Ian Lisk.

Q61 The Chair: Welcome to the second session of the Lords Select Committee on Risk Assessment and Risk Planning. As a witness, we have Ian Lisk, chair of the Natural Hazards Partnership and head of the Hazards Partnership at the Met Office. As before, a transcript of the meeting will be taken and published on the Committee website, and you will have the opportunity to make corrections to that transcript where necessary.

Mr Lisk, perhaps I might begin by asking: what is the role of the Natural Hazards Partnership in providing advice to the Government on natural hazards and in the national risk assessment process?

Ian Lisk: Thank you. I thought it would be useful to give a little context, and then go into the role. The Natural Hazards Partnership has been around for the last 10 years. It is good to be here today, because we have an ongoing multihazard, Storm Christoph, affecting large parts of the United Kingdom today. It is the very definition of the questions you are going to be asking me. Large parts of the UK have been affected today, and north-east Scotland will continue to be affected through tomorrow.

I have been chair of the NHP since 2013—unbelievably; eight years have spun past very, very quickly. I am based at the Met Office. For information, because this will inform my answers to some of the questions, I was also elected president of the United Nations agency the World Meteorological Organization’s Commission for Weather, Climate, Water and Related Environmental Services and Applications in 2019. I am also responsible for leading the development and implementation of global strategies and best practices in all those service areas—so some of my answers will be comparing what we do in the UK with what is seen as international best practice. I just wanted to put that context on the table.

The NHP was conceived to build on the success of the operational partnership of the Met Office and Environment Agency flood forecasting centre. That is still an internationally renowned operational partnership for the delivery of flood services. So the concept was, “It’s working for flooding, let’s look at all the other natural hazards, to provide a joined-up authoritative voice to government and the responder community”.

The NHP is underpinned by a memorandum of understanding. The governance is quite light-touch; that is one of its attractions. It is quite flexible, friendly and informal. It comprises 19 partners. The most important thing is that it provides this forum for the exchange of independent and authoritative information, advice, research and analysis on natural hazards, to support the development of high-quality and consistent—that is such an important word—natural hazards-related services and advice to UK Governments and the responder community.

The Cabinet Office, the Government Office for Science, Defra, the Department for Transport, Public Health England, the Welsh Government and the Scottish Government all sit on the NHP as key stakeholders, and are therefore expert users and advisers in the work of the wider group. The NHP is currently not public facing, although the website that we maintain is viewable by the public, but we do look to exploit the public outreach and engagement of our many partners to help inform our priorities moving forward.

Q62 The Chair: We have a national risk assessment process. Do you think it works?

Ian Lisk: Yes, without a shadow of a doubt. It would be easy to be glib and say that the number one risk on the national risk register since its inception 15 years ago has been pandemic. So, in its most simplistic terms, the expert advice and assessment of likelihood and severity has evidenced the number one risk, which we have been living through over the course of the last 10 months.

Putting my international hat on, I can tell you that the process that the Government use is envied around the world. It is viewed internationally as a model of absolute best practice. It has been referenced by countless international organisations, not just the World Meteorological Organization but the OECD, the UNISDR/UNDRR and the European Commission. It has been promoted as a model that other countries and Governments should follow as an excellent process for bringing together the very best scientific advice, both nationally from within our borders and also, where necessary, engaging with our colleagues and friends from around the world to help improve those assessments.

The Chair: So we spotted that pandemic was the number one risk. How well do you think we have dealt with it?

Ian Lisk: It has been an interesting 10 months; there are no two ways about it. In 2010, I was involved in the eruption of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull. That was a bit of a wake-up call, and I will come back to that in some of my answers in a bit. The biggest challenge with the pandemic has been the unimaginable extent of the various impacts and the longevity of the event. Going back to 2010, as an example with the volcano, as a nation we are very, very good with the risk assessment process of dealing with events of a shorter duration—a few days or maybe a few weeks. The longevity of this particular event has stretched everybody to the absolute limit and continues to do so.

Q63 Lord Rees of Ludlow: Is the volcano not an example of where, if there had been proper preparedness, there would not have been an overreaction? People did not know how severe the effect was on jet engines, so there was an overreaction. Perhaps the main lesson we can learn from that is the real importance of exploring all the scenarios before the event happens. Would you agree with that?

