whether we may attend. It remains very much an open question. Perhaps I may simply say to the noble Baroness that there are a great many different, and in some ways conflicting, bodies in which disarmament is now being discussed. These include the Nuclear Security Summit which will meet again in 2014, the UN Disarmament Commission and the Conference on Disarmament. There have also been a number of discussions on nuclear-weapon-free zones. The question of where one puts the priority and where you think it is most worthwhile to push for development is difficult We hold that the NPT review conference of 2015 should remain one of our priorities. We also think that there is value in the P5 process, on which Britain has been one of the leaders, and in the P5-plus process in which the P5 members discuss these issues with India and Pakistan.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, do the Government agree with the principal conclusion of the Oslo conference that no state and no international organisation has the capability to address the consequences of the explosion of a nuclear weapon and, much more worryingly, the view supported by experts that it might not be possible to develop such capacities? I hope that the Government disagree. If they do, where is the evidence that we have such capabilities?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the valuable contribution that the Norwegians and others have been making on this whole question of the humanitarian and, incidentally, climatic consequences of the explosion of a nuclear weapon are very much something that the UK Government are taking seriously. We see this as a very useful expert contribution. Looking at how, if there were to be—heaven forfend—a nuclear explosion, we would cope as an international community with the consequences, is something that is very valuable to take forward.