15
Examination of witnesses
Margaret Read, Polly Copeman and Martin Frobisher.
Q128 The Chair: Good morning, and thank you all very much for coming to help us with this important inquiry. Thank you for your time. I should remind you that this is a public session and it is being broadcast live. In a couple of days' time, you will each receive a transcript of the session, so if you spot any minor inaccuracies that need correcting, feel free to do so at that point. If you see anything—or, rather, you do not see anything—that you wish you had said at the time, feel free to send us supplementary evidence in writing. We have got a lot of questions to ask all three of you, so it would be helpful for our record if you could briefly introduce yourselves before giving your first answers.
My first question is a broad one. What are the constituent parts of the UK’s critical national infrastructure? How does resilience vary between them? Perhaps you could also say when you are giving this answer what the missing parts of critical national infrastructure are. What should be defined as CNI but currently is not? Let us start with Martin Frobisher, please.
Martin Frobisher: My name is Martin Frobisher, and I am the group safety and engineering director for Network Rail. In terms of what is critical national infrastructure, railways certainly are. As a witness, I can really only speak for railways with any degree of technical knowledge. But, of course, the railway interacts with many other systems: we rely on electricity for power and we work closely with agencies, such as the Environment Agency, on flood defences and other matters. So, we interact with a whole load of other organisations. Rail most definitely is critical national infrastructure; it gets people to their destinations and it gets goods to supermarkets.
Polly Copeman: My name is Polly Copeman, and I am a senior vice president in a private threat intelligence company that provides intelligence to CNI across Europe. It is Armed Forces Week this week and I would just like to give an acknowledgement, when it comes to resilience, to our Armed Forces. I work very closely with some military colleagues, and I think it is really important that we acknowledge the work that they do.
When it comes to CNI, we have 13 areas that have been pre-defined. We have got transport and all the supporting systems around that; we have got health; and we have got food. They are all critical services to the UK. Sitting underneath it, we have the lead government departments. For example, if you are working with energy, you will interact with the lead government department for energy, and it is there to help and co-ordinate; the departments understand the bigger resilience piece within government and they can support CNI organisations to understand too.
There is a kind of technical layer, which I am very interested in, around advice and technical support from organisations like GCHQ, the National Cyber Security Centre and the National Protective Security Authority. They are also providing frameworks to CNI in its rawest form. At the bottom, there is a lot that is being managed and owned and operated by private organisations. The two points I would love to answer are whether I think resilience varies between those sectors and whether that has something to do with the maturity and experience of organisations, and what the relationships are between them.
The Chair: We will be going into much more detail about some of the things you have touched on.
Margaret Read: Hi. I am Margaret Read. Thank you for inviting me to give evidence. I am the interim infrastructure policy and strategy director for the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority—or NISTA—which is a unit within the Treasury. You have already heard a few of the critical national infrastructure sectors, and I am sure that you have got a full list. I can give you the full list, if you are interested: chemicals, civil nuclear, communications—which includes data centres—defence, emergency services, energy, finance, food, Government, health, space, transport and water and wastewater. I can also give you the official definition, but I am sure you already have that from the Cabinet Office.
The key thing that I wanted to pull out is that the Cabinet Office is currently mapping resilience standards across all the CNI sectors, and that work will be completed by the end of the year. So, I think your questions as a committee and your inquiry are very timely to feed into that the work that the Cabinet Office is doing.
Q129 Lord Farmer: Thank you all for coming, it is very helpful. All of this comes down to water, really, because we are lacking a bit of advice on water. How resilient is the water infrastructure? To me, it seems that if we had a big drought, we have water supply in the west, coming from the Welsh mountains, and the south-west, et cetera, but we are very dry in the south-east and East Anglia. Is there a water pipeline grid, for instance? But my main question is: how resilient is the water supply infrastructure and what efforts are being made to accelerate its resilience?
Margaret Read: Generally, our water supply is very resilient. We have got a very high drinking water quality, and we have not used emergency drought measures—rota cuts and standpipes—for 50 years. But the infrastructure was built for a different pattern of population, a different pattern of industry and a different pattern of climate, and those things are changing. The Environment Agency has estimated that we will have a water supply deficit of 5 billion litres a day by 2055.