Ian Lisk: I completely agree with your assessment of having the very best scientific advice collected together and doing horizon scanning for unknown unknowns. With Eyjafjallajökull, we had always known there were volcanos up there in Iceland. Again, it was the severity and longevity of that event was the issue; it was a wake-up call. I will reference this later on, but we worked very closely with Rolls-Royce in the ensuing years to now have a much better understanding of the impact of volcanic ash on aircraft engines. That has been a really interesting piece of work, which I have personally been involved in, both domestically and globally, to develop new standards.

Following the volcanic ash crisis of 2010, the national risk assessment process was reassessed in terms of what else (other hazards) is out there that perhaps we should be worrying about but we are not necessarily expecting. As a result of that, the two main risks that have been added subsequently are space weather—solar flares—informed by expert assessment internationally and domestically, and volcanic sulphur dioxide, which is another risk imported from Iceland. That is a large, effusive eruption causing impacts on air quality over the UK for a long-duration event of that sort. As is always the case, a crisis at the time has driven some really sensible and world-leading research and scientific advice to learn lessons from what happened in 2010.

Lord Rees of Ludlow: Do you think your 17 members collectively have the range of expertise to be alert to these new and unfamiliar threats?

Ian Lisk: The NHP is a forum for the experts who are part of the partnership to exchange ideas and the collective experience across a range of hazards, but those members also have big networks that they can bring to the meetings of the NHP, either in the science subgroups or to the steering group meetings, to present on new areas that we perhaps need to be looking at.

I can give you a couple of nice examples. We have had the University of Durham come and present to the NHP on issues relating to tsunami risks. We had a very interesting presentation about 18 months ago on near‑earth objects from a UK expert in that particular field. So the great thing about the NHP is that we may not always have all the experts around the table, but between those 17 partners—in fact, it is 19 now—we will always have somebody who knows the network that we need to talk to in order to gather that information.

Lord Rees of Ludlow: I have one more question about timescales and how far you look ahead. For some purposes, such as insurance premiums, you want to know the present risk of, for example, a one-in-1,000-year event, whereas we know that a lot of these events are getting more probable year by year. In building new infrastructure, you do not care just about the likelihood now; you also care about the likelihood years ahead. To what extent do you consider both these issues, the present probability and also emergent threats that need to be taken account of, in building infrastructure?

Ian Lisk: That is an excellent question. The NHP focuses on two timescales. The first is the here and now, the response, the next five to 10 days, in terms of delivering co‑ordinated preparation and planning services, leaning on the mandated responsibilities of warning agencies such as the Environment Agency, the Met Office and the Scottish Environment Protection Agency. We also have a review and challenge role in the national security risk assessment process. We play in the game of the next two years, consistent with that process, and a five-year trend—there is now a five-year trend attached to the national security risk assessment.

Beyond that, at our last steering group meeting, which inevitably was virtual in the world that we live in at the moment, we were delighted to welcome Kathryn Brown from the Committee on Climate Change, who provided an update on the climate change risk assessment process. We have worked, and will continue to work, with Kathryn and her team on the development of the climate change risk assessment process. Again, that takes us into the environs of much longer-term climate change impacts, which I notice came up many, many times in the previous evidence session.

Q64 Lord Robertson of Port Ellen: Welcome to this session, Mr Lisk. The research that has been done for the Committee showed a number of hazards that you have identified that do not appear in the national risk register: severe lightning, severe rain, severe space weather, near-earth objects, et cetera. Do you think there are other natural hazards that we are ill-prepared for?

Ian Lisk: I do not think there are, on the basis of the collective scientific evidence that we collect through the NHP, going back to what I was saying about our networks domestically and internationally. Within the national security risk assessment construct, these exceptionally low-likelihood hazards figure on the next table down but do not appear on the formal national risk register itself. A tsunami, for example, is the subject of an ongoing review at the moment, but the scientific evidence, largely informed by historical precedents to define that all-important worst-case scenario, still does not provide enough of a heightened risk to suggest that it meets the category for formal inclusion on the national risk register.

