20
Examination of witnesses
Stephen Arundell and Dr Fiona Hill CMG.
Q40 The Chair: Good morning to you both, and welcome. Thank you very much for giving up your time to come and help us with our inquiry into national resilience. As you might expect, we have a number of questions that we would like to put to you.
Before we do, I should remind you that this is a public session and is being broadcast live. You will receive a transcript in a day or two’s time so that you can make any minor corrections to things that have come out wrong in the process. We have about an hour with you, and we will try to get through quite a lot in that time.
I will kick off with the first question to set the scene. In the context of the UK having a national risk register with 89 risks on it, can you both comment on what you think the most urgent national risks that we face are—the ones that are likely to require more urgent and greater national preparation and resilience—and why?
Stephen Arundell: Good morning, everybody. It is a pleasure to be here. I am the vice-chair of, and national lead for governance at, the Emergency Planning Society. If you would like me to say a few words about the Emergency Planning Society, I can do so.
Specifically in answer to your question, for professional emergency planners and resilience practitioners across the UK, the risks and challenges are to do with the profession. There are not a lot of us across the UK. Emergency planning teams are, generally speaking, relatively small teams in organisations. A large NHS acute trust may have a single specialty resilience practitioner within that organisation. A local authority may, depending in its size, have only a small team of two to three individual practitioners.
When we think about getting organisations ready for the external risk environment that we all face—given, as you say, the context of the risks on the national risk register—the depth and the range of expertise that we have to coach, cajole and work with organisations and senior leaders is relatively small. We definitely punch above our weight. We definitely have significant impacts on organisational preparedness and the business continuity processes in organisations. However, resilience is not yet everybody’s business. It is not yet something that everybody does in organisations. Managers and leaders deliver wide ranges of complex services in that risk environment, but they are not necessarily driven by the risk agenda; they are driven by finances, customer services, the residents and locally elected members with local priorities, in the case of local government.
Often, the resilience agenda is not necessarily given the priority it needs both in the short term and, more importantly, in longer-term planning, so that we are making sustained investments and developing sustained capability and capacity so that we can withstand disruptive events and shocks and recover from them, taking communities and residents with us.
The Chair: Thank you. Dr Hill, before you start, I should give you extra thanks for getting up so early to participate in our discussions this morning. We really appreciate it. It would be very good to hear your take on what our most urgent worries should be.
Dr Fiona Hill: What Mr Arundell just said is critical. We could do a whole litany of all the threats and look at the 89 that are already on the risk register but, if we do not have the capacity to deal with them, it is already a major problem.
I wish to add to some of the things that I heard on the first panel from the other Fiona Hill and Lord Harris. One of the biggest problems we have at the moment is that there is not a national conversation or dialogue about the kinds of threat that the UK faces. As one of the people who participated in the strategic defence review—as all of you know, I was one of the co-chairs of the strategic defence review with Lord Robertson and General Sir Richard Barrons—we prioritised the launch of a national conversation about defence and these related issues of readiness, preparedness and resilience, which we have yet to see. We believe, as everybody on the first panel said and as Mr Arundell has laid out, that there is plenty of expertise around the country; that people are much better informed than the Government realise about some of the risks they face; and that there is lots of capacity, notwithstanding the small formal groups that exist, into which we can tap.
Let us quickly review what we have seen in Ukraine, and now in the Persian Gulf, that is relevant to the United Kingdom. We have to remember that the United Kingdom has already experienced acts of sabotage and assassination. Think about Mr Litvinenko and the Skripal incident of poisoning in Salisbury, where the use of Novichok had larger effects on not just the Skripals, who were targeted by the Russians, but the population of Salisbury. The Russians have also been bombarding us with propaganda, as have many other adversaries, as well as with disinformation. This is another problematic environment. We have now seen, from the Strait of Hormuz being closed, what could happen in the event of an adversary blocking a similar chokepoint for transportation, communication and shipping closer to home. You have already heard about all the risks to satellites, GPS and space, on which we all rely in the digital environment.
Every day, when you pick up the papers, you read about yet another piece of civilian infrastructure being hit in Ukraine—such as the State Archive of the Lviv Oblast, which was recently targeted but the missile hit a UNESCO heritage site. Think about all the destruction to the national grid and the attempts on the railways, which are a lifeline in Ukraine, as well as all the drone attacks in the Gulf. We can see the problems that we face.
Before we move on to the next question, let me just say that we have all kinds of expertise and capacity around the UK to tackle all this. On satellites, for example, Teesside University in the north-east of England has a programme looking at space and the risks to satellites and GPS because of its proximity to, for example, the huge chemical plants at Wilton, what was ICI, and also Fylingdales, which is one of the most important radar stations in the whole of the NATO and US-UK system. Fylingdales is responsible for monitoring all the threats to satellites, as well as the threats that ballistic missiles might pose. We have all these capacities. Durham University, of which I am chancellor, has a major space programme. As Mr Arundell said, we often do not build up the capacities that we already have to tackle many of these issues.
Q41 Baroness Northover: Following up some of the things you have said, Dr Hill, what are the national resilience implications of the rising geopolitical tensions that we see at the moment—particularly for defence spending, the development of the country’s industrial base and recruitment?
Dr Fiona Hill: Beyond what we have already seen, the pace of it is not slowing down and the threats to the United Kingdom are mounting.
