Preparing for Extreme Risks (RARPC Report)

Lord Rees of Ludlow Excerpts

Thursday 12th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rees of Ludlow (CB)]

My Lords, I add my tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, for his benign and effective chairmanship of this special inquiry, which illuminated crucial issues that are still underdiscussed. Indeed, we are still in denial about a whole raft of newly emergent mega-threats, which will be the focus of my remarks.

We are increasingly reliant on vulnerable globe-spanning networks for food supply and manufacturing, and novel viruses more virulent than Covid-19, perhaps even artificially engineered, could emerge at any time and spread with devastating speed. Our interconnected society is ever more vulnerable to other scenarios—massive cyberattacks, cascading failures of crucial infrastructure, or even accidental nuclear war—whose likelihood and impacts are rising year by year. Covid-19 must be a wake-up call, reminding us that we are vulnerable. Such worries cannot now be dismissed as flaky doom-mongering.

What does it take to enhance the UK’s preparedness for future threats? The first need is better joined-up government. Covid was primarily a medical catastrophe, but it cascaded into other sectors, including schools and, through its impact on supply chains, manufacturing. We have learned lessons about the trade-off between efficiency and resilience. For instance, there need to be firmer guidelines about who—regionally as well as centrally—has authority in emergencies.

Secondly, we need to optimise the use of limited resources in preparing precautionary measures. For that, we need a more rigorous assessment of what scenarios are most probable. As has been said, the published risk register has hitherto been inadequate. There is little input from external experts and too much secrecy, and no pandemic other than flu was rated a major threat. Moreover, the quoted likelihoods pertain to the next two years, but that is not enough when the threats may be rising year on year, as they surely are for engineered pandemics and massive cyberattacks. We need to plan maybe 20 years ahead.

As we have heard, the Government’s recently announced national resilience framework is welcome. It proposes a new institutional architecture to raise the profile of resilience within government and Parliament, with, as we recommended, a head of resilience equal in rank to the National Security Adviser; an annual parliamentary statement on resilience; a new national resilience academy to train up a new generation of risk-management professionals across relevant sectors; and a national exercising programme, embracing both military-style and virtual reality exercises to test our resilience to a range of risks. This measure was, incidentally, forcefully advocated by the two former Defence Secretaries we were lucky to have on our committee.

The credibility, acumen and perseverance of the first person appointed as head of resilience will be a crucial determinant of where the scheme as a whole ends up by fostering practical and effective action of the kind that our committee recommends. Also crucial is whether the Chancellor signs up to spending whatever sums of money—probably quite modest—are needed to implement the framework’s proposals. Given these prerequisites, we would be on the verge of making real progress.

However, cross-party consensus on the institutional framework is essential if we are to properly address measures that stretch far beyond the timescales of a single Administration. A good start, already signalled by the shadow Paymaster-General, would be a manifesto commitment to nominate a Cabinet-level Minister with full-time responsibility for resilience. Moreover, the Opposition could add a series of substantive points not fully covered in the framework—in particular, establishing a statutory, independent resilience institute on the model of the Climate Change Committee or the Office for Budget Responsibility that can report to Parliament on the reality or unreality of the claims for resilience being made by relevant Ministers. That again was recommended by our committee. The UK should lead campaigning for the international co-operation that is needed to minimise the extreme threats, which are global—as most are.

If the Government vigorously implement their new framework, and the Opposition push more vigorously in these directions, then our democracy will be working as it should to protect society from catastrophe.

Cross-government Cost-cutting

Lord Rees of Ludlow Excerpts

Wednesday 21st December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rees of Ludlow (CB)]

My Lords, I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Bird, for instigating this debate and for his fine opening speech, and above all for his lifelong campaign to promote a fairer society.

We should welcome some savings—for instance, tightening of terms of procurement contracts and cutting the number of consultants—but most cuts are far too drastic to be absorbed by efficiency savings. Indeed, they add to costs. The gross inequalities in our society and the poverty and insecurity suffered by the sick, the old and the low paid have of course been aggravated by two events beyond our Government’s control: the Covid pandemic and the fallout from Ukraine. But the impact has been worsened by the Government’s policies; in particular, their reluctance to raise taxes.

We have learned from recent crises that there is a trade-off between efficiency and resilience. I have two examples: first, dependence on long supply chains, allied with just-in-time delivery, can be a false economy if large-scale manufacturing is jeopardised when one link in the chain breaks; and, secondly, although it may be efficient to have 95% utilisation of intensive care beds in hospital, it is prudent to bear the cost of spare capacity to cope with emergencies. It is unrealistic to claim that crises in our schools and hospitals can be solved by efficiency savings alone. These institutions are forced to pinch and scrape to make savings, which can lead to reduced efficiency because of decaying infrastructure, outdated IT, falls in staffing and staff morale, and so on. Our expenditure and outcomes have fallen below those of other advanced countries, a contrast starkly spelled out, incidentally, in a coruscating article in the latest Economist.

