Mobile Networks: Resilience

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Tuesday 11th December 2018 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Lucas]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they will take to improve the resilience of United Kingdom mobile networks following the outage of O2’s services.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (Lord Ashton of Hyde) (Con)]

My Lords, I ought to declare a very small interest as a customer of O2 and, therefore, someone who is in line for a reimbursement of two days-worth of my monthly subscription.

There is a regular dialogue on interests of concern to both industry and Government. DCMS works closely with the telecoms sector on resilience issues via the Electronic Communications Resilience and Response Group, which leads on resilience activity and emergency response. The industry has a good track record of enhancing resilience, and we will be working closely with O2 and the wider sector to understand the causes of this incident and what lessons can be learned.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend for that encouraging Answer. He will be aware that O2 is not the only recent example of lack of systems resilience. Work undertaken by the Government in preparation for a possible hard Brexit has revealed that a very large proportion of British business is driving extremely close to the edge of chaos in terms of how little it would take to seriously disrupt their businesses and our lives. Will he encourage his colleagues to encourage businesses, once Brexit is past us, to maintain the provisions they are now making against possible difficulties, in the cause of our running a more resilient society than we apparently have been doing?

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

I assure my noble friend that my department, which is responsible for telecoms, will continue to work with the Electronic Communications Resilience and Response Group. By coincidence, there is a meeting of that group next week, from which we will find out exactly what happened with the O2 outage and the emergency response, which worked well. I can assure my noble friend that we will continue with that, whatever happens with Brexit.