We have to factor in something; I will have to be a bit blunt, I am afraid. We did not completely prefigure in the strategic defence review the massive shift in the position of the United States. It is not just that the United States has moved away from being the guarantor of European security, which all of us have been contending with and discussing over the past year: it has also moved into a much more active phase under President Trump, including launching this war alongside Israel in the Middle East. We have seen the US take all kinds of military action, despite the fact that President Trump ran his presidential campaign in the previous year on the back of keeping out of so-called forever wars and focusing on the United States’s own region of the western hemisphere. We have seen anything but that.
This underscores the point that all of us made in the strategic defence review: inevitably, the United Kingdom will have to pay a lot more attention to the structures of its own Armed Forces, moving beyond expeditionary forces that were always tied into US operations and thinking about how we will have to restructure in the face of the threats that we face in our own immediate domain in Europe. We are seeing these threats become intertwined with the Middle East as a result of the United States’s campaign and because of attacks on Cyprus, Diego Garcia and other overseas bases.
We would always have these problems for the United Kingdom’s domestic and overseas interests, but we now have to figure out how to address these ourselves in combination with other allies—not just the United States. Inevitably, we would be forced to move beyond producing niche or exquisite lethal armaments towards the innovation in defence that we heard about in the previous panel. We would also have to rethink our recruitment into the Armed Forces.
I will be frank. Although we were constrained in how we had to approach the strategic defence review, we always knew that there would inevitably be a demand for more funding. The question is: funding for what? This is what we are talking about here, because the defence of the realm and the defence of a country is not just dependent on the Ministry of Defence and readiness for war. Defence is also tied into deterrence, resilience and preparedness. We tried in the strategic defence review to lay out many of the issues that relate to the failings Mr Arundell talked about: in transportation; in the health services; and in all our different systems, which will be put under stress at a time of emergency. Again, we stressed in the report—you picked this up—the importance and the imperative of changing the way in which we think about things through national dialogue, as well as thinking long and hard about what we are funding and what we spend our money on.
The Chair: Mr Arundell, do you have something to add? After you have spoken, we will have quick follow-ups from Lady Curran and Lord Oates.
Stephen Arundell: Dr Hill outlined the fact that we are now delivering resilience and civil society in a constant crisis cycle. Some refer to it in the academic literature as “poly-crisis”. Although those terms are helpful, fundamentally, what does this mean for the individual citizen, a resident, a business or a local authority? How are we able and empowered to deal with those shocks continually, both in funding and in technology?
Right now, district nursing services are paying more money to deliver local services. Because of issues that are going on thousands of miles away, the price of diesel has gone up. That is not in local budgets or local mechanisms. Holistically speaking, the system will not come out to a local authority or an NHS trust saying, “Don’t worry, we have your back here”. That money will have to be found locally, with that resilience delivered locally.
The funding question is: what are we trying to fund and where do we want to build that national-level resilience? We could argue that the emergency services, as brilliant as they are, are a bit of a Cinderella service: they turn up with their flashing blue lights, save the day then leave again. Developing national resilience is more than better funding for emergency response; it is about building strategic capacity and capability so that we are starting to design in-target hardening, thinking about the defence of the realm.
Professional emergency planners like my members and me have stopped our Cold War-era planning. We do not think about and plan for the defence of the home nation. It has not been on our risk agenda or in our work environment. If it needs to be—if that is the ask of the profession—we absolutely will pivot. We will go back to our civil defence roots and start to bring that back into the routine work of our members; it will then start to filter out. However, that ask has not been articulated to the professional community from the centre. I echo Dr Hill’s comment that some of the tightness around the strategic defence review translates into the resilience delivery agenda—not just the overall resilience agenda.
The Chair: It would be helpful if we could ask the three supplementaries that have been indicated to me so that Dr Hill and Mr Arundell can answer all three together, if that is all right. We will hear from Lady Curran, Lord Oates and Lady Helic, in that order.
Q42 Baroness Curran: Thank you, both, for your extremely helpful insights. Dr Hill, may I ask you something directly? Given what you said in your—very welcome—blunt view on the changing international environment that we face, it looks as though our international arrangements for engagement and sharing responsibility are vulnerable at the moment, if I can put it politely; I could be more blunt. Given that we are looking at this, should we think about any recommendations on how we can improve the international architecture to ensure that we have better international dialogue, share some of the global challenges together and come forward with some greater preparedness?
The Chair: Can we park that question? Lord Oates.
Q43 Lord Oates: My question is directed to Dr Hill as well. As I understand it, the SDR argued that the planned investment in defence was sufficient to enable the UK to continue to operate and sustain the nuclear deterrent. In view of the blunt remarks you made about the position of the United States at the moment, is it still appropriate for us to be investing in a nuclear deterrent that is so reliant on the United States?
The Chair: Thank you. Lady Helic.
Q44 Baroness Helic: I have a quick one for Dr Hill, following on from Lady Curran’s question. You asked, “Funding for what?” I am a great proponent of increased defence spending and of seriously taking on the lack of resilience in the country. However, I often ask myself how it is that the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office always gets punished, if you like, or damaged when it comes to spending. This is where we ought to start if we want better treaties and better understanding, and if we want to project power less expensively. Why does the Foreign Office never get taken into account when we are tackling the issues of resilience and our projection of power through military means?
The Chair: Dr Hill, that is a range of questions for you on international architecture, nuclear reliance on the US and FCDO budgets. Would you like to have a crack at those three together?
