16
Examination of witness
Lord Ricketts.
Q71 The Chair: Good morning. Welcome to this morning’s evidence session of the House of Lords Risk Assessment and Risk Planning Select Committee. Today we will be concentrating on the security aspect of risk and we will be doing it in two parts.
Our first witness in Lord Ricketts, the first of the country’s National Security Advisers. As usual, a transcript of the meeting will be taken and published on the Committee’s website, and you will have the opportunity to make corrections to that where necessary.
Lord Ricketts, welcome to our session. During your tenure as National Security Adviser, what was your assessment of the national risk assessment process? How well do you think risks were accounted for by this process? During the process we have been through we have also seen the merging of the non-threat focused national risk assessment and the threat focused national security risk assessment. What is your view about that general question?
Lord Ricketts: We set up the National Security Council in 2010 and we inherited a national risk register that, from memory, had about 80 risks on it with another 40 or so that could become risks. The Government had published a rather basic national risk register document in 2008, I think. We decided that we would, in parallel with setting up a National Security Council, do a national security risk assessment and publish a prioritised list of the top-tier risks. We did that because we wanted to do it alongside the strategic defence and security review so that we had a joined-up strategy, starting with ends and then going through ways and means. Relying on a list of 80 unprioritised national security risks did not seem to us to be the right way to go. Also, to confine it to civil emergency risks—in effect, the risks that could occur domestically—would not provide us with the sort of prioritisation of risks that we needed for the national security community.
We went through a risk prioritisation process and, as the Committee will have seen, we published a list of 15 top-tier risks in our 2010 national security strategy. By the nature of government documents, by the time the 2015 review came out that had grown to 20. I think it is one of the laws of government documents that if you have a list it will always grow. Now I look at the 2020 national risk register and I see it has grown again and become much more complex. It now has 38 risks measured along axes with five different levels of impact and five different levels of likelihood. While I am sure that is rigorous and valuable, I do not think it is much guide to prioritising resources.
My answer to your question is we came in when we set up the structure in 2010 and found a list that was comprehensive but not much help to government departments in setting priorities. We tried to give them that in the list in 2010. Now I see we are back to a very long, very complex document that sets out pretty well every conceivable risk but does not give priorities. That is my question about it. I have no difficulty with merging a national risk register and a national security risk register as long as the outcome is a document that helps government departments set their priorities and adjust their resources. Maybe we will get that prioritisation in this integrated review, which we are still waiting for, but my concern at the current state of affairs is that it is comprehensive but not prioritised. I am sorry for a long answer.
The Chair: Would you say that it is too complicated being as comprehensive as it is?
Lord Ricketts: I am sure there is a value in a comprehensive document and, indeed, there is probably one behind it, which is even longer, talking of the 80 risks that we had in 2010 , but it is not entirely clear to me what purpose it serves. It is said to be mainly a guide for emergency planners at all levels of government and businesses and other people who have a professional need to manage risks, and that is fine. It also has quite a lot of public information for guiding the public and yet I do not think it has a very high public profile. I am not sure many people would know of its existence to guide them in how to deal with a risk that arose.
I wonder whether it falls between different stools of being partly a guide for the professionals, partly a guide for the public and not much of a guide for government departments in setting priorities.
Q72 Lord Robertson of Port Ellen: Can I ask for a judgment from you, away from your present responsibilities but going back? We have known for some time that a pandemic was identified as being “the most significant potential risk for the nation” and that was highlighted in that major exercise, Operation Cygnus in October 2016. We had a warning about a pandemic, recommendations were made, so can you explain why we have done so badly? Even if the pandemic that was identified was going to be of the flu, surely even then we would have made provision for PPE and tracking and tracing, and we certainly would have put together the logistic pattern for delivering on a vaccine if it had been developed. Why on earth have we done so badly when we had such a clear warning of that risk?
Lord Ricketts: It is a very important question. It gets to the heart of managing risks in government. As you say, Lord Robertson, in the 2010 national security strategy we flagged up as one of our four top risks facing the country the risk of a natural hazard and we identified floods and an influenza pandemic. We developed that in the prose that went alongside it.
