Examination of witnesses
Fiona Hill CBE and Lord Harris of Haringey.
Q31 The Chair: Good morning and thank you very much for joining us for this meeting of the Committee on National Resilience. I should remind you that this is a public session and we are being broadcast live. You will both receive a transcript of this session in a couple of days’ time, so that you can make any minor corrections of things that have come out wrong. We each have some questions that we would like to ask you. Perhaps when you give your first answer you could introduce yourselves, so that we have that on the tape as well. Thank you very much.
I will kick off with the first question, and I will direct it in the first instance to Lord Harris, although both of you should feel free to answer. First, thank you very much, Lord Harris, for your detailed and comprehensive written evidence on behalf of the National Preparedness Commission, which is helpful. To make the best use of your time and our time this morning, I hope to avoid repeating what is in the written evidence, because we already have that and are able to quote from it in our report. We would like it if we can get you to build on that and look further forward.
My first question then is: can you expand a bit on how exactly the current new geopolitical environment, which you refer to in the written evidence, is affecting the importance of how we go about achieving preparedness and resilience? In particular, have you identified any European resilience structures or systems that the UK could do with being part of?
Lord Harris of Haringey: First, the sheer pace of events, frankly their unpredictability—and I am not going to ascribe causes to that particularly—and the increasingly transactional nature or, I could say, deals-based approach to all sorts of things at the moment, means that resilience will be tested even more by what happens. Think simply of the events of the last few days, the implications for oil supplies, fertiliser supplies and all sorts of things, simply because the Strait of Hormuz is contested and not necessarily free flowing; that has implications for all sorts of areas of the UK economy. Because of the speed of events, the turbulence and the unpredictability of it, you have to be looking in great depth at the different vulnerabilities that we have as a nation in terms of supply chains or anything else. That is before you think about whether there will be kinetic consequences on British interests and, indeed, on this country.
The other implication of all that is that it is also restricting the freedom of manoeuvre that the Government have to respond to some of these issues. For example—again, this is current policy and may or may not happen—if there is some form of bailout on fuel bills, that reduces the money that the Government have for other things. I can see this as part of a process that pushes resilience and preparedness down the agenda simply because you have to respond to the immediate events. That is another thing that one has to be aware of.
The other bit about all of this is that these are not isolated geopolitical incidents; they are connected. What is happening in Iran clearly has consequences on what is happening in Ukraine, first, because of the reduction in the oil sanctions regime on Russia by the US, which gives the Russians more revenues. There is also supply lines, the sharing of technology and so on. All that goes on. It is not one isolated incident that you have to deal with; these are a series of interconnected problems.
You also have the likelihood or the potential of other things happening at the same time. The Chinese Government could think, “Everybody is distracted with lots of other stuff going on at the moment. This is the moment for us to take decisive action on Taiwan”. That has implications for the supply of semiconductors in this country. It is difficult, and I do not want any pretence that it is anything other than that. That is before you have a meningitis epidemic or any of these other things.
You asked specifically about European structures. ECHO, the European something humanitarian something—and that has been translated from the French and so probably does not sound absolutely right—is an arrangement whereby EU nations can share resources in times of crisis. It is a fairly small resource, but it exists. Clearly, on many of these things, concerted action by as many countries as possible is important in dealing with these issues. That is why so much effort is devoted at the moment to how we make a relationship with the EU to enable that to happen.
The Chair: Thank you very much. Ms Hill, would you like to add to that?
Fiona Hill: Thank you so much for inviting me along. I am happy that this committee has come together to talk about resilience. It might be a good idea for me to explain why I set up the Future Resilience Forum and why it has that name. When I worked in government, I worked alongside Theresa May and the National Security Council on counterterrorism, organised crime, migration—all those big-ticket policy areas. I could never work out why in London we did not have a Munich Security Conference because our intelligence is some of the best intelligence in the world, and so I had this idea percolating in my head. When I left government, I thought, “I will look at setting up a London-based security international security conference in the vein of Munich Security and/or, say, Davos World Economic Forum”.
In making that decision, I then went out to do a lot of research and to speak to a lot of people whom I trust across the world. In my original vision, I would be speaking straightforwardly about defence policy over here, foreign policy over there and probably not necessarily development policy. I mean looking at the wider security brief with the same verticals that we have always looked at it with, those being foreign policy, defence policy, economic policy and development policy.
It started to become quite clear to me that, if you look at the great power competition and those people that we are in competition with, they look at everything through a single vertical. What is defence is development if you are China, and Africa is the best continent to see that example.
