Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what assessment he has made of the level of the increase in Huawei equipment used in UK 5G mobile networks to date; and what the proportion was of Huawei equipment in UK mobile 3G networks in 2010.

The Telecoms Supply Chain Review report (published in July 2019) set out estimates of Huawei’s market share in the UK focused on 4G and full fibre networks. The Review did not collect information that would allow us to estimate Huawei’s market share in 3G networks either now or in 2010.

Analysis from the Review assessed that there would likely be a significant increase in the use of Huawei equipment for 5G access networks overall compared to the use of its equipment in current (3G/4G) networks.

In January the Government set out the conclusions from the Telecoms Supply Chain Review in relation to high risk vendors including that they should be excluded from the sensitive core of the network and restricted to a cap of up to 35% in the access network, subject to an NCSC approved mitigation strategy.

On 14 July, the Government set out further restrictions on the use of Huawei equipment in the UK’s 5G networks, by advising operators against procuring affected Huawei 5G equipment, and to remove all Huawei equipment from the 5G network by 2027.