What happened after that, as far as I can judge from what has been published, is that government departments did what they were supposed to. No doubt the Cabinet Office Civil Contingencies Unit prodded departments to produce contingency plans. We have seen Department of Health contingency plans in 2011 and 2012 developing the scenarios that might occur. We then had Operation Cygnus in 2016 to practise the plan. All of that is copybook risk planning. But what did not happen is investment of serious money against the contingency. That is the general problem.
By and large, in my experience, Governments invest in risks that are happening—the immediate crisis. In that period we were investing very heavily in counterterrorism, because terrorist attacks were happening; we had been investing very heavily in the military for the international interventions that had been going on in the earlier part of the decade; and we were beginning to invest heavily in cyber because cyberattacks were happening. But we did not invest heavily in preparedness against a major virus pandemic because it was a potential risk—it might happen next month, it might happen in five years or in 15 years.
The problem for government departments, rather prompted by the Treasury, is that they invest money in what is happening right now and they tend not to invest serious money in what might happen but might not. The pandemic is an absolutely classic case of that. The plans that the Department of Health developed flagged up the need for preparedness against large scales of death but it did not provide money, did not lead on to investment in intensive units, in ventilators, in testing and tracing. It was an awful potential risk but there were many other awful potential risks out there and it did not attract the investment. I think there is a real question there.
Lord Robertson of Port Ellen: It was in your top four and, according to the new national risk register, before the pandemic we produced only 1% of PPE in the United Kingdom. The question that I am posing to myself and I ask you as well is: having been warned of this risk, having laid it out and having done an exercise that displayed the inadequacies of our preparation, what faith can we and the public have that some of the other risks, indeed some of the other risks that are not even yet identified, will be handled professionally, properly and safely?
Lord Ricketts: The only confidence we can have is that this has been such a massive wake-up call and in future Governments need to look very hard at the value-for-money issues. I can well imagine that the Treasury would have been arguing, in the light of the Department of Health’s planning documents in 2014 or 2015, “Yes, this is clearly a terrible risk that might happen one day but what is the value-for-money argument for investing now as against putting more money into this winter’s crisis in the NHS and getting through this winter and then on into next year?” It needs a change of government accounting methodology and doctrine to spend money on the potential rather than the immediate crisis.
Q73 Lord Triesman: Can I test those propositions a little bit further? Lord Robertson is obviously right that this was in the top four risks. I can remember a speech by George W Bush—I think it was in 2005 in the White House—saying that in his view it was the top risk as well. Everybody seems to have identified a viral infection as the top risk. I can understand your comment that Governments tend to invest in what is presented to them as being significant on the day.
My questions go to a slightly later period: April and May of last year, when we all knew not that it was a potential risk but it was actually happening. I made these points in an article in the Times on Tuesday. When we knew it was happening and we knew that there was likely to be a vaccine, probably produced by Oxford University in the science domain, we did not know at that stage exactly what the vaccine would look like or what kit would be needed to make it. A number of suggestions were made to the Government about how they could ensure that there was sovereign capacity to make vaccines and we would not have to worry about Brexit or blockages at the Port of Dover, or whatever. Equally there were proposals made about other medicines. My experience of these was not so much that past decisions about money were the issue, but that there was absolutely no correspondence between key bits of the Government in saying, “What do we need to do now?” Most of the ideas vanished into a black hole and were never seen again.
On the day we pass 100,000 deaths it seems to me to be a rather painful experience. How well does government co-ordinate when it is doing the stuff that it predicted would be the highest risk? That is not so much about money but about coherence in government.
Lord Ricketts: Yes, I think you are on a different point there: crisis management. The risk is then happening and you have to deal with it. I cannot tell you why things were handled so poorly in that period, why there was so little real co-ordination across government. That clearly was a problem.
In my own experience—and there are other senior colleagues on this call whose experience is even wider than mine—the UK has been good at managing crises in the past. We had plenty of experience over the 20 years after the Cold War ended at managing international security crises, wars and conflicts of various kinds and other emergencies; terrorist attacks, for example, or the Skripal poisoning. There is a very well-practised COBRA system at the heart of Whitehall, which brings Ministers and all their senior advisers around the table to co-ordinate a crisis. I have lived through many of them, as others on this call have.