Also, as you said, some areas are affected in different ways. The south and east, for example, rely heavily on groundwater, which requires two winters of rain to refill. The north-west is much flashier, if you will: it relies on regular rain to keep its reservoirs full.
On the question about the pipe, it is being worked through. One of the things the water companies have to do is prepare water resource management plans, where they set out how they will meet the deficits I just mentioned. Some of those plans include new transfers between water companies. There is also a requirement for new reservoirs and desalination plants. Furthermore, some transfers are going to use existing infrastructure. For example, there is a transfer planned to use the Grand Union Canal, which will take water from the Midlands to Affinity’s water area in Hertfordshire. These things are being developed currently, but it does need to be accelerated, as you said.
Lord Spellar: They are being developed, but this has been in the pipeline for decades, has it not?
Margaret Read: There have been some changes in thinking about water supply, and in particular, thinking about what water needs to be left in the environment for habitats, et cetera. That has meant that abstraction is being reduced. There is also more understanding of the effects of climate change, and how that means we will have different weather patterns and therefore will need a different water supply because of that. Work is ongoing to develop those options, and some of them will be going in for planning consenting very soon.
The Chair: Do either of you two have anything to add to that? No? Let us move on to Lord Oates’s question then.
Q130 Lord Oates: I have three questions, but I will roll the first two into one. Could you tell us a little bit about whether you think there is sufficient connectivity between the different types of infrastructure to ensure a coherent, holistic response to a national emergency? Also, do you think there should be a national resilience database through which critical national infrastructure operators and government departments can monitor threats? Polly, perhaps you could start.
Polly Copeman: Thank you. Those are great questions. Connectivity does exist between these different sectors, but I believe that it is static. What I mean by that is that our national risk registers out there in the public are extremely good, but they tend to be viewed through the lens of one risk: the risk of flooding or the risk of fire, for example. With complexity, as we move on to that resilience piece, we are being faced with a much more hybrid threat and risk. The need for it is there for sure, and it needs to be near-real time.
So, to move to the second part of your question, I would certainly support having a risk register as a kind of decision-making tool. I can point to things that currently exist out there. I am certainly no expert, but I have done some research on this, so it might be something you would like to follow up on.
There is something called the CNI Knowledge Base, which exists for government and government only. That looks at the cascading risks between the CNI sectors. The panellists here can perhaps say a little bit more about that. And there is something called the TISP, which is the threat intelligence sharing platform on the national cyber security side, from GCHQ.
Again, I feel that such a register would need to be real time, or as real time as possible, so that we could understand it, and there would need to be good information protocols around the sharing of that risk and threat, but I would absolutely support it.
Lord Oates: Thank you very much. Margaret, we turn to you.
Margaret Read: Yes. Polly has already mentioned the CNI Knowledge Base. The other thing that I would point to is the work under the adaptation reporting power, which is part of the Climate Change Act 2008. That requires infrastructure providers to report on how they manage climate risks, specifically. One of the things they have to do as part of that report is consider the interdependencies with other sectors and do some planning together.
I have seen this happen in action. For example, United Utilities has been convening all the different actors in its region to think about the interconnectedness between sectors, and to start to plan how they would handle an issue that might arise from climate change.
Martin Frobisher: My answer is specific to rail. For rail, we understand the connectivity with other sectors, so we have a strong working relationship with the system operator for the national grid, the NESO organisation. We also have a strong relationship with the other utilities that provide us with essential services. We understand those relationships and that connection, and we work quite hard to make sure that we manage the interface issues.
Recently, there was some testing of the national grid where the voltage was lowered to test resilience. We had a very strong relationship and contact with NESO while it did the testing. Those relationships work and are strong.
On your question about a resilience database, my view is that if that were taken as a project, it would need to be substantial and there would need to be real detail. If it was just a very high-level summary, it would be of limited value to us. You would have to map out the connectivity in great detail for that information to be of use to us.