One of the key roles of the NHP is to bring these experts in to present on the unknown unknowns. Because the Cabinet Office sits on the NHP, it gets a view of that. We will do further analysis, working with the Cabinet Office and the Government Office for Science, to inform whether we have correctly analysed that all-important likelihood quotient.

Lord Robertson of Port Ellen: That is interesting. Sir Mark Walport gave evidence at a previous session, where he made the point that one of the biggest problems in dealing with hazards and emergencies is in logistics. It seems to me, as somebody who has a defence background, that the military constantly rehearses and exercises scenarios. It seems to me that there is an absence of that in this field. Would it not make sense, in terms of these hazards and emergencies where we are not doing actual exercises, to involve the military routinely in the way we examine these things, rather than after the effect and down the line?

Ian Lisk: It is interesting that you should raise that, because I have been involved in a number of tabletop exercises for a variety of hazards. I have mentioned the volcanic gas eruption. When Chris Whitty was acting Chief Scientific Adviser, he chaired that meeting, and we had representation on that tabletop exercise from the Ministry of Defence. I am not going to argue for one moment that the exercising of scenarios and the response activities to tease out where there may be gaps and to involve all the relevant departments, the Ministry of Defence included, is not the right thing to do. But certainly, for the hazards where I am regarded as an expert, I have been involved in those tabletop exercises in the past, so there are good examples of where they are taking place.

Lord Robertson of Port Ellen: I have one final question. You said earlier that our processes were the envy of the rest of the world. How come, if we predicted pandemic as the number one risk and hazard, we now have the worst record for coronavirus in the world, with a failure of test and trace, a failure on the supply of PPE and last-minute planning for the rollout of the vaccine? If that is the envy of the world, what does it say about the rest of the world?

Ian Lisk: It is an interesting point. There needs to be analysis of what has happened over the last 10 months and where we go over the next six to 12 months, both in the UK and internationally, including why different parts of the world have been differently impacted in terms of cases, deaths and all the rest of it. The World Meteorological Organization has set up a task team to look at issues such as this, to get a better understanding of the climatic factors of this disease, its impact on human behaviours and a variety of other social and political factors. I do not think anybody has the answers at the moment—certainly not me sat here.

Q65 Lord Clement-Jones: Morning, Mr Lisk. One theme to emerge over the evidence we have already taken, which comes through quite strongly, is the way in which non-static or stand-alone risks, such as chronic risks, cascading risks or interconnected risks, are accounted for in the risk assessment process of the NSRA. Is the current process effective in accounting for these kinds of risks? If not, how could it be improved?

Ian Lisk: That is a great question: many thanks for it. Within the national security risk assessment at the moment, links and compounding risks are already a part of the process. For each of the risks that are assessed, there is a section within the national security risk assessment where other hazards that could compound that risk or are interdependent with it are assessed through a couple of paragraphs.

This is a really difficult area do to do well. I have worked with the Cabinet Office and the Government Office for Science through the Natural Hazards Partnership to explore different ways of doing this in a better, less subjective, more objective way. How do you bring all these sectors of world‑leading science, advice and mapping capabilities together into a much more integrated, interdependent model that squirts out a nice answer in terms of the overall impact? It is very, very hard to do.

Again with my international hat on, I have trawled the world, not just in advance of this hearing, and it is not a nut that any country has cracked in a way that provides this nice, seamless, “There’s a bit of weather; there’s some flooding. Here’s the impacts and all the other things that can play a part in making that worse or better”. So, yes, we can always do better on that. Yes, it should figure as a high-priority research activity moving forward. But, as a bit of expectation management, it is really, really hard to do.

Lord Clement-Jones: I take that on board. You have a very impressive website, but by and large that is all the separate hazards that are set out. You have this statement on the website saying, “Interdependency between risks continues to be an emerging area of work for the NRA. We consider multi-hazard events to be a key priority for future research”. You talk about modelling of hazards and so on. This is obviously something that you have in mind, but how are you going to take that forward in terms of that modelling?

