15
Examination of witnesses
Sophie Greaves, Rhodri Talfan Davies and Alex Towers.
Q116 The Chair: Good morning and thank you very much to all three of you. I think you can see Rhodri Davies on the screen. Thank you all very much for your time in helping us with this inquiry. I should remind you that it is a public session and is being broadcast live. You will all receive a transcript within the next couple of days or so, and if there are any minor inaccuracies that you need to correct, please let us know then. If you think of anything afterwards that you wish you had said, we are very happy to have supplementary evidence in writing, if that feels right. We obviously have a lot of questions to put to you. When you give your first answer, it would be helpful if you could briefly introduce yourself, so we have it on record.
I will kick off with the first question for all of you. It is a scene-setting question: what challenges does the UK currently face with digital communication, in terms of the fragmented information environment and the possibility of network disruption? In what ways can technology give rise to misinformation and disinformation, such as through the use of AI? Although it is probably packing a bit too much into this question, for those of you for whom this is relevant, perhaps you could also incorporate into your answer whether you think there would be a possible undesirable end to universal access to digital information if the shutting down of digital terrestrial television were to happen—I gather that is the current plan—which would disrupt access to information in an emergency? That is quite a lot of scene-setting. Perhaps we could start with Mr Davies, and then we will move to the other two.
Rhodri Talfan Davies: Good morning, everyone, and thank you for the invitation. I am sorry I am not there with you in the room. There is a lot in that question—let me just step through it in the context of the BBC. Clearly, in terms of the media ecology as we now see it, there are substantial risks regarding misinformation and disinformation and the role of bad actors. Protecting essential, trusted information that is universally accessible for the whole population is a critical role for the BBC, and a critical contribution that we make to national resilience. Our ability to challenge inaccurate information and verify video and audio sources is incredibly important, particularly as we see the rise of malign content on social media platforms. Clearly, the Government are taking a more proactive step in that space, which we welcome, but our principal response to those risks is very significant investment in our journalistic resources, not only in the UK but globally, so we can address those risks directly.
Let me answer your question on DTT specifically, in terms of the Government consultation. The Government have come to a view that there is a route through to switch off DTT by 2034, but with some substantial caveats. There is still a small minority of people who are reliant on DTT for access to live television signals. That number will reduce substantially between now and 2034, but it is essential that those individuals are not left behind and clear action is taken to give them full access to the benefits of digital provision. We will work with other broadcasters and the Government to make sure those steps are taken. It is important that the media ecology evolves, but as we learnt with digital switchover some 15 years ago now, it is vital that everybody is part of that journey and that we consider how we provide full universal access to our digital services, even for those who at the moment do not have the confidence or ability to access digital, or the money to fund it.
Sophie Greaves: My name is Sophie and I am associate director for digital infrastructure at techUK, which is an industry organisation of around 1,100 tech companies. My role concerns the whole connectivity ecosystem, and I hope to shine a light on that today. The companies I work with most are operators such as BT, and suppliers of all kinds of technologies across the telecoms landscape, including fixed, mobile and satellite. We also look at data centres, telecoms and cloud provision. Those are the areas I hope to bring to the session.
To turn to the risks, one of the things I am struck by—and Rhodri touched on the switchover from DTT a few years ago—is that in 2026 so much relies upon the digital infrastructure that our members are building in the UK. So much of our lives is being streamed live, like this session, and that requires internet connection. The resilience question is a whole-economy issue, because so much of what we do now runs on this internet infrastructure. It is resilient in its general approach; routine resilience is there and there is no need for concern. However, we need to make sure that our networks can resist a shock and keep functioning. That is obviously essential when you are using technology that brings great value.
The binding constraint on our telecoms infrastructure is power. Power and telecoms have a mutual dependence; if there is no electricity, there is no network, and that plays out in very different ways. The one thing that we would consider is the power.
I will not speak too much to the disinformation question. It is not really my area, but I can follow up with colleagues, if that is helpful. You mentioned generative AI. AI is but a tool; it is not creating a new category of risk. It is perhaps accelerating and scaling what is already out there, but it is also a powerful defensive tool. We can use it to both make sure that our networks are running and any fault is detected, and to stop those messages that we would perhaps not like to come through.