I do not know what happened inside government this time. It would be very surprising if there had not been a daily senior COBRA-type co-ordination meeting chaired by a senior Minister that was taking decisions day by day on allocation of resources and setting of priorities. That is how it should happen. Whitehall has the structures to do that and they have been used many times over the last 20 or 30 years. I think it is interesting to understand why they were not, why the National Security Council seems not to have been meeting very regularly in this period of extreme national crisis. The tools are there, Lord Triesman, I think the question is: why were they not used properly?
Lord Triesman: The prediction was that it would be a very serious risk. We get into the point at which you are quite right to describe it as crisis management. In what ways was it possible to translate the recognition that it was a very serious risk into the preparedness for the crisis? That is the gap that I cannot understand.
Lord Ricketts: I think it is the willingness to invest serious amounts of money in capabilities that are not needed immediately but might be needed if this risk occurred. We did not need to have double the number of intensive care beds or double the number of ventilators that the NHS had but when the crisis hit we certainly did need them. It goes back to the willingness to invest money in potentially redundant capabilities that would be crucial if a risk occurred.
Q74 Viscount Thurso: I would like to ask about areas of vulnerability. Are there security risks that the UK is particularly vulnerable to or for which we are poorly prepared? What in your view might be the reasons for these vulnerabilities?
Lord Ricketts: The vulnerabilities would stem from the same generic problem that I am trying to lay out; in other words, if they are potential risks but they have not happened then they are lower down the order for investment of major sums of money than risks that are happening right in front of us at the moment.
Serious investment has been made in mitigating the risks that have occurred. Terrorism and cyberattack are good examples. Now, I assume, the Government will be well prepared for a future viral pandemic because of this one. The areas of vulnerability are ones that have not happened yet but might—probably will—and the Government are not therefore investing. The obvious one is the more extreme impacts of climate change. We have flooding. Flooding has been a natural emergency flagged up for years and yet there are still significant floods.
I point to the stability of the grid in an era of renewable energy, of energy self-sufficiency more generally as coal is phased out, and we are learning about our vulnerability of our trade routes through the short channel crossing. In the last five years as a result of migrant pressures, the now public health emergency and Brexit, we are very vulnerable in our trade routes to a small number of very intensive routes through a small number of ports.
Viscount Thurso: Do you think that in part it is because we identify the risk in the form of a flood or a pandemic or whatever it may be but we do not look at the bit that is going to break? Sir Mark Walport said in his evidence to us that the logistics chain was where the vulnerability was. You have spoken in the Chamber about the human resource and intelligence. Are we correctly assessing the bit that is going to be vulnerable when we look at the risk?
Lord Ricketts: Of course, it is not always an easy thing to do—to have the imagination to spot this. On the pandemic planning, if the civil servants who were writing those plans in 2012 or 2013 had cast their minds to what would happen—the closure of borders, the freezing up of transport links, the movement of people, the nationalist responses that are inevitable when something like this hits where countries will tend to husband their own supplies produced locally of PPE or even vaccines and medicines. People rather assumed that the flow of international trade would continue even in the case of a pandemic. Having the imagination to recognise what those weak links in the chain will be and then fixing them is a real problem.
If we lost the electric grid, all our IT systems would go down. We saw in some of the cyberattacks how major companies were completely paralysed because a cyberattack took out all their communications networks and so now they are investing in redundant communications networks to make sure that does not happen. Those are the sorts of leaps of imagination that planners need to make. Then they need to encourage the keepers of the money to open their wallets.
The Chair: As well as all of our other systems too.
Lord Ricketts: Indeed.
Q75 Lord Browne of Ladyton: Thank you for the contribution you are making to our inquiry. It is fascinating and very helpful. I have a process question and it arises from evidence that we have heard from a number of sources that not all the participants in the risk assessment process have the adequate level of clearance to fully review some of the more classified information that is contained within the process itself. We have heard evidence from people who have been involved in this process—some with senior responsibility—that this has proved a hindrance. Was that your experience and, if so, how do you think we should challenge that? How could we remove that hindrance or at least mitigate it?
Lord Ricketts: Thank you very much. My own memory is that we took the national security risks from the national risk register and turned them into a separate national security risk assessment process. We did that through the National Security Council so that all those who were working on it, and then the Ministers who had to take the decisions on it, were cleared for the necessary level of security to deal with those national security risks.