Ian Lisk: As one of its big priority activities, the Natural Hazards Partnership has developed the hazard impact framework. The hazard impact framework is basically looking to develop a common and consistent approach to the modelling and forecasting of natural hazard impacts. To use a bit of a rough phrase, we can then mash together different datasets for different hazards, different mapping capabilities and different impact assessments, to provide, as I have described, this nice, objective assessment of risk, rather than the rather more subjective assessments that we are currently capable of doing, not just here in the United Kingdom but around the world at the moment.

The hazard impact framework is designed to be interoperable, so that you can mash together these varying datasets. Again, with all the different organisations involved, that requires data that is interoperable from a wide range of backgrounds. A big challenge, which I will probably come back to later, is about the different underpinning data policies that a range of different organisations have. Even within government, different departments promote different data polices. Defra is very, very open, for example.

So that again is one of the challenges with the interoperable framework. That is all well and good, but we still need to be able to share the data in a way that we can then use within this interoperable framework. That in itself is a bit of a challenge, not just here in the UK but around the world.

Lord Clement-Jones: That is really interesting. So it feeds into the national data strategy discussion, which is very current. Are there any good international examples where other countries are ahead of us in this respect?

Ian Lisk: It is a mixed bag. The United States is much more joined up. All public data is freely and openly available. That is designed so that the private sector can exploit the value of that data in terms of social and economic benefit. The Americans have quite a good model for data sharing, but it is not without its issues; do not get me wrong.

Globally, the World Meteorological Organization’s number one priority at the moment is the agreement of a global data policy for a more open exchange of a range of datasets for weather, flooding and other environmental hazards. This would facilitate a more interoperable approach globally, allowing us to mash these datasets together using the extraordinary science advances we have had in modelling and all the data that we have from our observational capabilities. For example, we can integrate the arrays of satellites that we have up there into these models to give these better risk assessments.

But we have to be able to share the data in a much quicker and more efficient way than we currently can. That is a role for the WMO, but it is the number one global priority at the moment within that organisation.

Q66 Lord Mair: In response to Lord Clement-Jones’s question, you talked about the hazard impact framework. You used the word “consistent” a number of times, including in your answer to the first question of the session. How do you ensure this consistency? Can you elaborate on that? You mentioned tsunamis, for example; a tsunami is a very low-probability but extremely high-impact event. Many thousands of years ago, there was a tsunami off the Norwegian coast that probably led to a four-metre rise in the water level, which inundated a significant part of Scotland. Can you explain to us how you ensure consistency in evaluating very different sorts of risks?

Ian Lisk: You are very well informed about the Norwegian landslip tsunami risk. The tsunami issue found its way into the NHP because of the work done by the University of Durham on that particular hazard, which I think happened about 7,000 years ago. It is a big challenge, but that is one of the reasons why the NHP is the right organisation to be a curator of developing a consistent way of measuring the severity of hazards and their likelihood.

I am not going to pretend that it is easy. It is very challenging. Operationally, the ways in which we measure the severity of hazards have different levels of maturity. The Met Office national severe weather warning service is very mature. It has been impact-based for 10 years and we have very clear guidelines for the way in which we assess the severity of weather events, which are used to inform how the Environment Agency does its flood warnings, again through this partnership activity, with communication and sharing of best practice.

It gets much more difficult when you get into these less frequently occurring hazards. Thinking about the conversation on local versus national that figured in your earlier session today, how do you measure the severity of impact of something like a dam burst? Its spatial extent is very, very small compared to what we have going on today, which is a nationwide event. It is challenging.

In the NHP, there are lots of discussions involving not just science experts but operational experts and end users. This activity has to be driven by what the end user wants, at the end of the day. It cannot be informed just by what the experts think is the right thing to do. It has to be useful and applicable to end users. That has been a focus of the NHP for the last 10 years.

For operations and hazards over the next five to 10 days, we have something called the hazard impact matrix, which could conceivably be transposed into the national security risk assessment process. It looks to achieve a consistent approach to the severity of hazard impacts for all the 15 or so natural hazards that the NHP reports on each day. It is an agreed matrix, working with all the partners and experts, checked with the users. That is the way we look to achieve a more consistent approach to doing it. It is one of the key roles of the NHP.