Alex Towers: I am Alex Towers. I am the director of policy and public affairs for BT Group, which includes BT, EE, Plusnet and our semi-independent network infrastructure division Openreach. I worked for quite a long time at the BBC, so it is nice to see Rhodri and I very much agree with everything he said about the importance of the institution.
In terms of BT and the telecoms infrastructure, the nature of the risks that we are trying to manage all the time has not changed very much, but the scale of the possible threats and risks of things going wrong is changing, and that is where we should be thoughtful. The stuff we are trying to constantly protect, keep running and provide contingency for is the physical infrastructure: literally the cables that come into the country, all our exchange buildings, our mobile mast network and all the other interconnected equipment that we service every day. As Sophie mentioned, one category is the power supply that all of that depends on, which is critical in dependency, and the second is all our IT and systems infrastructure that runs in the background to keep the whole show on the road. We do a huge amount of work and spend tens of millions of pounds every year trying to just keep those going in a business-as-usual way.
Clearly, there are a number of different ways in which they could be threatened, some of which have always been with us. They include accidental damage to a cable from a ship, or wear and tear, for example, but also, increasingly, cyber threats and AI risks across our network. We see millions of different types of attacks every year. We have hundreds of thousands of people in the background worrying about that. There is physical sabotage, which is sometimes linked to AI and disinformation. I am not an expert on the sort of disinformation that Rhodri talked about, but certainly, on occasions, in particular during Covid, we saw conspiracy theories online about 5G, for example, being to blame in some way for the pandemic. That literally caused people to try to set fire to telecoms masts. It was a genuine problem for us; we had to get the Government involved in trying to handle that.
These things are interconnected. Then there are supply chain issues, which are increasingly a focus, given the way geopolitics is going and the questions about our sovereign capabilities and where we need to invest as a country. There is also the climate and the extremes of climate that can cause issues for how equipment works, most of which we think we have factored in, but it is a continuing concern. Extreme weather and storms cause problems for telecoms equipment.
The level of all those risks is increasing. As Sophie said, the issues that come from any outage are increasingly on a different level because of the interconnectedness of the whole economy and the extent to which the way we all live our lives depends on telecoms networks. That includes other aspects of CNI, such as banking and government services. A very protracted outage would cause significant problems across all those territories, which is exactly why this is a good moment to ask the question: are we now on a different level of risk? What do we do about that, and how do we try to think through some of these issues and the ways in which different parts of the economy are tied together? As Sophie said, we have particular issues concerning the energy networks. Are we worried about whether we can get priority service from them in the event of some sort of problem? They are also dependent on us for any smart grid capacity that they want to provide, so this is a team game.
Finally, I will touch on the DTT question, which is absolutely the right question to ask. We are very pleased: as Rhodri said, the Government have said this week that they think there is a compelling case to move the television transmission from terrestrial on to IP. We are very confident that that is technically achievable in the timeframe they are talking about, which is an eight-year period. Again, as Rhodri said, we did something like this before, with the digital switchover a decade or so ago. It is totally possible, but it absolutely depends on a joined-up plan to make sure that everyone is brought on that journey.
This is a shift we are making across various different technologies. We are currently changing people’s landline technology over: we have now got to 92%, I think, of people who have landlines, giving them a new way of using that tech. We will switch off 2G, we are rolling out fibre, and the television switch-off is part of this suite of upgrades that the country needs to make to get everyone on to the best possible tech with the best possible resilience, so that it works fantastically for everyone and everyone has the same starting point in life. But that means answering some really important questions. Has everyone got access to the technology? Is it affordable for everyone? Does everyone understand how to make the change and are confident about that? Have we thought about what the resilience questions might be if there is a problem further down the line, and is there a plan to deal with that? All that is totally achievable but it needs some work.
Q117 Baroness Northover: My question is largely for Mr Davies. It is about messaging on preparedness and resilience, and how it can be made clear and accessible for the public, including during emergencies. What work are you putting into that, given the BBC’s extremely important role in terms of information?