That is why I ended up calling it the Future Resilience Forum. The resilience for me is implicit that we are not necessarily ready for the changes that we are going through. When you comb that back even further, it became clear to me that democracy was going through a period of external threats and internal threats. That is what my forum looks at.
The external threats are fairly obvious, but the internal threats are the things that this committee can look at. How do we, in a world that is changing so rapidly, keep up in competition with China, whose political structures allows it to move with such pace and agility? It does not have to worry about parliamentary terms, for example. That gives it the advantage.
I have one small vignette before I finish. In the research that we did last year, we looked at, again, what our competition gets right and does well, which is giving them an advantage. Every business leader in China, wherever they are all over the world, can go back to Beijing and explain what is happening in countries from Africa to Venezuela. Our intelligence is limited at that corporate level because of our liberal values; we allow our private sector to just get on and do it. The research looks at how we can have a much more fluid exchange of intelligence between the big multinationals that are in those countries that are of concern to us—or of opportunity, in fact—and how we link that into traditional state-owned intelligence and make that flow much more fluid than it is.
It happens already and it happens through the national security strategy in the counterterrorism part. The private sector is very much at the heart of what we do in counterterrorism. The forum that I have set up—I am now in my fourth year—argues for taking that model that we already know we can rely on, extending it and applying it to the new world order.
I will talk about Lord Harris’s point about the pace at which the thinking is done. We can say that, across Europe, all Governments are reacting to crisis after crisis. My forum tries to do the longer-term thinking, the horizon-scanning of about 20 or 30 years—and we do that—to try to allow us to almost hand over products to Governments all over Europe when the time comes and they need it.
My final point about Europe is that I was speaking to some of my friends and colleagues in the GCC recently, who are going through a major conflict. They have always traditionally seen the US as their security partner. What they are saying to me now is that they need a US plus one. If you think about the continents of the world, there only is one plus one, and that is Europe.
Q32 Baroness Winterton of Doncaster: My question is probably most aimed at Ms Hill. It is interesting what you are saying. I can see that your forum is looking, as you say, at some of the different democratic structures and how you are saying China can suddenly move like that and we cannot.
I am on the OSCE, which does election monitoring, and so Russian interference in Moldova and Hungary, which is going on at the moment. Do you have any reflections from the work that you do about how international co-operation on this misinformation interference in elections can be combated?
Fiona Hill: We did a panel on that, not last year but the year before. I would say from the evidence that we gleaned from that that pockets of good work are going on. Again, social media as a function for hostile state actors is not truly understood yet but, from the work that we have done, it is clear to me that the Russians in particular, with their troll farms, see social media as part of asymmetric warfare. We, at the moment, are on the defensive. This is the point for me in all of this: at the moment, we in the West are on the defensive and we need to work out how to get on the offensive.
Lord Harris of Haringey: It is an extremely important point about misinformation and disinformation. The commission has agreed that a piece of work will be done over the next three months—and so it might be available to you before you finish—looking at that, the extent to which the growth of extremism is driven by that process and the extent to which that undermines trust and faith in democratic institutions.
You heard from the Nordic ambassadors last week. From looking at that evidence, one message I took is that they spend an extremely large amount of their effort in building and trying to retain the trust and confidence of their populations in their Government and in dealing with issues about misinformation and disinformation. We may come to that in a moment.
The point I would make about all this is that the consequence of this global turbulence at the moment has begun to mean that the public at large are beginning to recognise the significance of this issue. The last time the Cabinet Office did research on this, it was clearly way down the list of issues that people thought were important, as if, “Somebody else will sort it out. We do not have to worry about it”. People are now worrying about it. As a nation, we must ensure that the public continue to feel trust that the institutions of the state will be on their side working for them, so that people retain that support and trust. That is essential if we are to be a resilient nation.
Lord Spellar: This is just a brief point. I would like to question the assumption that dictatorships are inherently able to be more effective and efficient than democracies. In fact, the history of the Second World War was that they may initially be but, once democracy got going, it was a much more efficient machinery for delivering the war effort. Our problems are in ourselves and in our unwillingness or inability to reshape our structures. That seems to be the issue; but it is not because inevitably democracies are less efficient and effective at operating in this way.
Fiona Hill: First, I would like to say that it is not an assumption. It is an observation. Also, my forum and I do not look backwards. We are looking forwards because we need to accept—this is the baseline assumption in everything that we look at—that we are already living in a new world order. What do we do about it? I can give you—
Lord Spellar: History does rhyme, you know. History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
Fiona Hill: People will do history and that is for them. My organisation is looking to the future. There is a clear example of a dictatorship in China compared to what the West is doing in Africa. You cannot compare the two. We spend a lot of money on development, for example in Africa, and that is right, but China builds roads and train tracks, and it invests in the local economy. That is what African leaders want; they tell me this time and again. I look at where we are, and we are not offering them that infrastructure that they so desperately need.
