Terrorism: Emergency Communications

Lord Young of Cookham Excerpts

Thursday 5th July 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Harris, for the Question that he has asked about improved communications in the event of a terrorist incident or major emergency and for focusing, as he did at the beginning of his remarks, on the progress on public-alerting technology. I also commend his wide-ranging review of London’s preparedness for a major terrorist incident to the House, which a number of noble Lords referred to and which I read with great interest when he asked an Oral Question a few weeks ago. I am grateful to all noble Lords who have taken part. This has been an astonishingly well-informed debate, with expertise from a wide variety of interests focused on it.

I understand the real anxiety that we should get decisions right. Major decisions are confronting us and it is crucial that we take on board some of the questions and concerns raised in this wide-ranging debate. I want to focus on communications—I am conscious that I will not be able to answer all the questions—and particularly on the subject of mobile alerting, championed by the noble Lord. When he asked me about this on 16 April, some noble Lords were concerned about the speed of progress being made. I am now able to report that we are making headway on the very topic of using mobile phones for alerting citizens to a major incident.

Doing nothing regarding an alerting system is not an option. It is absolutely right that the Government should take every step possible to reduce harm to citizens when faced with emergencies, such as the terrorist incidents that recently afflicted major cities in the UK. But the evidence linking use of an alerting scheme for emergencies to the actual saving of lives needs further work, especially given the nature of risks in the UK. To move matters forward, the Cabinet Office recently commissioned work to provide an insight as to what is happening elsewhere in the world, as mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, and to gain a wider appreciation of the technical issues behind a scheme. It is right to do this exploratory work to help understand how we get the best value out of the system. The matter is currently under active consideration by Ministers.

These days, a very large proportion of society—some three-quarters—owns a mobile phone and it seems appropriate to use phones as a vehicle for sending alerts to citizens. However, their wide appeal hides complexity in using them in an alerting scheme. It seems prudent to explore the situations where a scheme would stand the best chance of successfully reducing harm, which is where the police have a major role to play, especially in fast-moving terrorist incidents. There are already a number of schemes in the UK and internationally with very different objectives, delivered in different ways at different costs.

The sort of scheme that the Government have in mind should build upon arrangements already in place, such as the very successful flood warning scheme run by the Environment Agency. To have additional value and reach the maximum number of potentially affected people, our desirable characteristic for a scheme is one which addresses emergencies in general and is of national stature since emergencies do not respect administrative boundaries, as demonstrated in recent years. Importantly, we believe such a scheme should not involve citizens having to take any action to receive a message, such as having to install an app on to their smartphone. As such, we envisage it to be rather like a reverse 999 scheme. By using such a scheme only for real emergencies, thereby keeping the threshold for use high, a scheme will hopefully attract the same level of importance within society as calling 999 or 112. We also see any scheme as being as inclusive as possible by delivering messages to as many citizens as we can reach and to mobile devices that are not necessarily of the latest technology.

A number of noble Lords, including my noble friend Lord Arbuthnot and the noble Lord, Lord Rees, focused on how crucial it is to get the message right. That point was also made by the noble Lord, Lord Paddick. The noble Lord, Lord Rees, helpfully suggested some guidelines for the sorts of messages that go through. Traditionally, alerting schemes address slow-burn incidents such as flooding. In these, the hazard is understood, the location is increasingly known and the evolution of the situation is by and large readily comprehensible. In comparison, fast-moving terrorist incidents probably require a different response. The response could be both temporal and geographic, with a timely low-content alert in the immediate vicinity of the incident and different content sent more widely to advise people entering the affected area on foot or in vehicles both public and private. As a consequence, in-depth work needs to be undertaken at both a policy level in the Home Office—to answer some of the questions about where responsibility initially lies—and operationally with the police to see how an alerting scheme fits with existing response arrangements for major incidents, as described by the noble Lord, Lord Paddick.

Most of the schemes around the world tend to broadcast messages to phones that are in the vicinity of a mobile phone mast—a scheme aptly called cell broadcast. There is an alternative that looked very attractive in the trials that the Cabinet Office reported on in 2014 where text messages are sent to phones in a specified area, much like cell broadcast, but since the phones are uniquely identified they can receive subsequent messages even if they leave the area of danger. That arrangement could have been useful in Salisbury, for example, where a nerve agent was used in an attempt to murder the Skripals and people in the area at the time needed to be contacted later.