Rhodri Talfan Davies: I should have introduced myself at the start. I am the deputy director-general of the BBC. We are very focused on this. Clearly, the BBC has a central role in delivering information. We have a formal role under our royal charter in terms of how critical messages can reach the public in times of crisis. We have a body of work and evidence from Covid in terms of how we respond at pace to critical emergencies and how we make sure that public information is clear and available rapidly. We are now working with the Government on their own resilience action plan and closely liaising with a number of bodies, not least the National Cyber Security Centre, to develop a whole range of proactive measures that strengthen our own resilience and reduce the risk of us falling victim to an attack.
The critical part of this is clearly the delivery of our news services. While it might feel a peripheral question, the central one is: how do you maintain trust? In moments of national crisis, we see time and again that millions of users turn to the source that they trust the most. Right now, that remains the BBC; it is by far the most widely used and most trusted news outlet. Three-quarters of UK adults are still coming into BBC News each week, well ahead of any other news provider.
How we build and safeguard that trustworthiness is the critical work of the BBC. Clearly, there is technical and infrastructure work to do but, fundamentally, are we a brand that the audience trust to go to in moments of genuine threat and jeopardy? We are in a good place. We have demonstrated what we can do in Covid, where trust levels were through the roof, but that is the job in hand.
Q118 The Chair: I am interested in the emphasis you quite rightly put on trust. We have gone out of our way to canvass the views of young people, and it was quite striking that they were divided pretty much 50:50 on whether they trusted the BBC. Are you doing any proactive work to try to encourage a more positive attitude towards the BBC among young people?
Rhodri Talfan Davies: I am an optimist on this. There is a lot of talk about youth engagement with the media. According to Ofcom, the BBC remains the top-ranked organisation for news among 12 to 15 year-olds; it is the most important news source for them. We know that 12 to 15 year-olds trust the BBC more than any other organisation. I do not pretend there are not challenges. The polarisation and division that we see in social media means that many audiences, in particular young audiences, come to the BBC with a preconceived view of where the truth might be, so there are significant challenges for us.
Again, if you take a brand such as “Newsround”, which some would regard as a heritage brand, it is the most trusted source of news for children aged 7 to 12. Even among 13 to 16 year-olds it is the second-most trusted behind BBC News. We have the brands and the provision that can drive trust with those audiences. What we need to do more of is make sure that we have a really ambitious news offer sitting on social media platforms, where younger audiences are increasingly going for news and information. Part of our new partnership with YouTube is to do just that: to make sure that we are the number one news brand on YouTube not just in the UK but globally. There is work to do on that.
The Chair: That is very helpful. Does Alex or Sophie have anything to add on this question on messaging to the public, before Lord Farmer asks his supplementary?
Alex Towers: There is an interesting question: are the public thinking about these questions? Is there more that the Government should be trying to do to put everyone not quite on a war footing but in a different kind of mindset about how prepared we are for things going wrong, which we showed we can do as a country during the pandemic? But as things change, people are going to be more reliant on having, for example, back-up sources of power or radios or whatever it is in their houses. There is an interesting question from a whole-of-society point of view. There is always a danger of pointing at Scandinavia because it is a different culture, but other countries do more of this. I think that is a reasonable question to ask.
Sophie Greaves: The only thing that I would point to is the telecom sector, which has invested a huge amount in helping communicate with its customers in times of emergency. The cell broadcast system that sends out national alerts through people’s phones is just there to work in a time of great disruption, whether that be a storm or another difficult moment. The point is that that is a public message being broadcast to the country and, to Alex’s point, this is where media literacy comes in. If someone picks up their phone and looks at a message and it is saying something, you want them to be able to determine whether it is an official message or whether it looks a bit suspicious. I think Ofcom is looking at that and it has published something on media literacy this week. It was definitely in the Green Paper that was produced on Tuesday. Media literacy is interesting to point to.
Q119 Lord Farmer: We had evidence from Sam Wise of Saatchi & Saatchi, who said that 82% of people in the not-too-distant past have been likely to turn to national television for information, but that this has now dropped to 51%. He added that the proportion of people turning to family and friends via messaging had gone from 33% to 50% in a national emergency. That says that the trust is with the local community and family, rather than with the BBC. We had quite a lot of information from YouGov and other people saying that 50% of people believe that the BBC is biased. I think that is something you have to handle.