The Chair: Although the interconnectedness of all this is important, we are straying slightly from the question of the day and the job of the committee. Can I pause that discussion there?
Fiona Hill: Please do, yes.
The Chair: Although we have one quick supplementary.
Q33 Baroness Helic: I do not even know whether I should take your time, but I have been listening and what you say is fascinating, as is Lord Spellar’s observation about comparing democracies and authoritarian regimes and so on. I have been struggling with something. Maybe this is quite an open question, but I would love to hear what you think.
Can democracies survive? Trust in democracy has been so depleted. If we look around us at what has been destroyed over the last year, with our support, acquiescence or silence, sometimes—and I hope I am not predicting anything terrible and I hope that I am being pessimistic—it looks like we are at the beginning of the end of democracies. That is something about the lack of trust, confusion and inability to navigate the world that we live in that our adversaries are using effectively, because we are so primed to be persuaded the other way.
The Chair: Try to answer briefly.
Fiona Hill: First, you make a valid point. I also sit on the board of the John Smith Centre at Glasgow University. It did a poll last year of 16 to 29 year-olds, and 27% of that cohort would prefer to live in a dictatorship as opposed to a democracy. I know 27% does not necessarily sound huge, but the starkness of whether you want to live in a democracy or not becomes far bigger than the 27% suggests.
One thing that is coming over dramatically the more I go down the road of putting on this event every year—and as I said, I am in my fourth year, but we do lots of mini-events throughout the year—is that it is definitely true to say that democracy is having its own internal threats. Our external competition or adversaries understand those weaknesses. Take, for example, migration. It is not coincidence that Putin gives bicycles to allow immigrants to go through the north Norwegian and Finnish borders. He knows that it is disruptive to society. It is absolutely the case that, where there is any opportunity, our enemies are looking to destroy democracy.
I will end on this. I am an optimist. Going back to Lord Spellar’s point, of course, democracy is absolutely 100% the political structure that we need. However, we also have to be honest that, with an industrial revolution and everything that tech has allowed, by way of where the social contract is between the electorate and a Government, it has made leadership in the traditional sense harder.
The Chair: Thank you. You have one tiny sentence to add to this, Lord Harris, and then we must move on.
Lord Harris of Haringey: In defence of democracy, it should give—and people seek to undermine it—a trust loop whereby you have the consent of your population to try to do things. That is the important issue. The dictatorship model has an advantage in that it is easier for dictatorship models to take a long-term view, and that has clearly been China’s approach.
Q34 Baroness Mobarik: I am sure my question will sound rather mundane after that. But how can the Government collaborate with or, indeed, what new partnerships are needed with business and civil society, large and small, to enhance resilience and readiness across society as a whole?
Fiona Hill: We have to accept that we are in a state of emergency. In that acceptance, we need everyone who cares about democracy in the room, having the debate. The private sector increasingly needs to show more leadership than it currently does. I spend a lot of time going around speaking to business leaders and asking them to help me with what I am doing. The first question I normally get is: “What is my ROI?” My response is increasingly: “Your ROI is that you have an ability to operate in a stable environment, a stable economy, a stable democracy”.
There is precedence for working between the Government and the private sector. As I said earlier, we already do that for counterterrorism. The model is there; all we need to do is to build on it. It is actually not that difficult.
Lord Harris of Haringey: The first thing is not to spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel. You need to start with what is already there, make use of existing networks, existing structures and support that infrastructure. That is particularly important both in the business sector and in the voluntary community and faith sectors, in that this needs to be done locally. What are the local infrastructure arrangements? How are those supporting that?
If I can give an example, we held a conference earlier this week, and one small thing that emerged—it was not planned to emerge from it—was the problem that local community organisations, which are often unincorporated associations, will have in terms of the practical support that can be provided. They cannot get public liability insurance because they are not incorporated, and that then prevents them doing some of the things that are needed.
We need mechanisms whereby the Government genuinely listen to those voices. It is not a top-down process where the Government are saying, “This is what we want you to do”. It is a dialogue about how we can make these things happen at the local, regional and national levels, because that would enable you to pick that issue up and then the Government can work with the insurance sector to find a product that works under those conditions. That is one example.
The second example is that, at the moment, the Government produce a product like the national risk register. I am not sure it suits anybody’s purpose specifically, apart from it being a good list of 89 acute risks. But the largest corporates will have teams of people who are into all that and will know all that. It is a little bit too overwhelming if you run a small business or a small organisation, in terms of thinking how to deal with 89 acute risks at the same time, and so it needs to be segmented.