I did not get very heavily involved with the wider national risk register and the national risk assessment, which I know is classified, as you say. That is one possible argument for maintaining a bit of separation between the national security risks—some of which will be classified and what the Government does to mitigate them will certainly be classified—and the wider national risk register, which used to be called the civil emergencies risk, which is much more about coping with the sorts of things that might hit local government, local planners, businesses and require them to cope with them. People with the necessary classification levels could deal with the more highly classified risks, which will not be of concern so widely.
I must say I have not looked back at the detail of the national risk register but that is one argument for keeping the two streams a bit separate.
Lord Browne of Ladyton: Assuming that distinction, that separation, is consistent, do some places not merge into each other?
Lord Ricketts: They do, and the consequence management rapidly becomes a local unclassified issue that needs to be widely understood. I can imagine some of the hinterland to risks about chemical, nuclear and biological material dispersal will be classified, but the local impacts of that will instantly be something of concern to emergency services and the wider public. There is a point at which classified risk planning needs to open out into consequence management by all the various emergency planning actors.
Q76 Lord O'Shaughnessy: Thank you for joining us. You recently took to Twitter—always a brave move—to say in response to the integrated review that resilience is vital but priorities need to be set and all this needs wide consultation outside. Critically, you also said there is not enough of that.
We have heard already in our evidence sessions from Roger Hargreaves, who is now the director of the Civil Contingencies Secretariat, who also made the same point, and said that finding a way to inject some independent challenge is probably our highest priority for the next round of the NSRA. What is your current assessment of the degree of external consultation that takes place? Part of that consultation might also be taking evidence from the experiences of other countries. Thinking about this pandemic, the countries that have experienced SARS seemed to have coped better and we might have learned those lessons better.
Lord Ricketts: Absolutely. I think I still agree with myself in the sense that I had the impression that the national risk assessment process is quite a closed one, partly because the assessment itself is classified. It tended to happen within government and not allow much scope for external consultation with wider experts, as you say, internationally as well. That is also rather true of the Integrated Review. I noticed that, quite rightly, the review team went out and invited comments from external experts, stakeholders, think tanks, but they seemed to then disappear into a black box and we have not heard what has happened to them. I do not get the impression that the emerging findings have been subject to wider consultation, perhaps because the Government do not want them to leak.
The risk is that these exercises tend to be held within government and there is probably a lot of value in exposing the national risk process to wider consultation but also the potential policy implications as well through the integrated review. I accept that in my period as National Security Adviser we made some effort during the national security strategy to reach out, particularly to think tanks and academics but there was not a great deal of wider consultation.
I will mention briefly that I had the opportunity, while ambassador to France, to participate in a commission that the French Government set up before they produced their 2013 equivalent of the strategic defence and security review, which was 40 or 45 people. It included some commentators, parliamentarians, senior military, former military, myself and a German representative as well. That met quite intensively and exposed the emerging thinking behind their review to a wider external review group, which I thought was quite a useful practice.
Lord O'Shaughnessy: Thank you, that is very helpful.
The Chair: Do you not think it runs the risk of creating huge lobbying campaigns within the Armed Forces, for example, to save things they think might be cut?
Lord Ricketts: Do you not think, Lord Arbuthnot, that they happen anyway?
The Chair: Indeed.
Lord Ricketts: I have not noticed any great reticence on their part.
The Chair: Quite right. Good riposte. Lord O’Shaughnessy.
Lord O'Shaughnessy: Your French example is interesting because it is easy for people once they are outside of government to say they want more transparency when while they were in it they practised nothing of the kind. You have given us a concrete example of that happening in practice in a way that we might learn from, so thank you.
Lord Ricketts: It took place on a gentleman’s agreement that it would not be leaked and people would respect that. By and large they did. It took not the finest detail of the most sensitive policy but the broad strategic thinking, the broad assessments and assumptions, the geopolitical analysis of the world, all of that was conducted with that wider group. I thought it was quite an interesting process. I will be the first to admit we did not hold that in the 2010 review and I do not think it has been the British Government’s practice to do that, although I know in Lord Robertson’s period the 1998 review was subject to quite a lot of external consultation. There are precedents that the Government could look at.