Rhodri Talfan Davies: There are lots of different ways of looking at data. The BBC remains far and away the most trusted news organisation in the UK and the number one most trusted news organisation globally. But there is no doubt that there is pressure on trust scores for all broadcasters. If you look at the Reuters report that came out last week, trust in the public service media in the UK, and particularly in the BBC, has remained resilient. What is impacting on trust is new media entrants and the role of social media, which is polarising people. It is raising questions about who you trust and what you believe. That clearly has a drag on the whole industry. Time and time again, we see our scores on trust way above the rest of the industry.
I do not want to underplay the challenges. To pick up on the point that has just been raised, we have a lot of work to do in the space of media literacy to help people navigate a new ecology around news, such as the role of Bitesize in helping children to navigate fake news and information, and a brand called Other Side of the Story. Children can start to develop their own personal toolkit to understand what is fake and what is real. It is the same with AI. We have just launched a Bitesize guide to AI, which is about giving children knowledge so that they can make more informed choices and be confident about how they deploy AI tools at home and in their studies. That is all part of our work to build trust and to give people the confidence to navigate a media climate that is changing so rapidly.
Q120 Baroness Hunter of Auchenreoch: Thank you very much for coming and for bringing your not inconsiderable expertise. We have heard from other witnesses about large-scale communications disruption. We heard from Ofcom about providing interim coverage using mobile generators, and we have heard from the BBC about how to do business continuity. BT has provided some interesting evidence on the challenges facing all providers. Could you bring that together? What are the actual plans? Could you broaden them out for us, looking at maintaining communications in a major disruption and the recovery period? How does it all connect?
Alex Towers: There is a huge amount we do already to prepare for those sorts of situations. I would split the plan into two sections. First, are we ready to absorb whatever risk there might be? Secondly, how do we respond, repair and address the situation as it presents itself? The absorb part is all about how we design the network to begin with. The fixed telecoms network—the broadband and the wires in the ground sort of stuff—is designed so that the different phone exchanges that provide the service are overlapping. If something happens to one of them, we try to contain the geographic risk of outages to the population by there being others to support. There is a similar principle for the mobile phone network, where the masts have overlapping coverage so that even if one gets knocked out, there might be others that can step in.
There is a design point, and also built in is a degree of power, resilience and back-up. We have, I think, 5,000 generators around the BT Openreach network, and the core network that is underpinning both the broadband and the mobile phone networks has a seven-day back-up period built into it in terms of power supply. Many of those mobile phone masts will have their own separate back-up battery or generator supply. The street cabinets—the green ones that you see on the road—will have four hours built into them. Many of the services that we provide, especially to the critical emergency services and 999, have additional resilience built into them so that they can carry on working for longer. We try to prioritise the services. All that is good readiness.
As soon as something does happen, the question is: how quickly can you respond and recover? In our case, we have our own dedicated team called the BT emergency response team that heads to wherever an incident is and tries to provide a temporary, then a permanent, solution. For example, when there was an issue on one of the Scottish islands earlier in the year, there was an immediate deployment of those people and provision for a temporary period of a satellite-based service, because a cable had gone down that could not be replaced. The repair from the cable repair ship took a while, but we were able to provide that short-term measure. We have our own system that is quite effective in dealing with those specific localised issues.
Then there is a government mechanism that goes around that as well, called the Electronic Communications Resilience & Response Group. It is a Cabinet Office thing that kicks into action as soon as there is an issue. Sometimes it might affect just us, but more often it is going to affect quite a lot of different operators, and we will all be running around trying to work out how to fix it. So that is a good additional layer of operation.
That is all good, and it is based on decades of work and tens of millions of pounds every year spent on trying to sustain it. It is good for specific outages based on specific local or regional events. One of the questions the committee is asking, and certainly the Government is asking, is: what if there is a more profound, much more widespread national outage situation? Candidly, it is a harder question to respond to by saying that we totally have that covered today. Lots of the things I have mentioned about power back-up, batteries and generators provide a solution for a period of time in that sort of situation. Have we defined perfectly as a country what is the right amount of time and the right level of coverage for those things? Probably not. Are we ready for the interconnected questions about how the power and the telecoms networks work together in this situation? I would say that there is definitely more to do.