Lord Oates: Thank you. My final question is specifically for Polly. In your original answer to Baroness Coussins’s initial question, you mentioned layers, and in your in Open Horizon written evidence, there was mention of a missing operational middle layer. Could you tell us a bit more about what that layer is and what is needed to establish it?
Polly Copeman: Thank you. I will describe it as well as I can. The operational middle layer is for national resilience. It is supposed to take threat intelligence and information and, basically, pass that on so that we can understand the risk, so as to then make clever decisions and turn them into actions. There is a decision-making mechanism that I think needs addressing across all these sectors. That is really important.
I reiterate again that, working in a threat intelligence organisation, we are seeing state actor activity. You are seeing all these things in the news. Our adversaries are moving very quickly. My gut feeling, on all of this research and the stuff that I have done previously, is that we are quite slow and quite rigid.
The good news is that the middle layer that I am talking about sits between two very well-established parts that we have in place already. When it comes to the top part, I will shout out to the strategic intelligence piece, the National Crime Agency, GCHQ and so on—I have spoken about all of our intelligence services. They are world-revered. They provide a very good service and advice. So that is the top layer.
Underneath that we have an operational layer. We have COBRA, we have the police, and we have the emergency services that actually respond. Along with the private sector, they tend to have well-established emergency preparedness, leaders and crisis managers, and they train and test all that, but what I feel is missing is cross-sector decision-making.
As I said, we are in this hybrid, cloudy world right now. To take an example, we need to be able to review the intelligence as it comes in: the live threat picture. We need to also understand emerging connectivity between these CNI sites. Between these CNI organisations, what is going on? Is there something that is cascading? We need to be able to turn that into actionable information that can go out to these CNI operators.
I also think we should not be scared to set minimum essential requirements for CNI—recovery time objectives and very clear expectations of what we need the UK to have—and we need functioning at all times.
I can give a live example of where this strategic and operational layer exists. The strategic defence review with the Navy has been picking up a much wider remit when it comes to protecting CNI and the underwater infrastructure; the strategic intent is absolutely bang on.
That is what we should be doing. We have got a fantastic Royal Navy. We want to protect our infrastructure. But there is this middle layer that says that I now have to work with the private sector CNI. How often do I patrol those cables? What do I do if I find something? What are my actions? This decision-making model, and what it means, is something that needs to be explored.
I want to raise three points here. The first is pre-agreed decision frameworks. We know about them. We use them all the time. Let us get those nailed. If you are in the private sector, there are the RACI matrixes: responsible, accountable, consulted and informed. Let us do that. Let us get those nailed.
Then there is cross-sector intel. As I said, at the moment there is intelligence being shared, but it goes energy to energy, security to security. Let us go cross-sector.
Lastly, there is a big point that we were discussing outside a little bit: funded exercises, such as wargaming at the decision-making level. Let us not be scared to fail and learn. I know that is incredibly hard for the Government to do, but let us try.
Baroness Winterton of Doncaster: Could that be done at regional level as well, do you think?
Polly Copeman: Absolutely. I see this from strategic to operational. I see this as stress-testing and a mechanism to stress-test. We do it; we do it quite well in our individual parts.
The Chair: You touched on recovery there, which leads very nicely on to Lord Spellar’s question.
Q131 Lord Spellar: Your answer covered some of my question in relation to contractual arrangements. I remember that when I served in the Ministry of Defence under the then Defence Secretary George Robertson, he said, “You cannot fire a contract at the enemy”. A regular exercise is absolutely required, to find out where your information is outdated, as is a command structure and something that in some way replicates gold command or whatever, as we have for other emergencies. Perhaps you could comment on that. Finally, I ask you to consider whether we have something akin to the aviation industry where not only when things go wrong but when you have near misses as well, this is reported into the CAA on a no-blame basis, which then enables the development of best practice. This is an international standard and has resulted in a very safe civil aviation industry.
Martin Frobisher: To answer that for rail, we have a structure just as you have described. We have the bronze, silver and gold command structure to deal with any incidents. If it is a major incident that affects the whole industry, we set up a strategic crisis team, and we have very structured processes for managing that. We rehearse those regularly and practice all those roles. Where we have people in the bronze, silver and gold roles, we do specific training to make sure that they have the skills and capability.