However, that segmentation must not then lead to not trying to work out the interconnections. For example, national businesses will have local facilities. I am thinking of banks, building societies, supermarkets and so on. Work with them about how they can facilitate local things to happen with local community organisations, whether it is providing first aid advice or responding in the event of an emergency when, for example, you need shelters, or in hot weather when you need cool spaces or cold weather when you need warm spaces. Can things be done in those areas? The Government need to be a lot more inventive and proactive, and to make use of the structures that are already there, including the British Red Cross, St John Ambulance, Girlguiding, Scouts and so on.
It is complicated. The Government are not terribly good at these sorts of things because they like to have a single point of contact, and the voluntary and community sector does not have a single point of contact. The business community does not have a single point of contact: the CBI represents one group of businesses; the Federation of Small Businesses, a different group. It is not a single point. The Government cannot get away with wanting to make just one phone call.
Q35 Lord Oates: I wonder if I could pose this first to Ms Hill. I have had the opportunity to attend the Future Resilience Forum and found that useful. You spoke quite starkly about us being in a state of emergency, so can you say something about how we can prepare individuals and societies and, in doing so, strike a balance between instilling the urgency that you clearly think there is but without driving panic among populations, particularly among young people?
Fiona Hill: Absolutely, and that is a difficult balance to strike. That is why the Government have to fix where they are right now to get ahead. If we tell people that all these bad things will happen to them and they have to prepare, the obvious question then is: “What have you done to prepare?”
We can see the use of drones through this Iranian conflict. I do not feel comfortable, at the moment, that we have the right defence if we were to be attacked in that way. The Minister, the MoD, the Cabinet Office and all those security apparatus people have to almost get it all fixed before we then ask other people in society to start protecting themselves.
Lord Harris of Haringey: The drumbeat of events is beginning to mean that it will not come as a shock to people if you start talking to them in the way that they do in the Nordic countries with the material that they provide to the general population. At the moment, we are still in a position where the bulk of the population is blissfully unaware of some of the risks we face, the nature of those risks and the pace at which that is changing.
You do not deal with that by being nervous about raising the issue. Now is the time to raise the issue and to keep raising the issue. The earlier you start, the better. In other countries, maybe because they have been under existential threat or threats of earthquakes in Japan, people are used to that message.
Probably the way to couch it is not necessarily to frighten people that the Russians will arrive next week, that the Chinese will switch off the water supply or whatever it might be. It is to start talking about practical help for all sorts of emergencies: “The power has stopped because of a flood or because of bad weather. This is what you and your household should do”. There is practical help building up from that and advice given on the GOV.UK/prepare website, if anybody happens to stumble across it. It is quite good advice, but repeat and reiterate that.
The other issue is that we do not make enough use of the schools and what you could do to link the national curriculum to all this at every level. Schools are used to delivering safety information to children. They know what to do in the event of a fire. Children then take that back to their homes and say, “Where is our fire blanket? Where would we do that?” We educate them on stranger danger. We educate them on safety online, increasingly. Why are we not doing more about some of this?
The British Red Cross has a package—it is mentioned in my evidence—that is rolled out to schools. The evidence is that children and young people see far worse on their mobile phones than anything you might present to them in a classroom. If you start this process there, it feeds back into the community. Also, you are building a generational capacity. The Nordic countries are where they are because they have been doing this for 20, 30, 40 or 50 years. We have to start somewhere and it would be useful to start in the schools.
Lord Oates: I will quickly come back on this with Lord Harris. Is there some validity in what Ms Hill says? If you read those Nordic publications, they say, “Go to the shelter”, or they tell you things that presumably we do not have in place since we dismantled a lot of that infrastructure at the end of the Cold War. Is there a big danger of starting to teach things in schools and causing panic, because people ask exactly those questions, particularly in the light of the conflict in the Middle East, about our defence against those missiles or those drones or whatever?
Lord Harris of Haringey: You have to start. If you do not start, you get nowhere. There is no point giving people advice to go to the shelter when there are no shelters.
Lord Oates: People could build shelters.
Lord Harris of Haringey: You may recommend that that network be recreated. However, you can be—and I mentioned earlier working with national organisations—identifying at community level the places where people could go and take shelter, giving general advice to stay in place under certain circumstances and not to go somewhere where you will be covered in broken glass if there is an explosion outside. You can start to explain those sorts of things, even if you do not have a national network of shelters.
The Chair: Lord Spellar, you have a question on what might be holding us back.
