Emergency Alert System: Fujitsu

Baroness Twycross Excerpts

Wednesday 19th April 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

We have to follow due process. An inquiry is rightly taking place into the Horizon and Post Office scandal. In the meantime, it is important that procurement processes are open, that people are allowed to bid and that awards are made in accordance with the rules. I emphasise the point that I have already made: there is no link between the work that Fujitsu has done for DCMS and the Cabinet Office and the work done for the Post Office.

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as chair of the London Resilience Forum. The emergency alert system is a really good idea. In fact, it is such a good idea that the Cabinet Office first successfully tested the use of emergency text alerts in 2013. Why has it taken a decade to hold a nationwide emergency alert system test? Can the Minister confirm how quickly the test will be evaluated and how soon the Government think this potentially life-saving system can be rolled out?

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

I thank the noble Baroness for her support. Indeed, I think this alert system appeared in the Labour Party manifesto; we have had cross-party support for it. We have set up the test in consultation with various affected parties, which obviously means that it has had to be done properly—with motoring organisations, for example, and for vulnerable groups. That has taken time. The test is now taking place on Sunday. My hope is that it will be successful. Just to reassure the noble Baroness, we had trials in East Sussex and Reading, and the feedback we had from the people involved in the test was very positive, with 88% of people wanting to keep going and encouraging the test. We need to move things forward, which is exactly what we are doing.

Emergency Planning

Baroness Twycross Excerpts

Monday 20th February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

I share the noble Baroness’s concern about our rivers and, of course, we worked together to amend the Environment Bill on this issue. Now, she is rightly asking about the follow-up. This is not a matter for me but for Defra. However, I can assure her that our national security risk assessment looks at these issues and makes sure that, going forward, plans are right and proper.

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as London’s Deputy Mayor for Fire and Resilience and chair of the London Resilience Forum. The focus on skills in the recently published resilience framework on training and exercising is welcome, but it is vital that this provides the skills needed and it is properly resourced. Can the Minister provide further detail on how her plans for the proposed UK resilience academy are progressing and how this will contribute to both prevention and preparedness? Also, have the Government ear-marked funding for a major exercise along the lines of Exercise Unified Response that took place seven years ago? This would provide responders from across all sectors represented on local resilience forums the opportunity to gain valuable skills in advance of needing them.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

I agree on the importance of the local resilience and the testing and trialling that the noble Baroness talks about. On actual funding, I will come back to her, but the new approach that has been taken in the resilience reform and in the UK Resilience Forum meeting, that the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster presided over himself recently, is on the importance of emergency preparedness. The focus on skills is also a focus in cabinet committee work on these issues. So I hope I have given her some assurance that this is work we are pushing ahead with

Preparing for Extreme Risks (RARPC Report)

Baroness Twycross Excerpts

Thursday 12th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

I am very pleased to be able to speak as part of this debate. I declare an interest as London’s Deputy Mayor for Fire and Resilience, in which capacity I chair the London Resilience Forum, and as a member of the National Preparedness Commission, as are, I understand, quite a few noble Lords. I was a witness to the inquiry and gave evidence to the committee.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom, for enabling this debate. This is an important and significant issue that concerns the whole of society, not just this House. The report reminds us of the need for government to be better prepared, saying

“the UK must be better at anticipating, preparing for and responding to a range of challenging scenarios, including those which it has never experienced before.”

Humans learn through experience, and we are naturally inclined to try to prevent the recurrence of something we have already gone through. We are less good at recognising risks or preparing for risks that we have not yet faced ourselves. It is a failure of our collective imagination. It would be wrong to prejudge anything that may come out of the Covid inquiry, but this human trait is arguably why the UK was better prepared for repeats of a flu or swine flu pandemic than for a SARS coronavirus-type pandemic, because we had not felt the full force of one previously.

Were the Government to take on the recommendations in the report and adopt an all-risks approach, it would go a long way to improving the UK’s resilience. In my view, this is particularly key in relation the complex and cascading risks which have been referred to throughout this debate, including on climate change. The extreme heat last summer represents the thin edge of the wedge of what we can see on climate change. I concur with speakers throughout this debate on a number of issues in relation to cascading risks.

I shall make two further points in the remainder of the time I have in the debate. The first is that the Government need to demonstrate that they are taking the risk to the UK’s resilience seriously. I was disappointed that, rather than the long-heralded resilience strategy, we saw the resilience framework in the week before Christmas, at the point at which we were told to expect the strategy to be published. The strategic approach that it promises must not be instead of a strategy. It would be useful to get some clarity on when the forthcoming strategy is likely to be published and how the framework will be funded. The previously expressed vision of making Britain the most resilient country in the world should not be lost, nor should the potential for risks to be seen in the round, or the cascading impact of risks to be carefully considered and planned for be missed.

Clearly it would be ludicrous for home departments with expertise not to be involved in risk planning, but risk planning for hazards and civil contingencies, whether short shocks or long-running chronic incidents, is an area of expertise in its own right. Effective management of extreme risks cannot be fulfilled from a silo approach within departments, and this is where the proposals made by the committee in the report for an office for preparedness and resilience could make a massive and positive difference. This would require commitment and funding but, as the report also points out, and as has been noted in this discussion, prevention is significantly cheaper than cure.

My second point is one that I made to the committee, which is that there is a duty on local resilience forums to warn and inform their partner agencies and the public. There is no such duty on government, and the ludicrous level of secrecy has already been noted. There are many occasions when LRFs are asked to plan for risks but do not get access to the planning assumptions to which the Government are working nor, when they do, to the basis which those assumptions are made. This level of secrecy damages the country’s resilience and cannot be right. Government departments should also have a statutory duty to share information, not least with those tasked to prepare for and respond to risks to our country’s resilience.

There is much to commend in the report. I only regret that the Government have not taken up more of the recommendations as yet, and I look forward to clarification from Ministers on when the resilience strategy will be forthcoming. I hope that they will also ensure that the Government accept the points made by Members of this House during this debate and act on them and the recommendations in the report as a matter of urgency.