Dr Fiona Hill: I would. They all fit together. They also relate to something—I was taking careful notes—that Mr Arundell said. How do we get back? How do we ask everyone to step forward to do the tasks that we need now, like the planning that we did during the Cold War? Frankly, we need to have that ask. This fits into what we should be looking at, in terms of how we decide on what to fund and what to prioritise.
On that last question about the FCDO or other entities within the UK’s structures, I know that there was a lot of backlash—rightly so—around cutting back on humanitarian aid, for example. If we have a clear idea of what we are about, we will make carefully considered decisions about all these things. When I ask what we are funding, it always depends on the mission and the vision that we have in front of us, because not every issue related to defence is related to the procurement of weapons, recruitment or any of the other innovations that we might be talking about on the battlefield.
In terms of thinking about these in broader structures, I want to make a couple of quick comments about Ukraine and Finland. In not expecting the war in which it has found itself, Ukraine learned the hard way that it had to bring the whole of society into the prosecution of the war. It is a top-down effort. Absolutely everything in Ukraine, from the train system to the universities and the health services, is being crowdsourced and crowdfunded with the help of international support. The Ukrainians could not, of course, do anything without a larger international framework.
For the Finns, it is the same thing. They decided that it was not good enough to have just their own domestic preparation, which is pretty considerable; they do all the things that we are talking about today. They also wanted to join NATO after the Russians invaded Ukraine because they saw that they needed larger international structures in which to operate and other countries with which to collaborate in thinking about preparedness.
In that regard, the United Kingdom is part of the Joint Expeditionary Force. Lord Peach is on-screen here and can probably speak to some of this. We now have meetings at the top level of the JEF—at the level of the Prime Minister—which we did not have before, as well as meetings with foreign Ministers and others. This entity, which includes the United Kingdom, Finland and Sweden, was created for Finland and Sweden to engage on military and other defence-related matters when they were not part of NATO. It has become an important platform for thinking about a whole host of other issues. It could be expanded further, on the point about international architecture, to think about some of these resilience and preparedness issues, because all of the Nordic countries and the Baltic states are part of it. The JEF now has an open dialogue with Canada to the north, as well as with Ukraine to the east. It is a forum that could be used more for best practices; it is already one for co-ordination and thinking about leadership.
The United Kingdom is heavily dependent for much of its critical infrastructure on countries such as Norway—for gas, in any case. We have undersea cables. We have shipping routes. We have all kinds of communications, transportation and other critical networks, such as satellites and the radar stations in Norway, which all link together. We can address many of these issues. We also have counterparts in these countries who have stepped up the kind of emergency planning that Mr Arundell laid out extraordinarily cogently. That is one particular frame.
On our nuclear deterrent, we are already addressing the issue that what we foresaw a year ago may not be sufficient for the moment. Lord Robertson has talked many times about the importance of embedding the UK’s continuous at-sea nuclear deterrent in the larger European context of NATO, including thinking about how we might get more NATO support for continuing our sea-based deterrent. You saw that the Ministry of Defence—we had not prefigured this in the strategic defence view—decided to join the DCA. The French are already in discussions with the Germans and many others about expanding the nuclear deterrent.
It is always prudent, when you are thinking about defence and resilience, to reduce vulnerabilities, to diversify risk and to diversify the number of counterparts and partners you have, particularly when a key division of labour or key forms of specialisation are involved. Of course, defence diplomacy, humanitarian aid, collaborating with others and bringing all of these international platforms to new levels depend heavily on our Diplomatic Service, as well as bringing in our intelligence services. This has to be a holistic approach; that is the direction with which we are grappling and towards which we are leaning today.
The Chair: Thank you. Before we move on, can I check whether Lord Peach wants to come in on this question?
Q45 Lord Peach: Thank you. Dr Hill, it is good to see you again. I would offer the key point around nuclear deterrence as a question. Do you agree that we need a better IQ in the country as to why we have a deterrent, how it is being modernised and why that is happening?
Dr Fiona Hill: I agree. That is part of the national dialogue we must have on security. Ours is maritime because we are a maritime power. The risks that the UK faces are in the North Sea, the North Atlantic, the channel and the Irish Sea. We already see all kinds of penetration by Russian nuclear submarines in these areas, so having that discussion is pretty crucial.
The Chair: Mr Arundell, do you have anything to add, or are you holding fire for the next question?
Stephen Arundell: I have two quick points. Parking Brexit to one side, we need to be mindful that, where we lose opportunities in, for example, the Erasmus exchange programmes for academics and students, the resilience and STEM sectors suffer a loss of learning opportunity, which feeds back into the national resilience agenda.
Secondly, when we consider climate-driven hazards, many of our European neighbours are already dealing with climate-driven hazards, such as the wildfires in Greece. Opportunities exist for us to have strong peer-to-peer learning relationships so that a wildfire tactical advisor from a fire service in the north of England can go on work experience and have peer-to-peer learning from practitioners elsewhere in Europe. We do not necessarily need to reinvent the wheel, but we need to ensure that those international relationships enable us to hoover up the good practice that is out there and bring it back to the UK. Do you know what? If wildfire risks are growing in southern Europe, in 100 years’ time, that risk is going to be cogent and live here in the UK. We do not have a choice but to look elsewhere and bring back that learning and practitioner development. However, the structures and frameworks of government in the machinery of the UK need to enable practitioners to access that consistently so that we build the professional expertise that, as Dr Hill rightly highlighted, we need here in the UK to deal with the risks that are coming and are already here.