I had the privilege of being on the Times Education Commission, the subject of a recent debate in this house instigated by the noble Lord, Lord Lexden. An especially moving section of its excellent report highlighted the problems at preschool level. A head teacher of a northern primary school recounted that many children in reception classes could not say their name and were not toilet trained. This was a consequence of the shutdown. Home schooling was a reality for children with educated and well-resourced parents, but absolutely not for children of disadvantaged and insecure parents. Even before Covid, this contrast had grown starker because of the closure of around 1,000 Sure Start centres. It will be hard for these kids to catch up after facing such deprivations at the beginning of life. For them, equal opportunity is a sham.

At the end of life too conditions for the disadvantaged are shamefully aggravated by austerity. There is an almost decade-scale gap in life expectancy between the rich and the poor. We all know that it is the underfunding of care homes, distressing for the old and sick, that leads to the overwhelming of hospitals that endangers all of us.

These inadequacies cannot be cured by efficiency gains. The predicament that we are in surely calls for a rise in some taxes—for instance, on multinationals, on six-figure salaries, and on dividends and capital gains. Our nation should emulate the US less and northern Europe more, to sustain public services that we can be proud of and which allow the rising generation to fulfil their potential in a more secure and equal society.

Wellbeing of Future Generations Bill [HL]

Lord Rees of Ludlow Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 13th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rees of Ludlow (CB)]

My Lords, the commitment of the noble Lord, Lord Bird, to the disadvantaged is an inspiration to us all and we should surely welcome the Bill. Urgent and immediate matters understandably preoccupy our leaders; in contrast, some of the most threatening issues are global and long-term. In optimising people’s welfare, we should care about the prospect of a baby whose life will extend into the 22nd century; indeed, we should not knowingly jeopardise the life chances of generations as yet unborn. But investment decisions almost all discount the future so steeply that minimal weight is given to what happens beyond about 2050. The guidelines in the Green Book could be changed to ease this issue. The national risk register also needs to be extended beyond traditional economic timescales.

Plainly, many things are utterly unpredictable a century ahead but environmental, population and climatic scenarios can be analysed. It may be prudent to pay an insurance premium today, as it were, to guard against global threats that could emerge a century hence. Expert assessment of these issues is surely an endeavour that should be expanded, and it deserves all-party support.

We should also scrutinise our built environment. Our grand public buildings, such as the one we are in now, the great churches, museums and monuments, and even our railway stations, date from the Victorian era or earlier. They were built to last; not so the tower blocks that dominate the skyline today. Their planned lifetime is typically only 50 years, and they are not a legacy that future generations will thank us for.

I conclude with a cameo. Ely Cathedral is near where both the noble Lord, Lord Bird, and I live. It overwhelms us today, so think of its impact 800 years ago and the vast enterprise that its construction entailed. Most of its builders had never travelled more than 50 miles; the Fens were their world. Even the most educated knew of nothing beyond Europe. They thought that the world was a few thousand years old, and that it might not last another thousand. However, despite these constricted horizons in both time and space, and the deprivation and harshness of their lives, they built this vast cathedral. Those who conceived it knew that they would not live to see it finished. Their legacy still elevates our spirits, nearly a millennium later.

What a contrast that is to today. Unlike our forebears, we know a great deal about our world. Technologies that our ancestors could not conceive of now enrich our lives and understanding. We know that we are the stewards of a “pale blue dot” in a vast cosmos, a planet with a future measured in billions of years, whose fate depends on humanity’s collective actions this century. However, all too often, our focus is short-term and parochial. We downplay what is happening even now in impoverished faraway countries and give too little thought to the world we leave for our grandchildren.

In today’s runaway world, we cannot aspire to leave a monument lasting 1,000 years, but it would surely be shameful if we persisted in policies that denied future generations a fair inheritance. We need more cathedral thinking and that is a signal that this Bill will send.

Terrorism: Emergency Communications

Lord Rees of Ludlow Excerpts

Thursday 5th July 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rees of Ludlow (CB)]

My Lords, I contribute to this debate with diffidence. Others speak with far greater authority and have had direct experience of and responsibility for dealing with terrorist incidents, or, more generally, with infrastructure failures that could cause disruption and social breakdown. I pay tribute to the commitment of the noble Lord, Lord Harris, to these issues. He has emphasised particularly that enhancing the resilience of the electricity grid is surely a priority.

I will focus rather less on the communication medium than on the messages that need to be communicated in a context where we can expect far larger-scale and more catastrophic breakdowns and terrorist attacks that we have had up to now. Cities would be paralysed without electricity. The lights would go out, but that would be far from the most serious consequence. Within a few days, our cities would be uninhabitable and anarchic. We know what even an intrepid maverick with cyber skills can do, and there have been warnings from senior officials in this country and the US of how devastating and long-lasting a highly organised cyberattack could be.