Q36 Lord Spellar: Indeed, and we have touched on some of that, so I will not go over that part. We have a lot of friction and blockages within the system, and some of that is structural and some of it, as we have discussed, is about inadequate funding. Is it also about the speed of decision-making and how that can be resolved? I cite as an example the foot and mouth epidemic, when bringing the military in dramatically shortened decision-making time and led to immediate action, which was crucial in changing the pattern of that epidemic. How do we get decision-making into that structure, which involves many of these other organisations that you are talking about, so that they get clear guidance and can then move?
Lord Harris of Haringey: You are quite right. The Government take a long time under any set of circumstances to get a decision. There is this desire to consult everybody and so on, all of which takes time, even if it is desirable in principle.
The problem is that building the mechanisms to do this, the expenditure and the work on this get squeezed by other events. The resources of people who might be thinking about how to make something happen get diverted because of an immediate issue or crisis. You have to build into the structures something that enables you to look ahead—futures thinking, horizon scanning—as to what happens.
You mentioned foot and mouth and bringing in the military. The military, of course, was substantially bigger then than what we have available now. Ultimately, if I recall—and people in this room were much closer to it than I was, at the time—that was clearly led by the top. The COBRA mechanism kicked in. It was quite clear who was going to be held accountable for various things, and the Government saw it as pretty existential that it needed to resolve that. It is that sense of urgency and sense of pace that we will need to have available on these issues.
At the moment, yes, you are right; we go through all sorts of questions: Can we afford to do this? Who do we need to ask about it? In any case, the Treasury Green Book will tell you that you cannot place a value on something that might not be needed or will be two or three years down the road, because we are looking at things that are more urgent.
The other bit you need in place is decent information flows. When Patrick Vallance was retiring as Chief Scientific Officer, I spent some time asking him about the Covid epidemic. One thing he said was critically important was the need to have decent information flows and proper situational awareness locally. You need to make sure that those structures are there so that, when Ministers sit in COBRA, they immediately know what has happened.
A huge development in the last few years is the National Situation Centre–which I trust you will go and see—which brings a lot of information together, but that will be critical. You need to make sure that those structures are there to make that happen.
Fiona Hill: I go back to what I was saying earlier about where we find ourselves right now and the speed at which we have to get on and start making quite serious decisions and investments. We can talk about information flows, but information flows nowadays are done by our mobile phones and the internet. I can tell you right now that, if a satellite is shot down or if the subsea cables are ripped apart by our adversaries, there will be no communication because our phones will cease to work. We will not be able to call our parents or children; we will not be able to transfer money. That is another example of thinking about and preparing for the future.
Space is about to become a serious domain indeed for a number of reasons. First, until now, it has been seen as a commercial domain that powers all our comms and various things on earth. If you look at the pact that Russia and China have made, by 2035 they will be on Mars. They are working together to have dominance in space. They have done that because they understand the importance of it.
At the moment, Europe is behind in investment in space and that has to now be expedited. I am honestly not sounding like a space-crazy person when I say that, if something bad happens up there, it will be worse than the banking crisis because it will literally cease our ability to operate. The key thing about space as a domain is that it does not have any international law. There is literally one treaty since 1967, which is moribund. The idea that you can get consensus of international law at the moment, when all the great powers are jockeying for seniority, just will not happen. In fact, I know it will not.
I speak to people in space commands all over the world. They meet at the UN once a year, sit down and start talking about how they take that 1967 legislation and make it fit for purpose in the new world order. The minute they get anywhere close to agreement, the Russians and the Chinese leave because they do not want to make that agreement.
The Chair: Do you have a follow-up on space?
Baroness Mobarik: Yes. Quickly, should we prioritise our own sovereign launch capabilities and have our own satellite constellations, for example, rather than relying completely on Starlink?
Fiona Hill: That is a good question because we are all currently relying on Elon Musk’s Starlink. He is even ahead of NASA. This is a separate issue going back to the democracy question, which is that he is a businessman and has more power in space than any politician. I am not arguing whether that is good or bad; I am just pointing it out because that has consequences.
Going to the start of your question, 100% we should see space as an opportunity. I would turn Canary Wharf into the space capital of Europe. I am not even joking. We can do that and we ought to do it. We did it when we created a financial sector in this country, and that has allowed this country, as a small island, to power through and be a relevant economy up until now. We have to replicate the same vision that built the financial sector in the UK and I think the Space industry could be a new sector to exploit to our economic advantage, giving us the kind of resilience and influence that the City of London has given us.
Baroness Curran: This is so interesting. What would be the mechanism for that international dialogue, agreement or legislative framework? How would we do that?
Fiona Hill: It is supposed to be done at the UN.
Baroness Curran: Given what you have said about the new world order and that context, and given some of the antagonisms we know exist at the moment—that is what I mean.