The final point I would like to make is about the Ukraine experience. Let us take a single system in the UK and look at our resilience in relation to blood, via the national blood transfusion service. There are some days or weeks when that service is under significant strain and stress in a time of peace; this impacts on the ability of our NHS to care for routine patients in our nation. We really need to think about how we have that society-level conversation with the citizen and the system so that institutions such as the national blood transfusion service can both be there in civilian time and be scaled and supported in times of combat and military operations. We need to focus there as well.
Dr Fiona Hill: May I intervene? We have important stories that we need to tell about these issues. I want to give you two that underscore what Mr Arundell just said.
First, the United States would be blinded by the loss of RAF Fylingdales, which is the jewel in the crown of the radar systems and which I have already mentioned; it would be a catastrophe for not just the United Kingdom. It was nearly burned down by a wildfire on the North York Moors, exactly as Mr Arundell laid out. It has only its own fire service there—it is quite remote so it would have been hard to bring out fire services from other places—and it had not drilled for a wildfire on the moors. That was not one of the threats they had anticipated.
Moreover, the Fylingdales site is an old proving ground, with a lot of buried ordinances from World War II. Teesside University was the only place with a paper archive—none of it was digitalised—of where the ordinance was buried. It had to communicate by phone with the Fylingdales staff to let them know where the ordinance was buried, looking at maps to help them address the severity of the fire. We could have lost that entire world-class, state-of-the-art radar station to what was basically a gorse fire.
Secondly, on blood supply, you may recall the major storms that hit the United States a year or so ago and devastated parts of North Carolina. They took out one of the only plants producing saline solution for hospitals, and it turned out that there was no back-up. That had a massive effect on public health across the United States.
The Chair: Thank you; those are sobering examples. I turn to Lord Spellar.
Q46 Lord Spellar: May I follow on from that slightly? One of the lessons of the pandemic—and, indeed, of the current situation in Ukraine—is the problem of single points of failure in the industrial supply system. Something that was slightly overlooked, because the previous question had so many other interesting aspects, is the development and maintenance of the industrial base, particularly with SMEs. We would welcome your comments there.
That ties in with the whole-of-society approach to preparedness and resilience. This question is more for Mr Arundell. If, as you indicated, the Government gave you a signal and said, “We want to recreate this capacity with the involvement of communities, local authorities and so on”, how would you go about it?
Stephen Arundell: It would need to be an effort that is not in a single political cycle. It would need to be a national drive and a national move, similar to that of the Finns and the Swedes, where it becomes a thing that we now do and is sustained and funded in the long term. There are definitely significant opportunities in the national curriculum for the education of young people as catalysts for change, but I would go further than that in that we need to start thinking about education in all levels.
I can give a comparison that is, I think, helpful in this case. If we think about health and safety, and the way in which health and safety education and accountability in governance are driven, we have strong legislation in the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act. We have strong leadership from a dedicated body, the Health and Safety Executive; we have strong chief executive-level and board-level accountability; and we have education, both specifically in that area and more generally. If you are a manager working in a McDonald’s, you get trained in health and safety and all of your other management functions and tasks, so there is a degree of embeddedness where, thankfully, people have fewer injuries in the workplace; they can go to work and work safely.
That top-down, consistent approach to governance is the approach that we need to look at if we are to achieve whole-of-society resilience. It is not just about trying to mimic an attitude of total defence or total resilience; there is an embeddedness piece, but there is a long-term sustainability piece within that as well.
Dr Fiona Hill: What Mr Arundell just said is excellent; in fact, I was writing it all down. As he said, we in the UK already have a lot of models and practices ourselves—not just what the Finns, the Swedes or the Ukrainians have developed—that we can put into play.
One of the critical points is that we must move everything out into the regions and outside London. We heard from the previous panel that, when you look at places such as Scotland, with a population of 5 million, there are all kinds of operating tiers and levels, from the national to the regional to the local. In Wales and in Northern Ireland, you have a more holistic approach with the devolved authorities.
Part of the problem in the United Kingdom—this goes for thinking about defence production as well—is that we tend to have everything highly centralised in London. We have not been able to move fully into engaging with the new combined mayoral authorities, partly because many of them are very new, with a few exceptions such as in Greater Manchester and Teesside; the combined authority there has been in existence for a longer period. We have all this confusion around, as was said in the previous panel, changing police boundaries. The problem is that not all of these organisations will be contoured by the same sets of boundaries as those we are thinking about, and England itself has a problem.
We need to lean into thinking about the structures that already exist and how to consolidate them, as well as how to use the combined mayoral authorities and their links into local councils and the kinds of organisation that Mr Arundell laid out. That is very important. We must also think about how we can promote the development of small and medium-sized enterprises related to defence across the entire country—not just picking and choosing places but thinking about how we might avoid these single points of failure by encouraging the development of critical production for saline, for other products related to the blood supply or for other critical parts of our NHS and industrial production across the country, so that they are not all in one place in case of some kind of catastrophe.
The Chair: Lady Hunter has a question about putting a whole-of-society approach into practice.
Q47 Baroness Hunter of Auchenreoch: The idea of using paper maps and phones to find the ordinance was interesting; I am very interested in that. We hear a lot in these committees about not reinventing the wheel and making use of the structures that we already have, as well as implementing some of the recommendations that have already been made. What simple and practical changes do you think we could make in policy, particularly in terms of trusting and engaging our people?