Rhodri Talfan Davies: Just to echo a couple of Alex’s themes, I think that a lot of our work is based around minimising in advance the risks we face in cyber security, et cetera. However, if there was a national power outage, we have a clear plan that we have developed in co-ordination with the Cabinet Office about how we would prioritise public information messages, particularly using radio transmission, which would probably be the most resilient in a moment like that. We have a prioritised set of services that can be deployed both at a national level and across our local network of services, which would ensure public information messages were available. It goes back to a point Alex raised: what is the preparedness of the audience for those types of moments, in terms of very practical things such as access to batteries and basic tools that would help them be personally more resilient in such a moment? That is something that the Government will be thinking about because other parts of Europe, for obvious reasons, are probably more advanced on that journey. As I say, we work very closely with the Cabinet Office and other government departments to make sure that the public information part of responding to a power outage is in good shape.
Q121 Lord Spellar: This discussion is very interesting because it seems to be getting to one of the core problems that we are going to have to address. In all western economies there has been a dramatic push towards “just in time” and possibly a little less balance with “just in case”, so there is a real danger of then confronting single points of failure in the system. In reference to taking out Freeview and landlines, if your power source goes down locally and your internet is knocked out, and you are so dependent on that for accessing material, is it maybe not a little incautious to be basically eliminating landlines? Even if that does not obviously affect every household, at least neighbours can spread news. But suddenly you have an area of blackout.
Alex Towers: It is absolutely the right question to be asking because, as we have been saying, the scale of the impact of the risk is bigger. Landlines are quite an interesting case in point, because the current landline technology, or the predecessor landline technology called the PSTN, the public switched telephone network for those interested in the details, is really on its last legs—they literally do not make the parts any longer. To support the existing network that we are switching over, we are having to take parts from one part of the network to fix the problem in a different part, because there is no other way of doing it. It is not a secure, resilient means of communication. The newer landline technology, based on internet technology, has 50% fewer faults in it so it is more resilient in general, and we can sustain it for a longer period of time. It is definitely the right thing to be doing.
Then the question is: how do you manage a transition sensibly and make sure people know where they sit within it? That includes, for example, anyone whom we classify as a vulnerable customer, which is anyone in an area without any mobile coverage or over the age of 75 or with a particular telecare medical need—there is a long list of criteria and we try to be as broad as possible about it. We are leaving all those to the end of the process so that we make sure we can manage them separately and give them a dedicated unit that has a battery back-up system built into it, so that it should provide resilience and lasts for a significant number of hours more than the basic model on the market. We are trying to be thoughtful about that. It is still important that those people understand what they need to do to plug the thing in to make sure it works properly, and that goes back to the media literacy point and the public information side of things. However, it is the right thing to do to put them in hopefully a more secure position at the end of the process. It just needs careful design.
The Chair: Lady Winterton, I hope your supplementary is very quick before we bring in Lord Oates, because I am aware that we have Mr Davies online only until exactly 11.30, when he has to leave. If you want to hear his answers to all our questions, everybody needs to be brief.
Rhodri Talfan Davies: My apologies.
Q122 Baroness Winterton of Doncaster: Do you have practice sessions, with your regional personnel networks and so on, for what we are talking about? Do you do a kind of COBRA scenario of “It’s happened and we are pretending that we are in the midst of an emergency”?
Rhodri Talfan Davies: We do regular emergency and scenario planning against a range of risks, whether that is cyber security or power outages. There is regular internal planning across our networks with a range of staff. We also, as I say, collaborate with government on public messaging priorities and working through how issues will be escalated in moments of crisis. There is more and more focus on this. You will have seen in our response to the Green Paper on the royal charter that this role on national resilience is only going to become more important for the BBC.
Baroness Winterton of Doncaster: Do you do actual role-play or just planning?
Rhodri Talfan Davies: No, we do both. My most recent experience was in looking at various cyber security risks and role-playing a scenario based on a situation a US broadcaster had faced in the last two or three years. We test the planning to make sure that we have got the muscle memory internally when, or if, those moments of crisis should hit. Covid gave us an awful lot of experience in terms of how you mobilise an organisation at speed.
Q123 Lord Oates: My question is directed principally to Mr Davies. The BBC obviously has huge experience working around the world, through both the corporation itself and BBC Media Action, which I believe you chair. Can you share with us any lessons that the BBC would draw from its work in countries where communications systems are disrupted, such as during internet or mobile outages, in terms of support and emergency communications in the UK?