Fiona Hill: Realistically, we will have to have a few bilateral and multilateral agreements with like-minded people, mostly Europeans. In fact, the Germans have woken up to this in the last 18 months. They were something like 33rd in the league table of investment in space and they have shot up to second. At the moment, Germany is an interesting European country. Look at what they are spending on in defence: not 30-year procurement products that make big ships, but they are investing in those parts of warfare that we can see from Ukraine. Ukraine is a perfect example of how warfare happens now.
Q37 Lord Peach: We should also recall that the House of Lords’ report on space led by Cathy Ashton last year has not yet been debated, but I take Fiona’s points to heart. We need to take this seriously. At the moment, we structure space as if it is a science project, but it now definitely needs to be mainstream.
I also refer back to the discussion from Lord Harris, briefly, on command and control. In any crisis, command and control will become critical. Therefore, whatever we call it, however we organise ourselves, the ability to have situational awareness—which has been said—and then deliver an understanding of what decisions are needed and when is a major lesson from every crisis, including Covid. This issue of how we organise ourselves is crucial. I would like the panel’s thoughts.
Lord Harris of Haringey: Several points are in play here. On the issue about satellites, I am not sure that every part of the UK economy or the public at large are clear about our dependence on positioning, navigation and timing signals through satellites. In particular, the finance sector is critically dependent on timing signals and how the information flows take place. We need a lot more consideration of that. Again, the commission did a report on this point some time ago with the Royal Institute of Navigation. It is a question of finding the alternatives. In a lot of the preparedness and resilience space, we need a plan for what happens when it fails. We almost assume; we build all these defences so that the satellite signals will continue. What is plan B when they do not?
It is the same with business and cyber. They think they have spent lots of money on cyber defences. They have the greatest firewall known to humanity and so on, but what are their practical arrangements when their staff turn up in the morning, log in and discover that they cannot access their data? You have to plan for failure rather than assume that your mitigations will work. That is a general principle in a lot of what we are talking about.
The Chair: Before we move on, could I bring us down to earth from up in space and ask a specific supplementary to Lord Harris? Could one of the ill-suited bits of government structure at the moment be the criteria for classifying category 1 and category 2 responders? I read in your written evidence that, for example, a local authority is a category 1 responder and a utility company is a category 2 responder. I wonder whether this differential between different categories is still relevant or useful or should be reviewed. It struck me as an odd differential.
Lord Harris of Haringey: It should be reviewed. You need to look more generally at how the Civil Contingencies Act, which is now over 20 years old, operates. You may want to come on to that in a moment, but you are correct. In the event of an emergency, you want the main utilities around the table—communications, power, water and everything else. They are not organised neatly around police force boundaries, for example, so you have to find ways to do that and to engage them in dealing with particular crises.
The Chair: You are absolutely right; that leads perfectly onto the next question, Lady Hunter.
Q38 Baroness Hunter of Auchenreoch: I get woken up every morning by the radio and my first thought is about what prescience we have in this committee, because it is writ large. What we discuss here is happening outside.
This is probably a question for both of you, perhaps mostly Lord Harris. You talked about legislation and just mentioned the Civil Contingencies Act of 20 years ago. Do we require more legislation, in particular a resilience defence Act? You have mentioned that. Further than that, do we need not only legislation but a department, a civil servant, a government chief risk officer or somesuch?
Lord Harris of Haringey: The strategic defence review called for—and the Government have accepted the principle—that there should be a defence readiness Act. This is focused on the idea of how to mobilise the resources of society in support of defence of the nation. How can you call on industry, for example, to switch production to make drones or counter drones or whatever it might be? Where do you get equipment? Would you, in the case of conflict, for example, prioritise health service resources for military personnel? I assume a defence readiness Act would have those sorts of things.
I hope that, when the Government bring that forward—I hope next Session rather than some future Session of Parliament—they look wider than that and bring forward a national resilience and defence readiness Act. That would need to clarify—and we touched on it in terms of category 2 and all of that—the lead responsibility in various areas. What is a matter for Government? What is a matter for devolved administrations, for mayors or for local authorities? What expectations are placed on critical industry, critical national infrastructure and other critical functions, as to what they are supposed to be doing in terms of preparedness and resilience? Expectations about that should be clear. It might be a regulatory framework or it might be simply a legislative requirement.
We need a cross-sectoral mapping of what is there and how that should happen. You need to look at the structure and network of local resilience forums. It is interesting that the Scottish model has almost a three-tier structure. The national level in Scotland has a population of, what, 5 million; that gives you some idea of the scale. It has three regional structures below that and then a series of district structures.