We work closely with agencies, such as the British Transport Police. They are involved in joint exercises, where relevant. The security services work closely with us and brief us on the information that we need to know that is relevant to rail.
Lord Spellar: What about things going wrong, although not actually causing an accident?
Martin Frobisher: That is very much part of our safety culture. We have the Rail Accident Investigation Branch, which is an independent investigation agency. Its role is not to allocate blame, but to understand what has happened. It provides detailed forensic understanding of incidents. We have a culture within the railway of encouraging all our people to report near misses. We have very formal processes for whistleblower reporting, and processes for making sure that whistleblowers are protected. We have a policy that we call the work-safe procedure, which gives anyone the authority to stop work if they believe it to be unsafe. We stand by that, because giving people the authority to put safety first is absolutely part of our culture.
Margaret Read: If you want detail on individual sectors, you will need to talk to the relevant departments, but I can give you an overview of some of the other sectors. In water and energy, there are requirements in the licence and in legislation for companies to recover within a certain amount of time, to exercise a stress-test and so on.
For water specifically, there will be measures in the clean water Bill, which will extend the requirements to third parties that are contracted by water companies and operate assets and deliver infrastructure.
For energy, there is the Electricity System Restoration Standard. That requires the national energy system operator to have sufficient capability and arrangements in place to restore 100% of Great Britain’s electricity demand within five days. That also has to be implemented regionally, and it has an interim target of 60% of regional demand to be restored within 24 hours.
Telecom is covered by the Telecommunications (Security) Act 2021. It requires providers to ensure the security, integrity and availability of their networks. They are also required to maintain uninterrupted access to emergency services—999 and 112. There is also an expectation to have back-up power systems. This comes back to your point about interaction between sectors and the importance of them planning together and thinking about how they can each meet their security of supply requirements by working together.
Polly Copeman: Sorry, I know that I keep following up, but Lord Spellar touched on something for me. There is something about relationships and a safe environment. The private sector does it really well when it comes to creating a safe environment where you can say, “I am not happy. This is unsafe”, and it learns from it.
I do not have the solution to this—I am not sure that anybody does—but I know that it is this ability to fail fast, create a safe environment and work on relationships will be key to resilience, without a doubt.
The Chair: Lady Hunter, I think that your question has been partly answered already, but do you want to build on that?
Q132 Baroness Hunter of Auchenreoch: Thank you for coming on a very auspicious day, with it being our hottest June day ever. Rails are buckling and Baroness Winterton had a fire at her station. In view of that, I know that it has been answered, but more broadly, if there is a major outage, lasting several days or longer, what practical things will be doing—this question is particular for Mr Frobisher—to keep the rail network going?
Martin Frobisher: For several days of outage, as my colleague said earlier, the Electricity System Restoration Standard requires 60% of demand to be in place within 24 hours across the seven regions So, the scenario you are describing goes beyond that.
For localised or regional failures, we have real resilience on the railway, because our own overhead line power system has the capability to move power from one place to another. So, if there is a localised failure, we have very high resilience.
If the whole grid stopped for several days, clearly, that would be a really difficult situation for us. If it happened suddenly, electric trains would stop where they were, because there would be no traction power for the network, and trains would stop outside of stations. Our first priority would be to manage passengers, to make sure that we get people safely to a destination. Our first focus would be on our passengers.
Beyond that, we would then look at how we can restore service based on what power is available. If electric trains are stranded, clearly, we would have to have a very organised approach to shunting those and opening routes.
If there was a UK-wide power outage for several days, our primary focus would be on freight, to get essential goods to supermarkets. We would have a very focused and structured approach to managing the incident. We would implement our gold, silver and bronze structure. We would also declare it as a strategic crisis, and we would be managing very carefully the prioritisation of how we deal with the incident.
We have lots of back-up power supplies for signalling, but some of the power supplies come from our overhead line traction system, because that distributes power across a wide geography, and that provides resilience in normal situations. Some of our back-up power supplies depend upon transmitting power from one region to another, and therefore, we would have to restore power with what was available. We would have a very clear command structure. What you are describing is an incident that goes way beyond what would normally be envisaged. We have real resilience to the likely incidents of regional failures, because we have the ability to distribute power ourselves to meet our own needs quite widely.
