Telecommunications (Security) Bill

Lord Fox Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 29th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fox (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for her very clear exposition of the purposes and modus operandi of this Bill. It is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord West—Admiral West—and I look forward to working with the noble Baroness, Lady Merron, who is on the Front Bench.

During late summer last year, we debated the Telecommunications Infrastructure (Leasehold Property) Act, when this security Bill was held out as a carrot, largely to try to curtail discussions of a Chinese nature. It did not work, of course, and we had those discussions, but here we are at last with this Bill. As we have heard, it provides the Government with considerable new national security powers to issue directions to privately-held public telecommunications providers, primarily with the aim of managing issues arising from high-risk vendors. As such, the Minister will acquire wide and sweeping powers.

The Bill also gives Ofcom wide duties and legal powers to monitor and assess the security of telecoms providers. For teeth, as we have heard from the Minister, companies that continue to use high-risk vendors could or will face very heavy fines. Perhaps the Bill’s headline outcome is the new controls on the use of Huawei 5G equipment, including a ban on the purchase of new Huawei equipment from the end of 2021 and a commitment to remove all Huawei equipment from 5G networks by 2027.

How will these Benches respond? First, I am happy to confirm that Liberal Democrats are strongly in favour of having secure telecommunications networks. I am sure the Minister is relieved to hear that. Secondly, Liberal Democrats want to see Huawei technology removed as quickly and expediently as possible. However, I note, as the Minister hinted at but did not detail, that the issue is with more than one supplier and more than one country. I add that the issue of the treatment of Muslim Uighurs does not stop with this Bill. The genocide going on there creates much wider implications for our relationship with China than the issue of which technology makes our phones work. These implications are very important, but I understand that they are beyond the scope of this Bill.

Thirdly, Liberal Democrats strongly believe that the Government must now invest in developing telecommunications technology in the UK. We want to see an increase in the diversity of the UK’s telecoms supply chain. We also believe that a strong relationship with the European Union and the intelligence alliance Five Eyes will help us to ensure that security risks are dealt with quickly. Finally, Lib Dems want to see stronger protections for the privacy of people in the UK.

What we will be testing in Committee is threefold. First, does the Bill effectively shut out the technology it is meant to shut out? The trick to making communications secure will be the nuts and bolts of the Bill. Secondly, do the Minister and Ofcom have the right powers, and the necessary checks and balances, to make this Bill work? Thirdly, when it comes to supply chain diversification, can we actually shut out Huawei et al and have an effective communications network?

One at a time, first let us look at the prime intent of the Bill: to keep our networks secure. On the face of it, this is another skeleton Bill. With the presentation of a few statutory instruments here and there, the Government should theoretically be able to react swiftly, but are the Minister and Ofcom placed to pre-empt issues, rather than react to them? There is a technical difficulty here: in 5G particularly, the distinction between the core and edge of networks is blurred. With technology moving faster than government can, that distinction is almost meaningless and the threats will change from week to week. So can the Minister explain how Ofcom can ever successfully be ahead of the game and not chasing issues?

As we know, plans for removing Huawei have been announced, but this does not stop with Huawei. For example, legislation in the US is considerably broader. It identifies specific companies, including Huawei, but also ZTE Corporation, Hytera Communications Corporation Limited, Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology Co. Limited and Dahua Technology Co. Limited. Also, US legislation covers telecommunications and video surveillance and services. Given the news this weekend, the Minister might like to review where we source CCTV cameras from in this country—I note that that was discussed in a previous debate. Can the Minister assure your Lordships’ House that this legislation will cover the full range of security threats that we need to cover or will we see another Bill to broaden it yet further into surveillance and surveillance services?

Turning to the powers granted by this Bill, it gives wide-ranging powers to the Secretary of State and next to no oversight to Parliament. Included are sweeping powers to address matters of national security and it is not clear, although the Minister has hinted, how Ofcom will really interact with the intelligence community. Furthermore, as we have heard from the noble Lord, Lord West, the committee, which has express oversight of national security, has been excluded from scrutinising how this legislation will operate. I support the words of the noble Lord, Lord West. In addition, there is no dedicated role for judicial or technical oversight. This is very different from the Investigatory Powers Act 2016, in which such provision exists. I expect my noble friend Lord Clement-Jones to comment more on this issue.

The Bill also gives sweeping powers to Ofcom. We heard from the Minister how Ofcom will be co-operating with the intelligence services, but this creates a conflict of culture within Ofcom and will inevitably lead to more opaque operations which will, in turn, create issues elsewhere. I am still not clear how that interface will work. It will be useful to investigate that in Committee.

Finally, I turn to supply chain diversity. The Minister in the Commons said:

“We must never find ourselves in this position again. Over the last few decades, countless countries across the world have become over-reliant on too few vendors”—[Official Report, Commons, 30/11/20; col. 75.]


Fine words, I am sure, but they come from a Government whose Chancellor and Secretary of State for BEIS have cancelled the industrial strategy and disbanded the Industrial Strategy Council. Undaunted, alongside the Bill the DCMS has published a diversification strategy. I suggest that Oliver Dowden, who adorns that document, is rowing somewhat in the opposite direction from the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Assuming that this strategy makes some headway against a running tide within government, it has three legs: “supporting incumbent suppliers”, “attracting new suppliers” and accelerating “open-interface solutions”.

I will take those legs one at a time, beginning with “supporting incumbent suppliers”. I am bemused by the term “incumbent”. I think it means domestic suppliers, because Huawei is an incumbent supplier and we have heard that it will not be getting support. Assuming domestic suppliers is what is meant—there are world trade rules that make it difficult to preferably treat domestic suppliers, but assuming these can be surmounted —can the Minister give us the current estimate of how many incumbent domestic suppliers are in our network and what percentage, in terms of value, they represent?

To fill that gap, we are going to need pretty rapid innovation. Innovation is not easy and the speedy innovation we have just seen with the Covid vaccine, for example, was helped by two important conditions: first, a very strong existing R&D base in this country and secondly, a guaranteed private sector market for the vaccine. I do not think these conditions exist for telecoms technology. So, what is Her Majesty’s Government’s assessment of telecoms research and development in the UK? How will the private networks be encouraged to guarantee a market for any UK-based and UK-developed products that emerge?

The second strategic leg is “attracting new suppliers”. I suspect this is going to be an easier job than building an industry from scratch in this country. Will the Minister confirm how the vetting process will work? I assume this will be in the code of conduct. Will the networks have to be externally cleared? Will they be subsequently audited, and how deep does approval go? Does every component of every sub-assembly need to go through a process, and how will this all unfold in building the networks? It begins to sound quite cumbersome if there is going to be a nuts and bolts check of the technology.

The third leg is accelerating “open-interface solutions”. The Government are moving ahead at speed with open-access radio networks and open RAN piloting, and should be congratulated. If it goes to plan, when will we start to see this becoming significant? How will the Government get the existing vendors to increase the scope of their interoperability? What, in a sense, is in it for them?

We overwhelmingly support the objectives of this Bill. There are serious issues, particularly in the absence of detail and scrutiny. The regulations remain a mystery until they are published, and the process is potentially pretty bureaucratic. I think the Government have recognised that there are issues, which probably reflects why there are four days in Committee ahead of us. We may need all four of those days.