Dr Fiona Hill: Mr Arundell will have a lot of things to say about this because he already engages in it, but I want to say that you can see from polling—we did a lot of polling and focus groups for the strategic defence review—that people are already engaged and willing to be engaged. They want to know what they can do; in fact, the training and preparedness that Mr Arundell laid out is one of the antidotes to fear and panic.
We already have a whole host of institutions across the UK, with our voluntary services. Lord Harris mentioned all kinds of things: the Red Cross; the Girl Guides and Scouts; the voluntary services that sprang up after World War I, including the Women’s Institute; and all kinds of cadets and reserve forces.
We have schools that already provide a lot of training, but we also have our university network; I want to mention this very quickly. I am the chancellor of a university, and I think that universities are a completely under-tapped resource. Universities UK has been holding hearings and meetings in this past week about resilience, defence and preparedness. UKRI, the UK Research and Innovation fund, has been funding research into these issues. We have pockets of expertise. They also do a lot of training along with the military educational councils; officer and other defence training goes on in a whole range of universities and FE colleges.
We have to lean into those networks and think about how we might do more resilience preparedness and education along the lines that Stephen laid out, not just in schools but also in our university and FE networks. It is about linking them all together and getting the various leaderships of those universities to meet frequently and think about the plans they can make. Durham has already done this. Universities for North East England is looking at it, as are the N8. The problem is that we have a few too many different organisations looking at this, in the same way as how the police boundaries do not really overlap. It is a question of how to consolidate and tap into this.
Stephen Arundell: One of the most dynamic, most innovative and most challenging parts of the Emergency Planning Society, for us as the board of directors, is our student chapter—that is, our students right across the UK who are engaged in undergraduate and postgraduate education. There is a thriving culture within universities. There are not as many courses available at undergrad and postgrad as I would like for the pipeline coming in, but universities are definitely an untapped resource.
When we think about some of the practical changes you are looking for, we need to think about the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, which was conceived in the preceding decade—the decade of disaster, if you get into the academic literature on that. We need to think a bit more radically and openly about the way in which that Act is applied and used by organisations. Is it asking and placing the right duties on organisations?
There are a lot of gaps in the CCA, as it currently stands—the voluntary and charity sectors are not considered that well—but we also need to consider the governance and regulatory side here. No large organisation, chief executive of a local authority or chief executive of an NHS trust has ever been prosecuted, for want of a better phrase, for failing in their duties against the Civil Contingencies Act. We do not really have a national audit function around resilience.
In the NHS, we have the emergency planning, resilience and response core competency framework, and you have NHS organisations putting out self-assessment. It is not an external assessment; there is no third-party validation. We have a range of British standards in relation to security and other areas. We have some really good, high-quality international standards that we can apply in the UK, but there are no organisational or national-level drivers for organisations to achieve compliance.
The Chair: First, a quick supplementary, then Lord Farmer will ask the next question.
Q48 Lord Oates: Mr Arundell, you mentioned the lack of a resilience audit in the system. In the financial services system, there are the capital adequacy rules, where risks are rated and capital must be held in proportion to them. Do you think that there is something that could be learned from that system and applied in resilience so that there are back-up systems?
You mentioned the blood system. I was a non-executive director of NHS Blood and Transplant when the lock-out of the NHS system happened. It still had fax machines; that is how it communicated. I bet it does not have them any more.
Stephen Arundell: There is definitely learning on the financial resilience side of things, but, if we are being really honest, at this point in our austerity journey, most organisations’ financial reserves are relatively small and relatively stretched. So the ability of a collection of regional bodies to withstand a significant disruptive shock then recover from it will be financially challenging.
There are schemes in place, such as the Bellwin scheme. No one really accepts that as being meaningfully fit for purpose, given where we are now with the thresholds and levels of complexity. When communities are adversely impacted by disaster and crisis, that recovery tail can be very long, so, when we think about the funding of that recovery, we could be going across years and/or generations.
I do not necessarily think that we are thinking particularly well. It is expected that this will be absorbed into business-as-usual financial delivery by organisations. When we think about the mental health impacts and the challenges it places on mental health provision, especially in terms of children and young people’s mental health in relation to post-incident and post-disaster recovery, it can be quite challenging to ensure that we give people the best opportunities to thrive from their trauma experience. Trauma is not always a terrible experience. It can often lead to significant post-developmental growth if the individual—and society more broadly—is given the support they need. That can be done in a sustained financial way only where you have depth of capacity to surge and support communities.
We could be really bold in this space. We could think very broadly and say, “Maybe we need an Ofgem-style organisation for resilience that goes looking for examples of best practice, sets standards, encourages, audits and champions the end-user”. That may be a bad analogy, but you get the sense of how we could be really bold in this space and think about alternative governance and accountability arrangements.
I think Dr Hill would agree with me that the impact of Caldicott Guardians in organisations with care responsibilities has been dynamically beneficial to patient safety and the patient experience. We do not have something similar in the resilience space. We certainly do not have something similar in the defence space; I defer to Dr Hill’s expertise in the defence space. We may not want to think about something that bold and challenging the system in that way but there are opportunities to maximise what we are doing elsewhere, with a large resilience slant on it.
The Chair: Can I just check that you both have 10 or so more minutes to spare? We still have three more questions to get through, and I am looking at the clock.
