UK Telecommunications

David Davis Excerpts

Tuesday 28th January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Dominic Raab]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his positive remarks. We are making sure that we produce legislation as soon as possible that can deal with the various enforcement mechanisms and requirements he mentions. He referred to Huawei and the Chinese investment; the critical question for us is what we do, so we are taking the measures now in relation to guidance, and as soon as is practical in relation to legislation. There is a medium-term piece of work that we need to do to look at the health of the telecoms market and make sure that, both in terms of the domestic measures we take—legislative, investment and otherwise—and the international partnerships that we nurture, we do not end up in that situation again with any other critical piece of telecoms, let alone wider national, infrastructure.

[Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)]

I will answer the Foreign Secretary’s question to the Scottish National party spokesman: yes, I do think Huawei should be banned from our networks. It was founded by a member of the People’s Liberation Army. Even if it were not an arm of the Chinese Government, the 2017 law requires that it take instruction from the Chinese intelligence agency. In the future, the size and complexity of the problem we are trying to protect against will be enormous. Huawei alone—forget the rest of China—has tens of thousands of researchers working on this, and I am afraid that the only way to protect our safety is to ban it.

[Dominic Raab]

I welcome my right hon. Friend’s scrutiny, as ever. I am afraid I disagree with him because I and the Government do not believe—and, critically, the range of analysis that we have had leading into the decision does not back up—the suggestion that an outright ban would be a targeted way of dealing with the legitimate security concerns that we share right across the House and want to address; nor has he, or anyone else who has called for an outright ban, addressed the wider cost, delays and the impact that it would have both on the telecoms sector and, in particular, the roll-out of 5G.