Rhodri Talfan Davies: We have a lot of experience in this space, particularly around emergency radio programmes. This goes back to the point I made earlier about the resilience of radio networks. Back in February, the World Service launched a temporary emergency radio programme for Iran in response, at that point, to the crackdown on protests. We continued that service throughout the attacks by the US and Israel on the country. We now look at that as a fairly standard response to front-line emergencies in different parts of the UK. There was a similar response in 2023 in Sudan, with again a regular daily radio programme to give people information about how to cope with the humanitarian crisis, but also, frankly, to give Sudanese people an opportunity to hear their own accounts of what they were going through. Another emergency radio service launched in Gaza in November 2024, and extensions of TV bulletins in response to the crisis launched on BBC News in Ukraine in February 2022.
The key muscle memory here is speed of response but, secondly, a platform primarily built around radio. To go back to the point I made about power outages in the UK, radio—particularly FM—gives you very significant resilience in moments of crisis, if you have the back-up generators in place.
Lord Oates: On the radio issue, some of the advice for how people should prepare is to have a wind-up radio should things go wrong. I do not think there is advice on whether that should be DAB, shortwave or FM. You seem to be suggesting that FM is the most resilient frequency, is that correct?
Rhodri Talfan Davies: We would put out our services across as many platforms as possible but, clearly, access to a radio, whether a wind-up or a battery-operated one, which has access, ideally, to both FM and DAB frequencies is probably the best option that users would face. In a moment of national power outage, our response would be to focus information around two of our major radio frequencies but we also have the option to localise both on FM and DAB across our local radio network. We have a whole variety of tools to respond, and it would depend very much on the nature of the outage—whether it was regionally localised, as it were, or whether we were facing a national problem.
The Chair: Lord Farmer, I think your question is more for the other two witnesses on the panel.
Q124 Lord Farmer: I have two questions, so I will ask them both in order to save time. They are to do with the relationship between the Government and the private sector. First, how can further conversations between the Government and the private sector benefit communications resilience, such as by establishing responsibility for funding subsea infrastructure? Secondly, to what extent is there a need for either the Government or businesses to attain digital sovereignty?
Alex Towers: This goes a bit to the point that Lord Spellar was making about “just in time”. This is “just in case”, I guess. The telecoms industry is not hugely competitive, and we are all spending our time and putting lots of investment into trying to improve our infrastructure, as well as win and keep customers and keep prices down for all sorts of good and helpful reasons. It means that we do not have large amounts of capital sitting around ready to deploy just in case there is this resilience question. We are doing all the things that I have described because they are the obvious things we must do. Is there now a question, in areas like subsea cables, of providing a much greater degree of contingency? Probably yes. Are we, as an industry, ready to step in and fill that gap? Maybe not. It is a conversation we are having with the Government and it is a question for them.
As you say, it goes to some extent to the actual infrastructure. Lots of the infrastructure is funded by different sorts of companies and coalitions, but there are some really geeky questions about exactly how it works with the Crown land—if you want to get your cable onshore, what are the costs of that? But there is also an important question about repair. BT currently has access to two repair ships. One of them is in France, is French owned, does not come here very much and is usually busy elsewhere in Europe—this is not an area of Brexit dividend, I should say. The other one we have is in this country, but it is 35 years old. Is that enough for the range of possible issues we are going to face in the next 10 years, with all the hostile actors out there, and even just given the fact that the cables themselves are getting a bit old and there is wear and tear, and all that stuff? Possibly not. What is the right response to it? It absolutely needs to be some sort of conversation between the Government and the industry. We are talking about it, but we do not have an answer on that just yet. It is a really good question.
On the question of digital sovereignty, I will have a go, and then Sophie will probably want to speak for the wider industry. It is a really important and genuine question. There is much more interest from all sorts of different parts of the corporate world and public services, as critical national infrastructure customers, about what BT can supply them with. We now have a totally sovereign offer that all your voice, data, cloud and AI services can be provided on a UK sovereign basis. But there is also an awful lot of chat out there about what exactly is sovereign. We need a clearer definition from the Government about where they think the focus should go. There is a role they can play in how they procure, as the public sector, and what they say is the right boundary between UK sovereign and American or other owned services, but they have not quite got to that bit. They are doing lots of really great stuff around investing in start-ups and sovereign AI supply, but there is also a demand question.