Q77 Lord Willetts: Thank you so much for coming to give evidence to us. Roger Hargreaves, the director of the Civil Contingencies Unit, told us in a previous evidence session that the risk assessment process was “pleasingly free of any sense of political interference”. You have been describing to us this morning this process that begins with risk assessment then leads to prioritisation and then, we hope, leads to public spending. How do Ministers fit into that process? How do you ensure they are properly engaged?
Lord Ricketts: In the case I had experience of in 2010, Ministers were not involved in the early stages of our risk assessment process. Our effort to measure risks against a matrix of impact and likelihood, which I think has now become embedded in the practice, was done among officials but we then took the emerging result to Ministers and we made them sit down and focus on what we had boiled out of the 15 top priorities. We were determined to offer them a shortish list of the highest-risk areas, because that is the only way you can get any prioritisation in resource planning. I had the impression it was not a familiar exercise for many Ministers to sit down and think about risk in those terms. For example, a risk of a nuclear attack on the UK would not be in our highest risk category because although the impact is devastating, likelihood is low because of our mitigation measures. Political judgment comes in at the end to validate or question, challenge and change and then validate a list of priorities on the basis of the wider risk assessment process. I think it is healthy if those two stages are kept separate but in the end Ministers have to own the risk prioritisation that they set.
Lord Willetts: This morning you have talked about the National Security Council and COBRA exercises. Do you think that, between them, those provide enough ministerial engagement? Are there other ways in which across government people can share in the prioritisation process and begin to see the interactions between their specific departmental responsibilities and what is happening more widely?
Lord Ricketts: Our experience in 2010 was that we ran this process in the National Security Council with the Ministers there and then it went to full Cabinet for final endorsement, as did the wider strategic defence and security review. That process went on through a fairly classic British Government approach of first, a Cabinet committee and then the full Cabinet. The great advantage of the COBRA mechanism, as many on this call know, is that it is very flexible indeed. Different groups of Ministers will attend, depending on the subject, whether it is an ash cloud in Iceland or a pandemic or a flood or a terrorist attack. But I think that in the end the overall priority setting has to be worked in a group such as the NSC and then put to the full Cabinet so that it has full government backing.
Lord Willetts: You think that the machinery of government does not need any adjustment in this area. You think that we have a mechanism that can function.
Lord Ricketts: Yes. I think we have a tried and trusted mechanism that is so flexible that it can adjust to any kind of threat and it can meet every day if necessary. I am a bit surprised to hear that it has not been. There has not been that sort of daily structure in Whitehall to co-ordinate the Covid response; perhaps I am wrong. It feels like to me like it may have been spread across a number of different ministerial committees and groups, not necessarily always tightly co-ordinated, whereas the discipline of a single daily point where Whitehall comes together under a senior Minister and decides the priorities has a lot of value. Many people in Whitehall hate it because it generates new requirements for work every day before they have completed the last one, but it is the best way of keeping the Government aligned. It is the practice that Britain has developed over 100 years from the Committee of Imperial Defence and the way that co-ordination was done in two world wars. The structure is there but it needs to be adjusted crisis by crisis and it needs to be used.
Q78 Lord Browne of Ladyton: This is a question that may be bigger than it appears. We are talking about mechanisms to facilitate the plans or the decisions that are made. Is there a central accountability mechanism to ensure that departments, whom we have heard own the risks once they are identified, draw up adequate plans to do this?
Lord Ricketts: From my experience from the suite of national security strategy and strategic defence and security review in 2010, we set up a mechanism to ensure that commitments were followed up, that decisions had to be owned by a risk owner and followed up, and I think that that system still continues. It is the Cabinet Office’s function to do that and in the case of the pandemic I see evidence from the public record that the Department of Health did go away and produce contingency plans in the light of the 2010 review, but at some point they ran into the sand by not having the investment to go in behind them. You are quite right that there is no point in setting priorities and taking decisions to do things unless they are followed up and progress chasing is done systematically. I think we set up a system that there was to be an annual report to the NSC on progress in implementing the decisions set out in the 2010 documents.
