Terrorism: Emergency Communications Debate

Full Debate: Read Full Debate
Department: Cabinet Office

Terrorism: Emergency Communications

Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town Excerpts
Thursday 5th July 2018

(5 years, 8 months ago)

Lords Chamber
Read Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town Portrait Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)
- Hansard - -

On Saturday it will be exactly 13 years since the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, was doing press conferences and I was awarded my PhD. It turned out to be quite a day for both of us, although not in the same way. I was on the Tube, due to travel via Aldgate to Mile End for the PhD ceremony. For reasons we now know, the Tube was suddenly evacuated. I was one of the lucky ones not only to get off the Tube unaffected but to be able to use my phone to reassure my other half, who was also travelling that way, that both of us were alive and safe.

In different ways, it was a surreal day. What slowly dawns on one is the absolute horror of what has happened, the number of deaths and injuries—and there is also an awareness, even at that level, of the amazing response of all concerned: Transport for London; the emergency services; the taxi driver who took pity on me; Queen Mary University of London, which turned out food, beds, help and advice to parents and graduates; and a host of others whom we know of now and who were centrally or peripherally involved.

As I said, I managed to use my phone just before it went down. What I then watched, of course, was the students arriving, ready to be gowned up, and the parents ready with their cameras to beam down with pride on their children. In the absence of mobile phones there were terrible gaps: some parents arriving but not the graduates, some graduates arriving but not the parents. As we finally sat down, there were gaps on many seats. Given our proximity to Aldgate, our alarm is easy to understand. Fortunately, we learned—although not until the next day—that nobody, despite where we were, had been affected by that.

Of course, at the time, little did I know about all the issues of the attack, which we now know far more about—nor about the wise words and the content of the report of my noble friend Lord Harris. By the way, I knew him when he was getting ready for his first degree—supposedly, anyway, but I think he spent rather more of his time then as chairman of the Cambridge Fabian Society than studying, as he should have been. However, he has grown a lot since then.

None Portrait Noble Lords
- Hansard -

Oh.

Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town Portrait Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
- Hansard - -

I did not mean—well, when you are in a hole, stop digging.

Both my noble friend’s report and his speech today gave us much food for thought—or indeed gloom, if I may use the word of the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot. I will highlight two issues. The first is the robustness of the infrastructure and governance of the systems now emerging. The other is the public. This issue has been touched on already, in all the various scenarios.

On infrastructure, my noble friend’s questions leave one slightly less reassured than is good for one’s blood pressure. I do not know whether he was trying to discomfit us, but the more he spoke, the more I realised the size of the unanswered questions. As he spelled out some of those, it made one realise the seriousness of what we are doing.

As my noble friend Lord Harris says, unlike Airwave the proposed new emergency services network will not have its own exclusive part of the spectrum but will share it with the 4G network—putting our communications, as he said, in one basket, with a single point of failure. He hopes that the 4G never goes down. I also hope—like the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, and the noble Earl, Lord Attlee—that we never have a widespread power failure.

It is not, however, just the noble Lord, Lord Harris, or indeed the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, who have concerns about this. The NAO pointed out the high risk, given that the ESN approach has not yet been used nationwide anywhere in the world and there are currently no suitable handheld and vehicle-mounted devices that will work with it. Some reassurance, therefore, is needed today, provided that it is genuine and not just warm words. That would be appreciated.

How people’s own mobiles work in an emergency is also crucial, as is the question of whether they will give way to emergency personnel with higher priority than a mere member of the public—as I was in those days. As we have heard, emergency personnel may have priority over new calls from the public while still allowing heavy-usage calls already in progress to continue unabated. That was the question posed by my noble friend, to which we look forward to an answer.

The second issue is the public’s access to a network, or to information, during an emergency. That draws on the examples of Grenfell and Oxford Street and of other countries’ experiences—in Nice, Belgium and elsewhere—as well as 7/7. We must recognise people’s need to contact friends and relatives, and for reliable information at such times. I was particularly struck, in the Cabinet Office’s Civil Contingencies Act enhancement programme’s comments on communicating with the public, not simply about the guidance on warnings and providing advice in a timely manner—though that was a strong recommendation—but about the need to provide such information not just at the beginning but throughout the emergency, and at its conclusion. The latter point—something I had not realised or thought about—is crucial: it can be very easy to wind down at that stage and forget that other people do not know that the emergency is over.

The Cabinet Office research also demonstrates the importance of understanding people’s drive to maintain family contact: it is an important issue. We also need to prepare and understand the public’s mindset when faced by such events, as was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Rees. Research and understanding of that area is crucial to a successful emergency system. That understanding should be built into all the systems planning and rank high with the relevant leadership at each event. I am not referring to the kind of highly confidential information described by the noble Viscount, Lord Brookeborough, but to the information that people need at that time to know what to do.

Clearly it is easy to say that, but difficult questions arise over priorities—not only in access to communication systems but in the ranking of who gets told what and when. Those are issues for government, so I would also like to know who leads on it. I also ask the Minister for some assurance that even if the public as a whole cannot be involved in the planning and design of such systems, then civil society, consumer groups or communications experts are part and parcel at every step, so that the public’s needs are not an add-on, too late to influence the decision-making infrastructure and management system. I also ask that professional expertise on how to communicate—as was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Rees—is central to the planning, and not left to people who do not understand such ways of communicating. It is vital that it is built in throughout the planning system: the pre-warning and the training, whether we are talking about outward alerts from the police to mobile phones—really, the equivalent of what I remember as sirens when I was little—or the other issues. I hope that this will be built into our development of new systems and their governance.

These are serious issues and we already have a lot to be thankful for in what is being done in this way. I hope that today’s debate might serve to nudge the Cabinet Office to move a little faster on this vital issue and that my noble friend Lord Harris might be further involved, given that he seems to know rather more about this than I ever wanted to have to know about it.