Terrorism: Public Alert Technology

Lord Watts Excerpts

Monday 16th April 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham]

I hope I was able to reassure noble Lords that progress is now being made. I accept the implied criticism that we could have got here a little sooner. There is the potential, as the noble Baroness has just said, to avoid the sorts of incidents that she mentioned. There is also an opportunity to use technology in a way that it is not used in other countries at the moment, I think, which is why we are looking at a slightly different scheme; for example, in the case of the attempted murder in Salisbury, with a modern system it would have been possible to identify anyone with a mobile phone who had been in an area of contamination at the relevant time and send them a specific message. This is new technology and we want to make sure that if we go ahead, we use all the benefits that modern IT provides.

[Lord Watts (Lab)]

My Lords, can the Minister say what political issues are delaying the introduction of this technology?

[Lord Young of Cookham]

Well, there is the issue of whether somebody should have the right to send a message to somebody on their mobile phone—whether or not they want to receive it. There are those sorts of issues.