Lord Mair: You mentioned weather, which is hugely important, and climate change. Not to dwell too much on the tsunami example, because there are many others, it is thought that there are still some questions about what triggered that tsunami. One of the triggers could well have been melting glaciers depositing sediments. We know that melting glaciers are a real phenomenon now. How does your matrix deal with that kind of new change, which is almost certainly linked with climate change?

Ian Lisk: The matrix does not deal with that at all. It is explicitly for the next five to 10 days, although we are looking to adapt it for wider uses within the national security risk assessment. We are working closely with the Cabinet Office to improve the assessment of the likelihood, severity and interdependence of risks.

On climate change, we use the networks of the organisations within the NHP, whether it is the Met Office, the British Geological Survey for landslides or the various NERC centres—the Natural Environment Research Council also sits as a member on the NHP—to promote the application of some of those principles within longer-term research. As an explicit task, the NHP does not have a climate change impacts activity that at the moment, although obviously we encourage the promotion of some of those principles for additional applications, such as climate change risk assessments and the national security risk assessment.

Lord Mair: Do you think your framework could be extended to consider non-natural risks? What benefits and challenges might be associated with that?

Ian Lisk: It does not lend itself very easily to doing that. Some of the very basic principles underpinning it are about danger to life and destruction; we have three Ds [1]. Those elements of it would perhaps be transposable, but it is explicitly designed to look at natural hazards, rather than malicious threats.

Again, something we have been approached to tackle, with the national security risk assessment process through the Cabinet Office, is the further exploitation of the hazard impact framework, and other ways, which perhaps we have not thought of, that it could be employed as a practice in other arenas.

Lord Mair: You mentioned earlier the need to address unknown unknowns. Perhaps unknown unknowns are more relevant to the non-natural risks.

Ian Lisk: That is an entirely justifiable view, but from a Natural Hazards Partnership perspective our raison d’être is natural hazards. It is for our friends in the Cabinet Office to use some of what we have done in the hazards area, and to consider whether what we have developed over the last 10 years could apply to unknown unknowns on the malicious side. But that is outside my expertise.

Q67 Viscount Thurso: I have a short question, so I will ask a follow-up to Lord Mair’s question. I am speaking to you from the north coast of Scotland, which is the point at which the Norwegian tsunami would arise. We have talked a lot about rising sea levels, and 12 miles along the coast is a relatively new intermediate-level nuclear waste facility. Those are several dots that, if joined up, could be a pretty severe hazard. Who in the pantheon of government and agencies is responsible for joining those dots?

Ian Lisk: The national security risk assessment looks at the next five years. The climate change risk assessment picks up the baton from there. As I have said, we have had presentations and interactions with the Committee on Climate Change, for example, to do those longer-term assessments, based on the latest climate change work from the Met Office. The climate projections UKCP18 were released a couple of years back, and are being used to inform those longer-term projections from within government. The climate change risk assessment and the usual suspects, the Government Office for Science and the cross-departmental government bodies, will be involved in those processes.

Viscount Thurso: I cannot say I am overly encouraged by “the usual suspects”. But my question is, what one policy recommendation would you suggest to this Committee to recommend to government?

Ian Lisk: I have mentioned it already. Because of the importance of this interoperability and the better exploitation of the amazing science that we have available across a wide range of arenas, the policy area I am most interested in would be about better facilitating the exchange of data across the various agencies involved in coming up with the interoperable development of hazard-impact models, to inform both near-time risk assessments and the longer-term side of things. So for me it is about the easier exchange and sharing of data between the expert organisations.

Q68 Lord Triesman: I was very relieved to hear that you were taking part in a large number of tabletop exercises. I wonder whether anybody has published any research on the effectiveness of your tabletop exercises, or whether you have an internal challenge function that tries to shred them and see whether anything better can be done. You may tell me I am wrong but, supposing that there has not been a lot done on that, what sort of expertise would you welcome in the room to make sure that you are doing that as effectively as possible?

