Huawei

Lord West of Spithead Excerpts

Thursday 25th April 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord West of Spithead (Lab)]

My Lords, does the Minister not agree that—

[Noble Lords]

Front Bench!

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

I assure the House that I do not feel certain about many things. But seriously, my noble friend has a point. However, one should not be led into a false sense of reassurance by saying we should ban one particular company. There are really only about three main suppliers of this 5G equipment: Nokia, Ericsson and Huawei. Both Nokia and Ericsson either have their components assembled in or buy components from China. We must be very careful about trying to give a false sense of reassurance by banning just one company or another.

[Lord West of Spithead]

My Lords, I apologise for leaping in earlier; it is not like Radio 4. It is an absolute disgrace that things discussed at the National Security Council are leaked. I hope the Minister can tell us exactly what is to be done about this and how it will be looked into. It is really disgraceful.

On the work that is going on, does the Minister not agree that it is really important to complete that full survey? This is such a complex subject. Many of the firms referred to have exactly the same sort of problems as Huawei does. We have used Huawei since 2009. We know there are risks. We must never forget that China is a very real risk—let us face it: it has, on an industrial scale, stolen IP from us—but that does not mean that we cannot use its equipment in certain ways, as long as our experts are able to modify that risk.

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

My Lords, I completely agree with the noble Lord that any leak from the National Security Council is a disgrace. Obviously it should not happen. On what is happening about that, I am not able to comment—and he would not expect me to—on any particular inquiry or investigation, but I can say that the Prime Minister takes leaks from the Government very seriously, particularly when they are to do with security. I will leave it at that.

As far as Huawei in particular is concerned, I absolutely agree with the noble Lord. We must mitigate the risks where we can. We have an extensive oversight programme for Huawei—more extensive than for any other company. We have to face up to the fact that the risks come from not just the hardware but the software, and 5G in particular will mean that upgrades to software will be going through the networks the whole time. That is one of the areas we have to concentrate on and it does not come from a particular supplier of hardware.