A number of noble Lords mentioned the tragedy at Grenfell, where a facility of this kind could have meant that people in the tower could get information on their mobile phones that could not otherwise be communicated. That is a compelling case for making faster progress. These schemes all involve having a message involuntarily pushed to a mobile phone in a specified area. By keeping the threshold for use of a scheme high—for real emergencies where lives are at risk—we hope that recipients would not see it as intrusive and that the benefits would outweigh concerns over privacy.

A real challenge for all alerting schemes in terrorist incidents is that the protagonists will also receive the messages. Getting the content of the message right is absolutely crucial so it does not play into the hands of those who seek to cause harm. As a consequence, there is work to be done to shape the content of the message—that has been a theme coming out of this debate—so that it stands the best chance of getting the behavioural response sought, while not risking the recipient’s safety. That is a difficult call to make since bland messages would be rather like a news service, and we have plenty of those on social media.

The introduction of a scheme is not without considerable cost, but there may be an opportunity to contain the cost to the public purse. The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport is transposing Article 102a of the European Electronic Communications Code into law before we leave the European Union. The code makes provision for reverse 112, which is an alerting scheme by a different name. As part of the transposition, consideration can be given to whether the costs should lie with those who own and operate our mobile phone systems in much the same way as occurs for 999.

On mobile alerting, I can tell noble Lords that the Government take it seriously and are adopting a considered approach to explore how a scheme may be introduced that reduces harm to citizens alongside wider work to keep people safe in emergencies.

I shall try to answer some of the questions raised during the debate. I am conscious that I may not be able to do justice to all of them. One of the themes introduced by my noble friend Lord Arbuthnot and developed by other noble Lords was about the resilience of the electricity system. The national grid is extremely resilient to mass failure and has not completely failed since it was wired up from the regional companies in the 1930s. Plans are in place to restore the grid in the event of a catastrophic failure—the so-called black start arrangements. I accept my noble friend’s invitation to write to him in more detail about that. We are currently reviewing the preparedness for a major power outage, and I understand that the noble Lord, Lord Harris, is actively involved in those discussions.

There was concern about the replacement of Airwave with ESN. It is designed to be as resilient as Airwave on coverage and hazards such as power outages. Priority will be provided for the emergency services. They will have pre-emption and, if circumstances demand, they can kick off members of the public, but it is being designed to have adequate capacity in the event of emergencies, and 4G has been substantially rolled out in recent years.

On putting all our eggs in one basket, I understand the point being made, but Airwave is no different from ESN in that both are stand-alone networks. ESN is leading technology, although I understand that South Korea is ahead of us. Airwave was a pioneer. It was the first system of its type and will remain in place until ESN is proven. ESN handsets are currently available and have been demonstrated since the spring. Capacity on 4G is very much greater than it was on the 2G system in use during the 7/7 incident, and it is very different from 2G from a technical perspective.

I was struck by the point made by the noble Viscount, Lord Brookeborough, about the media. It was a subject that I had not thought about before: the way an incident is reported can give assistance to terrorists. I take very much to heart the point he made that the media should be responsible in how they report the discovery of certain incidents. There is a lot to be gained from the experience in Northern Ireland when, as he said, a police officer in plain clothes would miraculously come across a cache of weapons, thereby not revealing the real source of that information.

We must continue to learn lessons from the emergency services about the recent Manchester Arena attack. The noble Viscount made the point that we should learn lessons, and we are looking at lessons across all the incidents that took place in 2017 and this year. The Kerslake review was broadly positive about the emergency services’ response and preparations, although there are lessons to be learned, and some noble Lords touched on some of them. We have improved interoperability during major incidents through the joint emergency services interoperability principles— JESIP—and we will continue to improve it. More than 12,000 emergency service commanders and control room managers have already been trained, alongside their peers.

I see that the clock is ticking and I am conscious that I have not done justice to the very important speech of the noble Lord, Lord Rees. On Vodafone and the issue of enhancement of helpline services, the Home Office immediately acted on the problems with this service during the Manchester Arena attack, and has firm assurances and confirmation that robust arrangements are in place to prevent it happening again. It is an important service to ensure that the concerned public can contact the police.

As I said, I will write to noble Lords and thank them again for a very interesting and well-informed debate, which I know the Government will take seriously as they take the decisions referred to during this discussion.

House adjourned at 7.38 pm.