Terrorism: Emergency Communications

Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom Excerpts

Thursday 5th July 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom (Con)]

My Lords, I begin by congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Harris, on three things: first, on securing this debate, which is not an easy thing to do; secondly, on his excellent work on London’s preparedness to respond to a major terrorist incident; and, thirdly, on his speech, in which he has said many of the things that I would like to say but has done so with more eloquence, and so I shall not.

I declare my interest as an unpaid member of the advisory board of the Electric Infrastructure Security Council. In recent decades, the West has become increasingly—and is now totally—dependent on one commodity: electricity, as the noble Lord, Lord Harris, mentioned in his speech. Everything relies upon it. Water is pumped by electricity; cash machines operate by electricity; money is maintained and moved by electricity. Without electricity, we would have difficulty cooling the radioactive cores of our nuclear power stations and, without electricity, we would have no WhatsApp or Instagram, and all our children would have nervous breakdowns.

If our electricity were somehow switched off by a cyberattack, by an electromagnetic pulse, even by a solar flare or by other means that may not yet have been invented, we would be in real trouble, but the first thing that we would want to restore would not be hospitals or money but our communications. The Cabinet Office, among others, recognises that our communication is the key to restoring order, reassuring the public and allowing the subsequent restoration of health services, government and finances.

We saw in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina that the collapse of law and order can happen in a matter of hours, and looting did happen. So the restoration of communications, bringing explanation, information and understanding, is key to what is needed in an emergency such as we are talking about today—by the way, I am a very gloomy person to listen to about most of this because I am more pessimistic even than the noble Lord, Lord Harris.

However, there is one thing working in our favour; that is, smartphones and mobile computing. That is one of the most widely distributed networks—a national set of independent, battery-powered operations. It includes local computing devices and even torches. It is an amazing network which people have bought for themselves, so the Government do not even have to go out and buy it for them. If we can use that system, as the noble Lord, Lord Harris, was talking about, in relation to emergencies, first, to restore communications and, secondly perhaps, to support the delivery of crisis information, so much the better. If that system could also provide some form of digital emergency toolkit, possibly for personalised disaster communication, localised evacuation suggestions or localised suggestion of where to find resources, that would also be so much the better.

What steps are the Government taking on this? The noble Lord, Lord Harris, has talked about the new emergency services network which the Government say is based on the latest technology delivering secure and resilient voice technology and broadband data services. That is very good, even if it is delayed—I shall not quibble about the fact that it is delayed. But will it work if the electricity has gone off?

I recently asked some questions and received some reassuring answers. The first was that a significant proportion of airwave sites were fitted with additional power resilience to ensure that they could run for a minimum of five days on autonomous power. I have also been told that resilience against extended power outages is achieved using a range of technical solutions that include tow-to-site and fixed generators and batteries. That is good as far as it goes, but, first, what happens if the power outage lasts for more than five days? That is, I am afraid to say in my depressed frame of mind, perfectly feasible. If the power outage struck more than just a small area of the country, the demand for back-up generators and new transformers for things all taking place in circumstances of cascading failure of different parts of our infrastructure, would be very difficult to manage.

The noble Lord, Lord Harris, mentioned that we were putting all our eggs in one basket. Has thought been given to identifying and then possibly tasking some form of back-up radio ham network across the country that might be able to operate on vehicles and chip in, if the 4G network were not available? On 4G, we are just about to introduce into the country the new 5G network. As I understand it, the existing 40,000 aerials are going to have be expanded to something like 400,000 aerials. I may be wrong about that—but is not that an opportunity for the Government to design an additional degree of resilience into those new aerials, which would be of great benefit to the country?

Finally, I have read the Government’s Civil Contingencies Act Enhancement Programme. When viewed in the light of the possible loss of electricity, I am sorry to say that it leaves a little to be desired. The public are wholly unaware of most of the contents of that document and of most of the things that they should be doing. I suspect that Ministers, too, are pretty unprepared, and I am sure that they are unpractised in dealing with catastrophic events such as the ones that we are talking about. I would hope not only that Ministers would begin to form plans of what to do in the face of major catastrophes—because forming such a plan once the catastrophe has taken place is not wise—but that they should practice that plan from the top to the bottom of government and the top to the bottom of civil society, because a plan that is not practised is no plan at all.