Our high-tech and interconnected world is vulnerable in other ways. We depend increasingly on elaborate networks: air traffic control, international finance, globally dispersed manufacturing, biothreats and so forth. Unless these networks are highly resilient, their benefits could be outweighed by catastrophic, albeit rare, breakdowns. Social media can spread panic and rumour, and economic contagion, literally at the speed of light.

Not enough effort goes into minimising these risks, nor, for the focus of this debate, into preparing for how to cope with the aftermath of catastrophic events. There are two reasons for this underpreparation. First, we are in denial. We respond rationally and proportionately to fire risks, for instance, because, even though the chance of our home burning down is small, we have frequent reminders of fires and the damage they can do. We can estimate their probability and therefore the risk.

However, catastrophic events are rare—perhaps unprecedented or newly emergent—so we do not have this experience. We are lulled into believing that they will never happen so we are underprepared. It is an analogue of what is happening in the financial world. Gains and losses are asymmetric; many years of gradual gains can be wiped out by a sudden loss. Likewise, in cyberdisasters and those that might be caused by bio-error or bioterror, the risk is dominated by the rare but extreme events. The magnitude of the worst potential catastrophe is growing unprecedentedly large. Too many people are in denial about this; it needs to be higher up in public policy and attention.

The second reason for underpreparation is political reluctance to spend money in ways that may prove nugatory, as is likely to be the case for any low-probability but high-consequence scenario. For instance, in some years when a flu epidemic has been predicted, the Government have prudently stocked up on the appropriate virus but then been unfairly criticised for waste if some was not needed. We must overcome that mindset if we want to prepare for these extreme events. It is reassuring that the Government have given priority and resources to cyberdefence, where there is an arms race between the attackers and the defence and it is unclear whether the defence will always win.

It is surely not scaremongering to raise concerns about human-induced risks from bio-error or bioterror. We know all too well that technical expertise does not guarantee balanced rationality. The global village will have its village idiots, and they will have global range. The spread of an artificially released pathogen cannot be predicted or controlled. The rising empowerment of tech-savvy groups, even individuals, by biotechnology will pose a growing intractable challenge to governments and aggravate the tension among freedom, privacy, and security. Most likely, there will be a societal acceptance of a shift towards more intrusion and less privacy.

Before closing, I want to focus on nuclear threats. Even a stalwart establishment figure such as William Perry, the former US Defense Secretary, has expressed concern about scenarios involving terrorist nuclear weapons. Be that as it may, there have already been nuclear incidents that involved not explosions but serious radiation release. Such nuclear accidents hold lessons about the appropriate response—evacuation versus staying put, for instance—and messages that should be sent. In 2011, the Japanese tsunami claimed 30,000 lives, mainly through drowning. It also destroyed the Fukushima nuclear power stations, which were inadequately protected against a 15 metre-high wall of water and sub-optimally designed. For instance, the emergency generators were located low down, and were inactivated by flooding.

Consequently, radioactive materials leaked and spread. The surrounding villages were evacuated, but this was done through unco-ordinated messages and in an unco-ordinated way. Initially, just those within three kilometres of the power stations were evacuated, then those within 20 kilometres and then those within 30, with inadequate regard for the asymmetric way in which the wind was spreading the contamination. Some evacuees had to move three times and some villages remain uninhabited, with devastating consequences for the lives of long-term residents. Indeed, the mental trauma and other health problems, such as diabetes, have proved more debilitating than the radiation risk. Many evacuees, especially elderly ones, would be prepared to accept a substantially higher cancer risk in return for the freedom to live out their days in familiar surroundings. They should have that option. Likewise, incidentally, the mass evacuations after the Chernobyl disaster were not necessarily in the best interests of those displaced.

In Japan, it was the tsunami itself, not the nuclear accident, that caused the major death toll. The public fear of radiation is enhanced by a special dread factor and a feeling of helplessness. As a consequence, all nuclear projects are impeded by disproportionate concern about even very low radiation levels and the cost is raised by overstringent clean-up requirements. To offer a specific recommendation, were a city centre to be attacked by a dirty bomb—a conventional chemical explosion laced with radioactive material—some evacuation might be needed, but, just as in Fukushima, there is a risk that present guidelines would mandate a response that was unduly drastic, both in the extent and the duration of the evacuation.

The immediate aftermath of a dirty bomb incident is not the right time for a balanced debate. That is why this topic needs a new assessment and wide dissemination of clear and appropriate guidelines of the risks to different categories of people. We need discussion of a proportionate response and how to communicate it.

Finally, it is clear that such threats are growing in their variety and severity. We need to devote more resources to reducing our vulnerabilities, planning the optimum response and communicating it. The past is a poor guide to the future when fast-changing technologies are involved. There is a salutary mantra: “The unfamiliar is not the same as the improbable”.