Stephen Arundell: I am happy to stay as long as you need me to.
The Chair: Thank you. Dr Hill, do you have anything to add before we move on?
Dr Fiona Hill: I just want to applaud that last comment. As it happens, I am writing a book about resilience at the moment. Coming out of the strategic defence review, I felt that there were so many unanswered questions around how we achieve this. Like Mr Arundell, I have found the best practices in unexpected places. They are often at the local and community level, where everyone has chipped in and you have all of the elements we are talking about: boldness, leadership, pooling of resources, bringing in best practice from other places and learning from them. We have some outstanding examples of that across the United Kingdom. In fact, Mr Arundell is an example of one of them. He is somebody who sees the problem and has all kinds of ideas about how to deal with it. Investing in people like him and his colleagues will be critical. Again, it is about taking things out of the national level and looking elsewhere for great examples. We have them in British history. Think about all the lessons from World War I, World War II and the Cold War: we have done all of this before.
On old analogue systems, such as faxes, telephone calls and paper files, we are going to need all kinds of back-up in times of catastrophe. Local archives are pretty critical. The Chinese have been buying up racing and homing pigeons; you can take from that what you will, but we need to think about alternative communication systems. Everybody is expecting some catastrophic hit to GPS at some point. We worry about everything from solar flares to major climate and weather events. We must think about all the different contingencies; that is what some groups do 24/7.
The Chair: That moves us on very nicely to Lord Farmer’s question about information.
Q49 Lord Farmer: I thank you both for your extraordinary contributions. I was thinking about battery-run radios, which may be helpful. We want to talk about what information should be provided to practitioners and the public on preparedness and resilience. We have heard before that people are worried about panic. For instance, if you give details of possible food scarcity, you are going to have a rush to the supermarkets, as we had in Covid with loo rolls and things like that. We have some experience of this.
We have also heard evidence today, both from you and from the former panel, that the public are better advised and knowledgeable than we think. Are we willing to be honest to the public about what is needed and the risks? How should we inform them to be resilient and prepared?
Stephen Arundell: My members work with community and youth groups. They are out giving talks right across the country, talking about risk in a very localised context. However, when we think about the national conversation, it tends to fall back to the “duck and cover” parody in the old survival guide. We do not seem to have national risk language reflecting a more modern approach.
A really good example is what was done by counterterrorism policing in relation to the “Run, Hide, Tell” messaging when it initially launched. There was the use of celebrities. There were information packs in schools and universities. There was an online campaign, using social media. That risk communication information got out there into the public. If you talk to people about what they would do in the rare event of a weapons or firearms attack, you see that it got into the public psyche. There is no reason why a similar comms approach could not be taken with resilience matters.
The other thing where we had some very good learning is the outputs of the Pitt review, which was published in 2007. We made a significant range of changes so that, if you buy a home in the UK, your legal pack now comes with a flood information pack. There is absolutely no reason why we could not take the learning from that review; replicate it in civil defence, emergency planning and civil emergency scope; and make your solicitor handing you a legal pack just one of those things you do when you buy a house. We could replicate that in landlords’ obligations to their tenants.
There are a lot of opportunities here where this can be systemised and become repeatable so that the narrative is out there and individuals can understand, make a determination and choose to buy a property in a flood risk area or choose not to do that—or choose to live somewhere and undertake a bit of local target-hardening so that their home is safer for them and their family. We are already doing a range of things well, but we are not 5x-ing or 10x-ing them across other sectors.
The public are more willing to be given information on risk than we perhaps think they are. The Covid experience should underpin that. Notions around people panicking have been widely challenged in the literature. I refer you to the fantastic work of Dr Chris Cocking at the University of Brighton, who is a bit of an expert in this area. He has done some very good collaborations with colleagues in that crowd behaviour space in terms of how people behave in real-world situations.
In recent weeks, the Emergency Planning Society has been engaged by Full Fact, the online fact-checking service, to counter disinformation and online conspiracy noise in and around the current outbreak of meningitis in Kent. You already have organisations such as my own and other professional bodies taking it upon themselves to try to counter some of the disinformation narrative that exists out there. We do it because we feel that it is the right thing to do; other professional bodies and membership organisations do it as well. It is good people doing good things; it is not necessarily a co-ordinated structured national effort, and it could definitely be better. We all have an obligation in the disinformation space—as both practitioners and organisations—but there is definitely a bit more to be done in and around that for the technological providers. It is not necessarily a sledgehammer/walnut situation; there is a bit more of a pick-and-mix approach to this. We must all do our bit in that disinformation space.
Dr Fiona Hill: I could not agree more. It is a question of scaling up and co-ordination. Another element to add to the really good things that Mr Arundell has already said is to think about the creation of citizens’ assemblies, which I know many of you have already considered. As I mentioned, we pulled a set of citizens’ assemblies together for the strategic defence review, as well as soliciting submissions from members of the public on what they thought we should focus on in defence. As a result of that and some specialised polling, we concluded that people are already well-informed and want to know what they can do, getting to the point that Mr Arundell made.
We also found that people are very people-focused. They were interested in the people who were providing defence or working in that space and wanted to engage with them more. They wanted to have a sense that they were participating in some way. Regularly convening citizens’ assemblies across the country, which could be done in conjunction with the devolved authorities, schools and universities—in order to get input from people on the things that work and the things they want to hear about—is very important. We pull people together for juries. They are absolutely capable of hearing all kinds of information and important directions and acting on them.