Sophie Greaves: A repair ship for subsea cable breaks is your classic resilience versus redundancy case study, because typically you do not need it and it is sitting there, but as soon as you do need it, it is absolutely vital. I absolutely echo Alex’s points on what the UK has in terms of its own capability to repair cable breaks. Of course, 70% to 80% of the breaks are accidental. I know that the Government are looking at how they can strengthen some of their deterrents and the penalties for those accidents happening but, equally, roughly one-third are not accidental. It concerns the whole piece: the land where they come in and the cables themselves. It is a very interesting conversation and one that the Government have to enter into with a standing partnership with industry, because the sector will not be able to fund it alone.
Sovereignty is top of mind for many of our members. It is an ever-increasing discussion. We see it as a mix of capability, leverage and openness. You do not want ownership just for its own sake. You want to invest where the UK leads; buy better everywhere, which is helpful for cost, for instance; and shape the world that we trade in. There is a layer of it that is almost a sovereign imperative. The subsea cables are part of that, but there are other technologies and areas where we feel that, if you do not co-fund or put your weight behind them, it is essentially a strategic loss; you are excluded from that. It makes a lot of sense for the UK to fully support certain areas, like subsea or quantum computing, for instance.
The Chair: Thank you very much. We have supplementary questions on this issue from Lady Mobarik and Lord Peach. I suggest that they both ask their questions, and then whoever finds it appropriate to answer can answer them both together. Let us be brief, please, everybody.
Q125 Baroness Mobarik: You have alluded to some of this but, in relation to digital sovereignty, we are in a world where data cloud services and AI are more or less concentrated in the hands of a few global companies. How can the UK preserve strategic autonomy and at the same time remain open and competitive?
Lord Peach: I would like to dive a bit deeper into the cable question—pun intended. Do you not think that someone in government has to be responsible, given the risk of states that wish us harm deliberately cutting cables? There is plenty of evidence across the globe that that is happening, and it seems unusual, if we are such a digital economy and are so exposed to that vulnerability, that we are not pursuing it. That leads to my very detailed question: which part of government do you think should be responsible for that?
Rhodri Talfan Davies: I will pick up the first question, on the challenge around digital sovereignty. It is a timely debate. There is a whole set of questions around AI and the level of sovereignty that the UK wants to develop in terms of foundational models and large language models, which I know the Government are very focused on.
I will just make a point in the context of the whole conversation that we have had. The ability of the UK to have a sovereign media organisation that has independence from global influence and other international players is critical. Despite all the competition, the BBC is still used by 94% of the population every month, which is an extraordinary figure. It remains a universal service. It is a critical part of our national infrastructure and it is a critical part of achieving digital sovereignty that you have a UK-owned media player of scale. This is a critical part of the narrative in the conversation that we will have about the future of the BBC over the next 12 months. If we allow the BBC to be reduced or we compromise its universality, we also compromise the country’s digital sovereignty. This has not been discussed in previous charters, but it feels incredibly timely.
Alex Towers: I agree with Rhodri. It is good that the BBC is putting all that stuff on YouTube and social media. Equally, it is important that we are not entirely reliant on those global platforms for people to find their way to the BBC’s content. That is another question to be grappling with.
It is complicated. We cannot pretend that we can exist in a world without big US tech companies and somehow onshore everything that the country needs. We need to plot our way through. Some of this is statecraft stuff and so beyond my pay grade, such as how we use the bits of leverage that we have got in international politics.
But we can invest in some of the components of a sovereign tech stack, which is about the data centres and services that you put on top of them. As I said, BT is doing some of that, and other companies will be doing some of that. It is an important part of the answer.
Around the question of resilience of critical government and national infrastructure-type services, there has to be an answer for how these things stay on and are secure in all circumstances. That is the question that the Government should be asking.
Sophie Greaves: I echo Alex’s point. To be clear, our view at techUK is that ownership does not give you leverage; jurisdiction does. Making sure that we have control over what is in the UK is essential.
The Chair: Do any of you want to hazard an answer to Lord Peach’s question about government responsibility for subsea cables?