Lord Browne of Ladyton: On that point, we have had in this country since 2017 a national biosecurity strategy that has a process of accountability embedded in it if it involves committees of the NSC. These committees were stood down quite deliberately in 2017 because the capacity was needed for Brexit but they were never put back in place again. We have a strategy with an accountability mechanism and it does not exist.
Lord Ricketts: That goes back to what I was saying. The tools exist but they are useful only if they are taken out of the shed and used.
The Chair: We will need to come back to this.
Lord Clement-Jones: I want to follow up on Lord Browne’s point. Your central argument is that strategy is not being matched by the allocation of resources but we have the central mechanism that could do that if only the process of government or the will was there. Is that right? We do not need a new structure. It is simply that we need to be advertent about the need to do it.
Lord Ricketts: Yes, Lord Clement-Jones. You have summarised my argument well. I think this country has shown it is very capable of mitigating threats and risks when they occur. I have mentioned terrorism and cybersecurity. In both cases I think the agencies and departments have done a remarkable job in mitigating risks that looked horrendous immediately after 9/11 but have been very successfully managed—never reduced to zero but managed effectively. The risks that might happen, are over the horizon but have not yet happened, are the most difficult to prepare for. I think the whole pandemic experience will show, not just in Britain but in other countries, that Governments need to take the disruptive threat/risk problem very seriously and think ahead and invest serious money in mitigating potential future disruptive risks.
Q79 Lord Rees of Ludlow: I would like to ask about the international dimension and how this can help with mitigation and coping with risks. I know you have written and spoken quite a lot about the effect of our departure from the EU on various collaborations with the EU that have been important for terrorism and crime and so on. Can you say something about the more general situation? Is the international collaboration that needs to be worldwide on health, cyber, internet failures and so on—even things such as Icelandic volcanoes—adequate or does there need to be some firming up of the international collaborative background?
Lord Ricketts: It is a vast question because the type of international co-operation involved will depend on the risk that is happening. Some risks are very much domestic risks. The British Government have to cope with flooding risk.
Lord Rees of Ludlow: I was talking about things like pandemics, the internet and so on, and volcanoes.
Lord Ricketts: I think international co-operation has been remarkably good in the case of the pandemic in the scientific community. It seems to me that the scientific world has mobilised in a way that Governments have not been able to do to work across boundaries and cultures to share ideas and create vaccines and therapies. I am by no means the expert but I think that has been very impressive and the structure exists. The question is optimising it and making it work effectively.
We could never invent a new global public health body, given the polarised state of the world, and so we need to make sure that the World Health Organization works effectively, has the right governance and the right funding. That is true across all the other UN agencies. They are all important for global co-operation. In some areas such as cybersecurity, new groups and networks of like-minded countries have developed. Britain is very much at the forefront of that and I think the British Government deserve a lot of praise for the effectiveness of our response from the National Cyber Security Centre, for example. We are one of the leaders on counterterrorism and there are all sorts of international networks of co-operation on terrorism.
I worry that leaving the EU takes us out of one of the major alerting systems that developed, the so-called Schengen Information System II, which the Lord Chairman and I spent quite a bit of time talking about in another committee. But overall I think the networks of co-operation exist. I am a bit reluctant to start thinking about wholly new structures as a result of the pandemic. We need to ensure that what we have works better than it has done in the recent past. There is a bit of a wake-up call for a revitalisation of the UN agency network. It is a precious network of organisations that could not be reinvented in the current state of the world.
The Chair: Now I will ask Lady Symons to unmute and you have a question about social media. I am going to give you a bit of time to unmute because on the telephone it is not quite so simple. We will come back to you in just a second. In the meantime, let us go to Lady McGregor-Smith.
Q80 Baroness McGregor-Smith: With such a wealth of questions being asked this morning and such far-reaching discussion, if you had to suggest one policy recommendation that the Committee could make to government what would it be?
Lord Ricketts: One that is a bit different from what we have been talking about but which I feel needs more thought is central government presence in the regions in managing crises and handling risks. It is quite striking to me, having served in France where you have the préfet system where whatever crisis, whatever risk is to be managed across the country, the préfet is in charge. The préfet takes the lead of the emergency service, the law enforcement community, and can mobilise all the resources of the state in his or her area.