We do not have anything quite as formalised as that, but this is all up in the air. First, we have MHCLG’s devolution agenda, the arrival of elected mayors and the moves in the Home Office to reorganise police force boundaries. At the moment, all these structures are historically linked to police force boundaries. That needs to be looked at. How do you create mechanisms—and this may require support—to engage with the voluntary community and faith sectors in those areas and with the business community? Bear in mind that it is diverse from local businesses right the way through to national organisations.
As part of that legislation, you then need to create something that provides pressure and a trigger on the Government and agencies to make it happen. Under the Climate Change Act, we have the Climate Change Committee. We all have our views as to how effective that has been, but those regular reports saying, “This is the state of things and this is what needs to be done”, are important. You need something that looks at these issues. Parliamentary scrutiny also needs to be built into these processes.
The Chair: In view of the time, I will ask Lord Farmer and then Lady Curran to ask their follow-up questions then, Ms Hill, you could come back and answer any of what has been said by these two.
Lord Farmer: First, thank you much; it is all highly informative. I suppose this is a bit of a cheeky question in a way. Do we need legislation? You have talked about a resilience defence readiness Bill. We see how long Bills take to go through here and all the preparedness. It is ages. As you rightly said in the beginning, things are happening now; we need preparedness now.
I ask why the Government cannot do more now, with their current powers. For instance, the Swedes, in case of crisis or war, tell you where to go to the loo if you do not have any water and that sort of thing. Why can we not do that now? You said earlier that we have no single point of contact. With this Government, the Labour Government, we have 1,050 family hubs now operating throughout the country. I should declare an interest: I am a director of the non-profit company, Family Hubs Network. That is a single point where people connect. All I am asking is why we have to think about legislation. Surely we should be thinking about what we can do here and now.
Lord Harris of Haringey: I am certainly not suggesting that nothing should happen while we wait for legislation, particularly if it—
The Chair: Can we hear from Lady Curran first?
Baroness Curran: Briefly, do any current mechanisms allow devolved Governments to be involved strategically with the UK Government about any decision-making? Should we think about a statutory duty on devolved Governments going forward, so that they fully participate in this?
The Chair: Lady Northover, is your supplementary part of this discussion?
Baroness Northover: Yes, it is on how this is done. I am struck by your idea of the Climate Change Committee and that kind of approach. One Nordic ambassador mentioned that they have a Minister with that responsibility. That is a specific arrangement within the Government. What do you make of that?
The Chair: Let us hear from Ms Hill.
Fiona Hill: That will not work. It will not work because Ministers cannot effect change at pace, unless the Prime Minister says, “We are doing this”. We do not need legislation right now; we need leadership. We need to look at the national security structure that we currently have and test it against new threats like the crossover between organised crime and terrorism. These have to be taken by the real experts in the services, Cabinet Office and National Security Council.
Going back to the legislation point, it does take a long time. One thing that I learned when I was working on the Modern Slavery Act is that you do not have to legislate for everything. Sometimes, it is just a policy decision.
Lord Harris of Haringey: I almost disagree profoundly with some of what you have said, but of course you do not need to wait for legislation and, indeed, the Government must not wait for legislation, but some things will be helped by legislation. Therefore, given the length of time that it will take, it is worth starting that process sooner rather than later. That is why it would be lovely to see it in the next King’s Speech, rather than perhaps in the one after or the one after that.
You need legislation—this is again going back to something that Fiona Hill said earlier—because you have to consider the return on investment for businesses in some of these areas. You have to create a framework where this does not undermine competition and where the socially conscious, community conscious and nationally conscious businesses do not say, “We will do this”, and then put themselves at a disadvantage against their competitors. You have to create a level-playing-field framework as to why you need to do that.
That does not stop you doing things more quickly, and lots of things could be done now. You do not need legislation to produce a booklet. That could be done now; it could have been done five years ago and ideally should have been done 10 years ago. We should be repeating it in the way that they have just done in Sweden, because people will lose it and some of the information will change. You need to do that all the time.
In terms of the devolved Administrations, whatever legislation is there should, a bit like the Climate Change Act, place a duty on devolved Administrations, on local government, on public bodies and, I would argue, private bodies to have regard to their responsibilities in this issue.
A question was asked about whether we need a Minister. We need somebody co-ordinating this at government level. That person must have sufficient clout within Government that they can tell the Home Secretary, the Defence Secretary or the Environment Secretary that something needs to be done and something happens. They need that absolute authority from the Prime Minister. It is a level of seniority that gives you that clout and confidence within it.