Again, I like the idea of getting celebrities, such as people in sport, people in professions and astronauts. For example, Durham University has hosted several events with astronauts and invited members of the public to participate. If they are asked why they are not frightened when they go off into space, astronauts will tell you that it is all about the preparation and training. They know what to do, even when they are doing something that would be terrifying and panic-inducing for the average person. It is all about training and preparation; that is the best antidote to fear and panic, and we need to lean into that.
On information, we think about internet harms and digital spaces being very threatening all the time. However, we can also use these smaller networks—listservs and other internal networks, such as the intranets that people use in their businesses, workplaces, communities, schools and universities—to provide this kind of information and a back-up in providing paper information. I thought that supermarkets could be another place for disseminating the kind of information that Mr Arundell suggested.
I recently cleaned out my mother’s house and found a book that she was given by her builders in the 1960s, telling her how her house worked. Much of it was also about safety features. I had no idea that builders used to do that back in the 1960s. I also found a handbook from the 1980s about how to survive a nuclear war, which was super helpful. I have kept both of them because I talk about them in my book. These are the kinds of things that people did refer to; both of these documents seem well-thumbed and underlined, in my mother’s case.
Lord Farmer: Can we have a copy of the book?
Dr Fiona Hill: I still have it. It was put out by the Wimpey builders on estates. I had no idea that builders were supposed to do that in the 1960s.
The Chair: We have two follow-up questions. I think that we should hear both of them then ask both of you to come back on them.
Q50 Baroness Mobarik: This is coming at the misinformation bit from a slightly different angle. We all acknowledge that we have a constant stream of misinformation and disinformation coming at us. What mechanisms would you suggest we put in place to correct false or misleading narratives rapidly during a time of crisis? Secondly, is there a risk of inconsistent messaging from across government undermining trust? What mechanisms would you put in place to counter that?
The Chair: We will hear Lady Winterton’s question first. You can then answer both together, if that is all right; I am looking at the clock.
Q51 Baroness Winterton of Doncaster: Mine is directed at Dr Hill because I know that she has commentated quite a lot on the international use of disinformation. Do you, Dr Hill, have any reflections on the use of that during elections to disrupt democracies?
The Chair: Mr Arundell, would you like to kick off?
Stephen Arundell: Yes. Specifically on democracy in elections, there is a lot of good guidance out there and available to those who are standing. Some really good technical briefings on delivering and being safe online have been provided by the police and colleagues to those who are standing, as is right and proper.
However, the challenge is a volumetric one. Any single counter is perhaps not the answer to a volumetric problem; part of the solution is a technical one at a system level, working with the technology providers. There must also be an acknowledgement that the truth narrative needs to be funded and disseminated on multiple platforms and in multiple languages so that we are enabling all communities to be reached effectively—especially those with disability and health complications. I am not in any way suggesting that there is sign language disinformation out there but, at the same time, we should provide the counter to it in an inclusive and accessible way, so that all residents and citizens understand how they get their information.
Vaccine hesitancy and disinformation has a direct, real-world implication for public health. The same can be true in other areas of life in the UK, so there is a need for us to challenge that so that we can have better public outcomes. There is a lot of international learning on which Dr Hill will be better placed to speak, but I do think that we need to look overseas and bring some of that good practice back here—notwithstanding the fact that we have some awesome practice in the UK.
The Chair: What about Lady Mobarik’s question on conflicting messages?
Stephen Arundell: It is a classic “left hand, right hand” case. The risk is in that becoming distorted or confused as it goes through the layers of the machine down to a local or regional level. It is about individuals working hard to ensure that they are getting it right, but there is another element here. Think about our structures, such as the Civil Contingencies Secretariat, as it was, and, now, COBRA: there are a lot of intelligent, hard-working people there, but the staff turnover is relatively high.
It is about the longitudinal nature of people. We used to get people who worked on crisis in central government for decades—not so much any more. There is high turnover, so there is a loss of depth of experience. I am not sure how many people in those teams right now have good knowledge of Operation Yellowhammer, which was not that long ago.
When we compare that to the local and regional level, we have local authority emergency planning staff and NHS emergency planning staff who may have been in an organisation for 10 years or longer, so you have that local sense-checking—that local ownership of the narrative of the risk story—and you tend to get less noise being generated. This is not a criticism; I am not knocking the centre. I am just highlighting that, sometimes, inexperience can lead to less-than-optimal outcomes.
The Chair: Dr Hill, do you have anything to add on misinformation and interference?
Dr Fiona Hill: All these things and what Mr Arundell just said are interrelated. As he was speaking, I was thinking about that loss of expertise. In the military, when people leave, there is the idea of them being part of the strategic reserve for a number of years, then they go into the reserves. We have to think about that for people who have served in the civil sector on all of the different issues related to emergency preparedness and civil response that Mr Arundell has talked about. Who are the people out there who would be trusted figures and who have expertise that you could call on in an emergency to counter some of these acts of wilful disinformation? We need a better sense through mapping, polling and focus groups of who people trust and who they are most likely to listen to.
We had a lot of experience of that during Covid. We can draw on that. Where was it most effective for people to hear information from? Who did people trust? Who did they turn to? If it is sources of pervasive disinformation, why is that and what can we do to counter it? We have already looked at this in all the inquiries that are going on in the UK and elsewhere.