Ian Lisk: I am not aware of any evaluation of those tabletop exercises. They are usually led out of the Government Office for Science, which has been the lead on the tabletop exercises in which I have been involved in the past. It does not mean that evaluation has not been done; I am just not aware of it. We work with the Government Office for Science to identify experts who can help support exercises on the more obscure hazards. That is all I can say; I am sorry I cannot give you a fuller answer on the evaluation of their success or otherwise.

Q69 Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean: I am following up on the questions Lord Clement-Jones raised with you earlier. Most of the hazards you have described have become international challenges. How do you decide how much information you should share internationally? Is it for you and your colleagues to make that decision, or do you regard that as a government decision, on some quite difficult and sensitive issues?

Ian Lisk: That is an excellent question; thank you for it. At the NHP, we share our knowledge and the work that we do widely and internationally. We do not share the details of the national security risk assessments themselves. We are bound in what we can and cannot do by government policies, and we are very, very clear on that. We have been very, very open in sharing best practice, the NHP processes and the existence of the national risk register itself, which is a publicly available product, in all sorts of international for a around the world.

Q70 Lord Robertson of Port Ellen: This is a very quick question. How many staff do you have, and is it enough?

Ian Lisk: The NHP comprises representatives from its 19 members. It does not have a dedicated funding line. It is something that the organisations have agreed to do, and to dedicate their experts to: to give that collective view. There are no dedicated staff and my chairmanship of the NHP is about providing the necessary coordination in the areas that we have agreed to focus on. We could perhaps improve it by having more formalised line of accountability in how we work with the likes of the Cabinet Office and GO-Science so that we have clear responsibilities moving forward.

NHP collaboration is set out in an MoU. It is a collection of experts from those organisations. To quote Sir Mark Walport, we are doing the sort of stuff we should be doing in a forum to share expertise and ideas.

Lord Robertson of Port Ellen: Do you think it could be more effective if it was more formal?

Ian Lisk: There is an argument that formalising our accountability and responsibilities with cross-departmental bodies, such as the Cabinet Office and the Government Office for Science, would certainly not do anybody any harm. But there are advantages to the more informal way that we work in terms of open ideas, sharing expertise and bringing people in from outside the partnership. A little more formalisation and clear accountability as to where we sit within government decision‑making and the hazards arena would not do us any harm.

Q71 Lord Browne of Ladyton: I think this is a very simple question, but it may not turn out to be. You have shared with us your own experience of participation in tabletop exercises. Would it be possible for us to get from the Cabinet Office and the Government Office for Science a list of those tabletop exercises that have been carried out, say, over the last 10 years? That would be helpful, to inform us of whether this is adequate, or maybe we could test its efficacy.

Secondly, you have shared with us the constraint on your work of your inability to mash data from separate sources together. Could you just share with us any other constraints that you think impact the NHP’s ability to input into the national risk assessment process?

Ian Lisk: On the first question about tabletop exercises, I do not have that information. The Government Office for Science and the relevant government departments would have it. I am afraid I cannot explicitly help you with that one, but the sources of that information are those responsible bodies themselves.

You asked me about the mashing-of-data issue as well. Could you repeat that question?

Lord Browne of Ladyton: When you were answering Lord Clement‑Jones’s question, you spoke in some detail about this challenge and difficulty. I do not want to go back to that. I want you to think about other constraints that impact on your ability to input into the national risk assessment process and share them with us.

Ian Lisk: I beg your pardon: it was the classic thing where I thought of the answer and forgot it in giving my first answer. One challenge we still have is that not all our agencies have the adequate level of clearance to fully review some of the more classified information contained within the national security risk assessment process. I as the Met Office am properly vetted and what have you, but some of our partners do not have that level of clearance. That has proved to be a challenge in terms of being able to do a full review of the complete process from end to end, because some of that information is protected. Again, we are working with the Cabinet Office to find out how we can address that. That has proved to be an issue. Over the last 12 months we have been able to do a much wider review involving all the necessary experts.

Lord Browne of Ladyton: Is that is the only one you can think of?

Ian Lisk: Yes.

The Chair: That was a very interesting session altogether. I would like to thank you, Mr Lisk, for your evidence today, as well as the rest of the committee and our staff, and draw this meeting to a close.