Terrorism: Emergency Communications

Lord Harris of Haringey Excerpts

Thursday 5th July 2018 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Harris of Haringey]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to improve communications for use in the event of a terrorist incident or other major emergency.

[Lord Harris of Haringey (Lab)]

My Lords, I should start by referring to my various interests in the register, in particular my role as UK co-ordinator for the Electric Infrastructure Security Council. I am grateful to the distinguished list of noble Lords who have put their names down to speak.

Less than two weeks ago, Michael Dowden, the London Fire Brigade watch manager for North Kensington gave evidence to the Grenfell Tower inquiry and said:

“For me … to facilitate and change a stay-put policy to a full evacuation was impossible. I didn’t have the resource at that time. We’re looking at 20 floors above the fire … I just don’t know how that could have been done with the resources we had in attendance at that moment in time”.


Tragically, the technology to deliver that message to those waiting in their flats exists and, had it been adopted in this country, could have been used on that terrible night.

I have spoken to Michael Hallowes, who is sitting below the Gallery watching this debate, who tested Australia’s “emergency alert” for just such an emergency at the 37-storey Department of Justice building in the heart of Melbourne back in 2012. He drew a warning polygon on the system’s mapping tool over that building, which detected the presence of 5,736 mobile devices. The location-based SMS alert that followed reached over 90% of those devices within 12 seconds, delivering the alert successfully to people on every floor. The system’s configuration also meant that the alert was kept to just that building. This technology could undoubtedly have saved lives in Grenfell Tower. It could also have been used to reduce the panic and stampedes in Oxford Street last November as people responded to erroneous reports that gunshots had been fired.

We know that social media play a huge role in the event of a terrorist incident or indeed any other emergency. Sometimes, of course, the result is that misinformation is spread, as members of the public caught up in an event and the media try to make sense of what may be a very confusing situation. It is essential that civic agencies are able to provide a swift and authoritative voice during such events.

Three months ago I raised this matter in your Lordships’ House and the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, said that,

“the Cabinet Office has been requested to provide Ministers with … An initial analysis of what a scheme might look like and what delivering a scheme might entail … for May 2018”.—[Official Report, 16/4/18; col. 981.]

In a later answer, the noble Lord admitted that this timetable had been set by him that morning in preparation for my Question in the afternoon—I am grateful to him for doing that. But my questions now are: has that analysis been completed—we are now in July, not May—and when will action be taken?

The legal duty exists in Part 1, Section 2(1)(g), of the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, which requires category 1 responders to,

“maintain arrangements to warn the public, and to provide information and advice to the public, if an emergency is likely to occur or has occurred”.

This technology was tested by the Cabinet Office five years ago. As I have said, it is already in use in Australia, but also since 2012 in the United States, the Netherlands and elsewhere.

Therefore, my questions to the noble Lord are as follows. Which Minister and which government department will be leading on this going forward? Have the police and the other emergency services identified their operational requirements and, if they have not, will Ministers be asking them to do so as a matter of urgency?

I would like to move on to the replacement of the current system for communications within the emergency services. The police, fire and ambulance services must have reliable communications between control rooms and personnel in the field. This is currently delivered by a radio system known as Airwave—a system which the National Audit Office pointed out has served the emergency services effectively in dealing with life-or-death situations—but now it needs upgrading and improving, in particular to enable it to handle data better in addition to voice communications.

In 2011, the Government took a decision to replace this system with what is to be known as the “Emergency Services Network”. Unlike Airwave, it will not have its own exclusive part of the spectrum; instead, it will share it with a commercial 4G network—in this case, EE. This puts all our communications eggs in one basket: it creates a single point of failure. If, for whatever reason, the 4G network goes down, so do the communications for the emergency services.

At this point, we were supposed to be half way through the rollout of the new system, but the NAO pointed out less than two years ago a number of rather significant facts: the ESN is inherently high risk and such an approach has not been used nationwide anywhere in the world; the ESN is “technically cutting edge”; no suitable hand-held and vehicle-mounted devices that will work with ESN existed at the time of the NAO’s report; the ESN requires the percentage of Great Britain’s land-mass covered by EE’s network to rise from 70% to 97%; and, as the NAO said,

“the programme has adopted a timeline for delivering ESN that is very ambitious”.

What could possibly go wrong? Not surprisingly, the programme is running behind schedule. Can the Minister tell us the current timeline for the rollout? What are the extra costs for each month of delay, and, perhaps more significantly, why do so few senior officers in the police, fire and ambulance services seem to feel confident that it will all work as promised?

The present arrangements are based on a series of contracts that expire next year. As I understand it, there are 105 contracts with the emergency services around the country and 307 with other public sector organisations. These will be replaced by one single contract managed by the Home Office. I repeat: one single contract managed by the Home Office—that instantly inspires confidence.

The individual providers will have a call-off arrangement with EE, but this is much more limited than the contract that they currently have with Airwave and gives those services very little direct recourse for poor service. Is the Minister satisfied that a local police force or a local ambulance service will have the leverage they need to get the quality of service required to keep the public safe in their area without recourse to separate expensive investment in back-up facilities?

We all know what it is like using the mobile phone network, particularly at times of high demand. The question that has to be answered is: will emergency services personnel have priority over other commercial users of the network? I am told that software and protocols are being developed to enable this to happen. Perhaps the Minister can tell us how this will work and, very specifically, whether the prioritisation will mean that existing users will be bumped off the service if it is needed by the emergency services.

My understanding is that the prioritisation being offered is that, if it is a choice between the emergency services provider coming on to the system and someone who wants to initiate a call—perhaps to a loved one to say they are all right or are on the train—the emergency service provider will get priority. But what about those people who are already using the system, either making an extended phone call or, more significantly, using a lot of data to stream music videos? Will they be bounced off the system in an emergency? My understanding is that they will not, and I think that is a significant weakness.

All of this assumes that the 4G network is operational and is not disrupted by the emergency itself. At the beginning of my speech, I mentioned the work I do on infrastructure security. I will not go into this at length, but there are a number of “black sky” events that could, for example, produce a widespread power failure. Under those circumstances, the 4G network would be viable for at best two to four hours before the batteries in the cell-site masts run down.

This brings me back to the concerns I expressed earlier about the single point of failure and to the last point I want to touch on: the High Integrity Telecommunications System. HITS is intended to be—again I quote the Minister,

“a resilient communications solution providing a voice and data link to 47 fixed sites across the UK. It is intended to provide failsafe communications in times of national crisis, connecting local responders and the Devolved Administrations with COBR”.

The Civil Contingencies Secretariat says in its information pack that this is a “resilient and independent” network that,

“will still function when the main networks (such as landlines and mobile phones) are unavailable or degraded”.

The collapse of the 4G network is acknowledged as a real risk. The existing contract for this system ends in March. When I asked the Minister about this a few weeks ago, I was told a review was “currently under way”. Is this urgent enough if the contract expires in less than nine months?

Connecting with 47 fixed sites was always a very limited aspiration—I understand it is one for each police force. Originally, this was supplemented by transportable terminals that could be deployed to specific locations in addition to the fixed sites. These were withdrawn at the end of 2013, are no longer available and have not been replaced. I have spoken to those involved in emergency planning around the country and their view is that the existing HIT system is approaching obsolescence and is inadequate for maintaining central co-ordination in the event of the sort of crisis for which it was designed. Can the Minister tell us what the plans are for the future of HITS and when decisions will be taken?

I apologise if some of this speech has appeared to be rather technical, but let me be clear: effective emergency communications in a time of crisis are vital. It is genuinely a matter of life and death, and it is essential that as a nation we get this right.