On international practices, a number of countries have set up units looking at psychological defence. The Swedes have them. The University of Lund in Sweden, for example, has a whole programme on psychological defence, which is doing quite a lot of the things that Stephen has already talked about in terms of what is going on at the University of Brighton and in other places. We need to look across our university sector and see who is looking at this kind of work, what research has already been funded in the UK and how we can pull that all together.
I used to work at a centre within the Brookings Institution, where I am now, on social and economic dynamics. It looked at these exact questions across different disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences. How can we pull this together and apply it to counteract many of the problems we are seeing with so-called violent entrepreneurs stirring up problems? How can we push back against this? Some of the problems of disinformation are related to financing, to be honest. It is not just interfering in elections to try to distort electoral outcomes through the process of voting; it is who is paying for various political parties or campaigns.
That is a real weakness in the United Kingdom and a huge weakness in the United States. We are all familiar with the legislation on Citizens United where giving money is given the same standing as other forms of free speech and political action. That has been an enormous problem. Elon Musk showed up in Wisconsin and was literally throwing millions of dollars around; that turned out to be a failed attempt, but he was certainly aiming to swing an election there.
What the UK must be very careful about—as we know from Brexit and many other campaigns, not just elections—is who is funding these campaigns. We need much more transparency here. It is not just the Russians; it is all kinds of other actors. The UK is under incredible threat right now from funding sources coming from abroad—including from the United States, where there is an effort to subvert the political discourse and put a heavy hand on preferences in elections. That also goes for Germany and France.
This is a difficult situation. The House of Lords and Parliament have a very important task: to close up those loopholes and make it much more difficult for foreign or domestic funding that is meant to subvert these processes to get a foothold. Again, a lot of this is about taking things down to local areas and having conversations about these problems in schools, universities, and local communities, with constant engagement. It is no good engaging after the fact when something is already happening. You have to be doing this constantly, as Mr Arundell laid out; it must be engaged and sustainable in the long haul.
I want to go back to that quip about battery radios. We must think all the time about the different forms of communication that we would have in an emergency. I have a hand-crank radio, not just a battery radio, which my father gave me during the Cold War. It still works. It is about all of these old analogue systems that we might need to back up.
I remind everybody about how important the BBC is, because that is another issue. Remember that the BBC was set up in the 1920s precisely with the goal of trying to create a better-informed populace, with the idea that that was the antidote to demagoguery. It was, of course, conceived at the same time as national socialism and totalitarianism were emerging in Germany and the Soviet Union. The whole idea of the BBC was also to promote local news, not just news at the national level.
The Chair: We have certainly had a big canvas to draw on today. The next question must be very succinct, please, as must the answers.
Q52 Baroness Helic: I will cheer you up by saying that I think my question has been answered. Let me just make sure. How can we ensure consistent action and communication across all sectors in preparing for, responding to and adapting to disruptions? I believe that this has been answered but if you would like to add anything—Mr Arundell, in particular—please do.
Stephen Arundell: We need to look at some of the language we use, especially when we are helping businesses and wider society to understand the risk envelope in which they are delivering. Sometimes, we are too technical in our language, and we do not use common language; we talk about likelihood and other risk-centric terminology.
There is a piece here around ensuring that we are telling contextualised stories so that people can adapt their business practices and how their charity operates; so that they understand that external risk environment; and so that they can thrive. Ultimately, we want businesses and organisations to thrive, to meet their objectives, to serve and to generate profits—to do whatever they are looking to do—so it is about helping with the language and the way in which we do that.
The other element here is that you often have to go looking for our risk communication. It is relatively dull. There are definitely opportunities for us to have better innovation in how we communicate risk. I am not suggesting that we commission cartoons or anything like that, but, at the same time, it could be a bit more interactive and accessible so that everybody can understand it in a better, more informed way.
That is what my members are saying. They want the public to get the risk environment so that they can be a bit better prepared, because, if citizens and businesses are better prepared, there is less ask of the state. We can then focus on those who are truly vulnerable or do not have the capacity to withstand a disruptive event, and we can prioritise.
Dr Fiona Hill: I could not agree more. I just hope that more attention will be paid to the kind of work that Mr Arundell does. If I had a vote, I would vote more attention and funding on the kind of work that he does, because he has laid it out brilliantly for all of us today.
The Chair: We have a final question from Lord Oates; it requires a very quick-fire answer.
Q53 Lord Oates: You have given us lots of information. If you had to give us one recommendation, what would it be?
The Chair: What is at the top of the wish list? What should we be recommending to the Government? Give us one thing.
Dr Fiona Hill: Take advantage of what you already have and consolidate it. There is a lot out there.
Stephen Arundell: I am privileged to represent amazing emergency planners across the UK. They work hard in our communities and businesses. They are expert professionals. We would just like to be heard. We would like to be engaged with. We would like to be respected as a profession and recognised for the added that we can bring. Enable us and turbocharge us to make the difference that we know we can make.
Preparedness is not that difficult. Emergency planning is a really powerful methodology. It is a powerful thing with which we can all engage so that, when that disruptive event comes along, we can deal with it—we can withstand, grow and move forward. Engage with us. Talk to us, listen to us and perhaps show us a bit more respect. We can do this together in partnership.
The Chair: We have kept you for far longer than we said we would, but it has been well worth it. You have given us a lot of food for thought and we are very grateful for your time. Thank you very much.
