Ukraine: Defence Relationships

Lord Harris of Haringey Excerpts

Thursday 9th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Harris of Haringey (Lab)]

My Lords, the whole House is grateful—

[Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)]

My Lords, I respectfully remind noble Lords of the speaking limit. We are running very close to time anyway, and the Minister will not have very long if we do not all stick exactly to it. I apologise for interrupting the noble Lord.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Harris of Haringey (Lab)]

That is a slightly strange intervention, given that the noble Baroness, Lady Meyer, was well under time.

The whole House is grateful to my noble friend Lord Liddle for his, if I may say so, magisterial and wide-ranging introduction to this debate. I declare my interest as chair of the National Preparedness Commission, the aim of which is to improve the preparedness of the UK to reduce the risk of and mitigate the consequences of a major crisis or threat.

My noble friend and others referred to the integrated defence review, which now appears—with all due respect to those who say its tone was right—somewhat stale in the light of Russia’s actions in Ukraine. The Ukrainian resistance to a vile invasion has demonstrated what a well-led, resilient nation can do when faced with an existential threat. But how well prepared would this country be if faced with a similar attack, whether kinetic or hybrid? How resilient would our society be in responding to any other significant threat? We know from Covid how quickly what we would regard as the norms of society unravelled within a few weeks, with deserted town centres, lockdown, social distancing, mask wearing and so on. We are living in an increasingly volatile and uncertain world.

Eighteen months ago, the latest edition of the national risk register was published. It mapped 38 major risks facing the country, including environmental hazards, major accidents, malicious attacks—cyber-based and terrorist—risks arising overseas and, inevitably, animal and human diseases. Supply chain disruption and energy market instability are not mentioned; nor, since it pre-dated the invasion of Ukraine, is the threat of Russian retaliation by cyber or other means for the stance that the EU, NATO and, indeed, this country have taken.

That is why Chapter 4 of the integrated review, on building national and international resilience, was so important. It explicitly promised a “comprehensive national resilience strategy” based on a whole-of-society approach, involving individuals, businesses and organisations. This strategy has been expected for several months. Can the Minister tell us—this is the first of five specific questions I have for him—when it is likely to be published? I assume that it will address the three central questions of what we should prepare for, how much resilience is enough and how we finance the necessary investment.

A whole-of-society approach necessarily implies engagement with the whole of society. My second question for the Minister is: what plans do the Government have for this engagement? Specifically, how will the wider business community be informed, encouraged and incentivised to build its organisational resilience?

What about the general public? In 2018, the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency sent to every household in the country a revised version of its household preparedness guide If Crisis or War Comes. It asks the reader to consider what they would do if their normal everyday life was turned upside down. It cites climate change, external incidents and cyberattacks, but is essentially risk agnostic in the practical advice and information it provides. So my third question for the Minister is: do the Government plan such a publication here? If not, how do they envisage obtaining sufficient community engagement to deliver the necessary level of societal resilience to the threats we may face?

A familiar background to those broadcasts that we have all heard from Ukraine in the last few months has been the background sound of air raid sirens. I remember, as many noble Lords will, when air raid sirens were still placed on the top of large buildings in this country—as they had been in World War II. But that system was largely dismantled in the early 1990s. I am told that only about 1,200 remain and are used to warn the public in the event of floods in certain parts of the country. So, what is to replace them in the rest of the country?

In 2013, the Cabinet Office tested emergency alerts sent automatically to every mobile phone in designated areas. It is a technology that has been proven to save lives all over the world. Yet, nine years later, the technology has yet to be rolled out here. So, my fourth question for the Minister is: when will the promised cell broadcast technology—which incidentally is not the best technology to be using, but it is better than nothing—be available across the country and what advice is to be provided to the public on the actions they should take in response to an alert?

During Covid, communities had to come together to respond at local level. Councils and the emergency services worked with local community and voluntary organisations to support vulnerable people in the community. So my fifth question to the Minister is: how are those arrangements going to be sustained and built on as we go forward? This will involve increased funding and proper partnership. The lessons of the response by the Government and people of Ukraine demonstrate why whole-of-society resilience is so important. It is a wake-up call for us to look at our own arrangements. I hope that, when he winds up, the Minister will reassure us that this is central to the Government’s thinking, and that the fine words in chapter 4 of the integrated review will be turned into meaningful action.