There used to be government offices in the regions in the UK; they have gone. Now with the emergence of powerful mayors of major towns and cities, it feels to me there is a bit of a confusion about who is in charge of a major event that happens anywhere in the country: is it the central government, is it the chief constable, is it the mayor? How do the Government, in the early stages of a crisis, intervene outside London and the south-east, which is easier? The whole issue of how the central government can co-ordinate sudden emergencies across the country probably deserves another look now.
Baroness McGregor-Smith: That is really interesting. My initial reflection, though, is that it is an investment point.
Lord Ricketts: It is an investment point. The Government are talking about dispersing central government more into the regions, but they need to think a little about a structure. It is obvious now that these disruptive events have local impacts, but they need to be co-ordinated centrally. I am not sure that we have a good system for doing that in this country. As you say, it would be expensive to re-establish something, and it would not necessarily look like the government offices of the regions of the past, but it is a bit of a weakness in our civil emergency planning network.
Baroness McGregor-Smith: I have to say that I agree with you completely. Thank you.
The Chair: I am interested that in your answers to Lord Robertson you did not make your central suggestion anything to do with the role of the Treasury. Would you like to make a suggestion about that?
Lord Ricketts: I think the issue that arises is willingness to spend money on risks that have not transpired but might transpire. How do you work out the relative priority and the value for money of investing now in capabilities that may turn out to be unnecessary or redundant, possibly for years, as against spending on the immediate crisis that Ministers are concerned about that day? I think the Treasury approach to government spending has tended to make it very hard for departments to spend to create capacity against a possible need in the future.
The Chair: We need to remember that it is untrue, as Nicholas Soames used to say, that the Treasury was working for the Russians.
Q81 Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean: I want to ask you about the impact of the enormous spread of social media on various risks that we are facing at the moment. We saw one very recently in the United States, with an enormous and violent crowd being encouraged through social media to attack the Capitol building at the time of the new President’s induction, which would have been unthinkable. It is not just there. There is a risk at the moment of social media being used in this country for example to encourage some groups of people to believe that Covid is not a real threat or that it is somehow being manipulated in some social groups.
Do you see the unfettered use of social media as a risk? Do you think it needs to be regulated, so that that sort of civil unrest is not fostered so quickly and with possibly devastating results?
Lord Ricketts: It is a huge question, and it is really about the regulation of the internet and the major social media platforms. One immediate reflection is that social media can be a tremendous force for good. It can be a source of community cohesion and resilience, as it has been through the pandemic for example. We have seen in countries with fewer freedoms than ours that social media can be a crucial organising vehicle, whether it is in Belarus or other countries, for those who want to protest against an authoritarian Government. China and Russia and others clamp down very tightly on use of the internet because of its disruptive potential in authoritarian states. How Governments should regulate the internet and social media to bear down on the harms that you mention, who has that power and how it is exercised is a very nuanced, and huge, question.
Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean: It is a huge question but it is a very topical one. One understands your point about countries that may not have the democratic processes that we are used to, but I specifically used examples where there are democratic principles and where social media is used to actively promote violence. This is a real issue that we are going to have to think about much more seriously, particularly in view of recent events.
Lord Ricketts: I completely agree with that. I am uncomfortable that it should be left to the decision of Facebook or Twitter management to refuse a platform for example to a President of the United States. I think it is better if that is based on legislation and statute rather than left to private companies to make those sorts of choices. We need to look again at the law and how that relates to social media in order to draw the line that we have always to draw with the law between the right of individual freedom of expression and the risk to public order and public health and safety from false information or incitement of one kind or another. It is an issue for legislation. That is really what I am saying.
Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean: But do you think it is an issue for legislation on social media?
Lord Ricketts: Yes, absolutely, on the internet more widely. I do not think it should be left to the judgment of companies, because that is unfair to them and not a safe precedent.
Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean: No, indeed. Thank you.
The Chair: That brings us back to the issue of international law enforcement, which is not an easy thing to do. This has been a fascinating session. Thank you very much indeed. We knew it was going to be interesting and you have not disappointed us in the least. Thank you very much. We will now move to our next panel and for the purposes of bringing in the witnesses to our next panel I will need to suspend the meeting. I now suspend the meeting to bring in the next witnesses.