Equally, it must be a seniority that does not bring with it an enormous number of other responsibilities because people have to have the bandwidth to do that. Over the last few years, we have had Deputy Prime Ministers who have held this responsibility, or Chancellors of the Duchy of Lancaster. Sometimes that has worked; sometimes it has not. It has depended on how much else they have to do or whether the individual is genuinely a big beast in the way the Government operate.
In reality, we do have a Minister at the moment. The Minister is Dan Jarvis. He has a shared responsibility; he is Security Minister in the Home Office and he is responsible for resilience in the Cabinet Office. Actually, he has all sorts of other responsibilities as well, so he has a bandwidth problem. I have enormous faith in Dan Jarvis, but there is a real issue here. It does at least mean he has cross-departmental impetus, but my feeling is that you will have to look at how much strength there is in the centre of government—the Cabinet Office and so on—to enable all these things to happen and say, “Yes, we do want a booklet”, and make sure that all the different departments then work towards the end of making that happen. That partly comes back to the earlier question about how you get decisions at pace and make sure that they are centrally directed.
The Chair: Before we ask our last question, could I ask a quick one of you, Lord Harris? You say in your written evidence that it would be a good idea to have incentives to encourage individuals and businesses to take action in terms of preparedness and resilience. Can you give us some examples of what such incentives might be?
Lord Harris of Haringey: I am quite attracted to the national defence course run by the Finns, not because that is a good idea, which it is, but because of how senior people in business and elsewhere are keen to be invited to go on that. They get a little badge to say they have been on it, and it is worn with pride. It is trivial, but it is part of saying, “We are stepping up and taking a role in it”.
The Chair: That is a good example. Fiona, do you have any other examples to give?
Fiona Hill: I will wait for the next question. I have quite a few things to say now, but I should wait for the final question.
Q39 Baroness Winterton of Doncaster: It is so difficult to ask this of you because you have put so many ideas out there. But if you were to make one recommendation to the Government or to the committee about what we should recommend for preparedness and resilience, what would it be?
Fiona Hill: First, we do live in a new world. We can all agree that the pace of change that we have been living through has been rapid. Therefore, as I said earlier, without being too alarmist, we need to approach this as if we are in a state of emergency. Therefore, we have to expedite decision-making in a way that we did not do before.
One of my observations of politics now—although I do not work in politics anymore—is that people are trying to fight the same battles by playing by the old, same rules. I do not feel like the rest of the world and society are in that territory. My main recommendation is that we set up a new national security council to run alongside the current one. It does not serve any purpose to disrupt an already good National Security Council and the periphery around that, but we need something that runs in parallel and is PM-led. Again, the junior Minister model does not work. I have seen it. I have worked in government for eight years and it just does not. You need buy-in from the Prime Minister.
Baroness Winterton of Doncaster: Why would they not conflict?
Fiona Hill: By the time a junior Minister decides, after reading all the submissions, that they have a recommendation, four or five different people might not want them to make that recommendation. So we end up in this protracted system of getting something to the Prime Minister and getting the Prime Minister to say yes or no, when we could have a new national security council looking at the new threats that we face. When we are talking about resilience, we are really talking about security.
Another thing is that all this is beyond party politics. We have to find a way—and this is difficult, I understand—of bringing in the leaders of other parties that could sit on this national security council, because they have to understand the seriousness of the times that we are living through. The next generation will never forgive us if we have not taken the action that we absolutely must take now.
The Chair: Thank you. That is an important note to end on, and we should draw it to a close now.
Fiona Hill: I have one last one. On the national security council, going back to your point about how we get the private sector involved, someone like Jamie Dimon is at the heart of financial services. If you read any speeches that he has made, he totally gets the changing patterns of the world. You need big people like that, big beasts, reporting directly to the Prime Minister.
Lord Harris of Haringey: Can I pick up one point? The question that was asked is whether security and resilience conflict. A fundamental issue that comes into how you organise resilience directorates and everything else is the extent to which you create a mechanism that can look beyond the immediate crisis. If you have a national security council that thinks just about today’s national security crisis, it will have a full agenda. If you have a national resilience committee—and there is already, as I am sure you know, a Cabinet sub-Committee of the National Security Council that deals with resilience—that at least has been given the task of looking at longer-term policy and how to build resilience for the next crisis and the crisis after that.
My general message to you is about getting on with it, not waiting for the perfect report from this committee or anywhere else, but starting the process now, and trusting and engaging with the public.
The Chair: Yes, it is important to remember that resilience includes recovering from as well as dealing with at the time.
Fiona Hill: I heard an interesting comment on the World Service this morning from the Education Minister from Lebanon. It shows you a starkly polar opposite view of resilience, where she says, “We are fed up being resilient”.
The Chair: On that note, we must end now. Thank you so much for your time. It has been really helpful.