Alex Towers: I am always nervous about telling government which bit of government should be doing what, but it is definitely a question of protect and defence, which I guess is an MoD thing. We are not seeing at the minute lots of these hostile attacks, but it is possible. That is a question for one bit of government. There is also a question about building in and adding to resilience, which is more for the DSIT bit of government or whatever that ends up being.
To some extent, this is a devolved issue. Within the UK cables, lots are between different parts of Scottish islands. Those are some of the cables that BT operate. Some of them have resilience built in, with two cables between island A and island B, but some of them have not. That was a procurement decision made some time ago by someone. Whether that is right or not will be for the Scottish Government to consider.
Q126 Baroness Paul of Shepherd's Bush: Thank you very much for your interesting contributions. This is primarily for you, Sophie. How can the Government avoid a complacent approach to cyber threats? For example, with the upcoming cyber security and resilience Bill, are there additional things that it should be covering and, if so, could you be specific about what you think should be included? We would be very interested in Rhodri’s and Alex’s contributions as well.
Sophie Greaves: Thank you for the question. The Bill is very much supported by techUK. We see it as a tool, not an outcome. You can comply with the legislation, but you do not want to assume that alone means you are compliant. It takes a mindset shift to make things secure and resilient. We have talked about anticipation of shocks and how you might absorb them, and the plans that you have for recovery. That is for each organisation to take a view.
Expanding the scope is not something that we would like to see at this point. We know that you and your colleagues are now to address the Bill as it returns to the House of Lords. We want to see it implemented at pace.
The secondary stage of the CSRB will be crucial. That secondary legislation and the codes of practice will be where industry is making sure that it is optimal. Some form of mandatory consultation with industry would be very welcome, as would being able to resource the regulators. Bringing a few new sectors into scope and ensuring that the regulation layer is optimal is something that we would support.
Keep it proportionate. The criticality of certain sectors perhaps does not need to be applied economy-wide. We need to select what could have the most disruption versus keeping costs low for businesses, while encouraging the mindset and approach to being secure and resilient.
Collaboration is something that we at techUK very much support. I worked a lot on the Telecommunications (Security) Act, which carves out the telecom sector from the cyber security and resilience Bill. That is very much a collaborative effort to understand the threats and the risks and how to engage with the regulator and with government.
We would not like to see anything around scope engaging, but the powers that the Secretary of State will be given to bring in new sectors are welcome. It is good to have that as a tool.
My final call would be for no added complexity and as much alignment as possible. If you are a telecoms provider that provides a different service, you would be working to the Telecommunications (Security) Act and to the cyber security and resilience Bill. So we should make sure that there is alignment between different guidelines.
Q127 Baroness Helic: Thank you very much for everything you have said so far. I will start with Rhodri, because he has got to go by 4 pm, but the question is for everyone. If there was one recommendation that you would like to see put into our report, and, we hope, taken on by the Government, what would it be?
Rhodri Talfan Davies: A sustainable financial footing for the BBC to be a universal service. It is pure self-interest, but, frankly, the BBC is a critical part of our national resilience. If we want it to remain at scale, it requires a funding settlement that allows it to continue to thrive and be a full national and local service, at every level.
Alex Towers: It is a slight cheat, because there are two halves of this, but the two things that worry us most are power and subsea cables. We would like a more defined, more sophisticated statement from the Government about what is the reasonable worst-case scenario, and therefore a proportionate plan intervention to get us to where we need to be to deal with that reasonable worst case.
Sophie Greaves: Mine is quite specific. At techUK, we are seeking to understand the Government’s plans for the 1.5% of GDP to spend on security and resilience. The other 3.5% will be spent on core defence. We would love to see some details on that and funding new capability to make us more secure and resilient.
Lord Spellar: Particularly for Rhodri, I remember that the previous Israeli ambassador to the UK stressed the importance of the UK, saying that Britannia no longer rules the waves but still rules the airwaves. The BBC is a crucial part of that in our global offer.
The Chair: Oh well, Mr Davies, I expect that you will just have to agree with that.
Rhodri Talfan Davies: Yes, I am in complete agreement. Total consensus.
The Chair: Thank you all very much indeed. That is a good note to end on. Your evidence has been extremely helpful and we are very grateful.
