UK Telecommunications

Debate between Lord West of Spithead and Baroness Morgan of Cotes

Tuesday 28th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morgan of Cotes]

That is because the evidence of the oversight board—it is extremely vital to our relationship with Huawei, a world-leading structure to have over it, and it provided the evidence that our services provided to the National Security Council—was not the only evidence that the National Security Council received that gave us the reassurances to make this decision today. Some of it cannot be discussed in public. The board will absolutely continue to operate and to work with Huawei to improve standards.

[Lord West of Spithead (Lab)]

My Lords, in an ideal world we would not want the Chinese to provide us with telecoms equipment, build our nuclear power stations, own all our CCTV structures, buy British Steel or invest so much in the City, but we are not in an ideal world. The Americans make a lot of complaints about risks to intelligence. I was in the intelligence world for six years. I do not believe that there will be a risk to intelligence unless they say that they will not give information. This is extraordinary, bearing in mind that they released several hundred thousand of our very sensitive signals using SIPRNet, WikiLeaks and Snowden. We have to be a bit careful about shouting the odds about intelligence.

Does the Minister not think it inconceivable that the director of GCHQ and the head of the NCSC, who know more about this issue than probably anybody else in the UK, would ever give advice that put our intelligence at risk, bearing in mind that intelligence has been their bread and butter all their lives?

[Baroness Morgan of Cotes]

It is a delight to agree with the noble Lord. I and my colleagues have been thoroughly impressed with the careful, systematic way in which GCHQ, the NCSC and other services have advised the National Security Council on this matter. He is right: if they felt that different advice should have been given, it would have been given. I put on record my thanks to them for all the work that they have done on this.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Morgan of Cotes]

As I said earlier, if the noble Lord looks at the documents, he will see that the process sets out clearly how a high-risk vendor is defined, which was one of the points raised by his Front Bench. The requirements that a company does not meet—there is a list of them—determine how it will be considered a high-risk vendor. Once it is considered a high-risk vendor, and if a provider wanted to include it in the networks, that would trigger involvement by the NCSC in working out how its involvement could be mitigated. So, there are a number of steps that I would expect, based on today’s announcement and where we are with the providers and rollout of 5G. I have made it clear that we want to reach a stage where there is no need for any high-risk vendors in our system. However, we are some way off that, which is why the NSC has taken the decision it has taken today.

[Lord West of Spithead]

My Lords, the issue of governance boards, rightly raised by the noble Lord without a tie, is a valid one. It was first flagged up that we had problems with Huawei, after a number of years, when it stated that it could no longer guarantee security. Huawei was told to put in place a lot of investment—£2 billion, I think. Has that investment been put in to harden up the systems and to correct those problems?

[Baroness Morgan of Cotes]

The oversight board’s conclusions are, I believe, public documents. As we heard earlier, there are question marks about things that Huawei has been asked to do which it has not done. I would need to check the specifics on whether it has spent that money and where we are in the latest process—the oversight board publishes its report annually—and I am happy to write to the noble Lord with further details.