The Chair: Mr Frobisher, your answer has triggered two quick supplementary questions from Lady Winterton and Lord Oates. We will hear from both of them together, and perhaps you could come back in response to both.
Baroness Winterton of Doncaster: In terms of the standards that you have applied, such as the 60%, and the plans that you have in place, particularly for the railways, how do they compare internationally? Are our standards higher or lower for the restoration of power? I have a quick question about the Channel tunnel. Presumably, you have to have some agreements with France on keeping that going.
Martin Frobisher: There are lots of agreements—
The Chair: Just hold your answer until we have heard from Lord Oates, because they might link up.
Lord Oates: Briefly, you mentioned trains stopping outside stations and having to manage helping passengers off. Obviously, people could potentially be stuck in the Channel tunnel. Do trains have any power on board to get themselves to the next place? Is it a feasible resilience to have some kind of limited battery supply, so that you do not have to handle a whole load of people, who you would be de-training into fields and things such as that?
The Chair: Over to you, Mr Frobisher: we are obviously all worried about our journeys home today.
Martin Frobisher: We compare well with other nations and we benchmark quite meticulously. The International Union of Railways based in Paris sets international standards for rail. We take a really close interest in that. I am the European vice-chair for that organisation. We use the International Union of Railways to undertake technical collaboration and understand where we are. So, we have benchmarked how we manage overhead line and power systems. In fact, we will be taking a paper on that to the Network Rail board very shortly. We take a close interest in how we compare internationally.
In terms of the Channel tunnel, clearly, there are agreements on how that operates and the joint agreements with France. There are emergency plans in place for operational incidents in the tunnel.
As for the question about whether trains have power, some do. Some of the fleet is diesel. At this point in time, 60% of train journeys made in the UK are made with diesel traction. Under electrical power, some of the trains are hybrid—part electric, part battery and part diesel. Hybrid trains do exist. But, for a fraction of the fleet, particularly on high-speed mainlines, we rely on purely electric trains.
South of London, on the third rail network, there are lots of purely electric trains. Those trains do not have back-up power, and in the event that the traction power is lost, then those trains do not have an alternative back up. That is the current position on the UK network.
On the third rail network, I would not advise us putting in diesel engines, extra batteries and things that we carry around as extra weight. It is not efficient either in terms of energy or cost. We need to have resilience in our power supplies, rather than wanting to fit lots of extra batteries, weight and engines to purely electric trains—that would not make sense.
The Chair: We are going to move on to another issue now which will bring all three of you in.
Q133 Baroness Northover: This is a massive question that faces the United Kingdom all the time, but perhaps you could focus on it in terms of resilience. What have been the barriers to securing long-term investment in infrastructure and what is being done to overcome these? As I say, that is a challenge the United Kingdom has wrestled with. Putting the national resilience lens on it, what do you see the barriers as being now and do you see that the Government and others are addressing this particular challenge?
Martin Frobisher: To start with, our big challenge is that the railway has just celebrated its 200th anniversary, which we are very proud of, but that of course means we have lots of assets that were built a long time ago, and the resilience of old assets is a challenge to us.
On your question of what we are doing about it, we have a really detailed set of asset models so we understand the age of our assets, the impact of ageing assets and what it would cost to invest to maintain reliability of those assets. We are funded in five-year cycles, and we use our asset models to inform the bid that we make for each five-year cycle to make sure that we properly invest in our assets.
For this next cycle, we are recognising that we have ever hotter weather, ever greater rainfall and all the climate effects. We have built the forward-looking effect of climate into our asset models. That is something that we will be discussing with our regulator and with Treasury as we bid for funding for the next control cycle. So, in answer to your question, we do it by really understanding our assets, modelling the future impact of climate change and wear and tear and making sure that we invest appropriately for the future.
Polly Copeman: I am obviously not representing CNI in a funding cycle, so the only thing that I can really speak to here is generally about emergency preparedness and investment in security. There is an unwritten saying, which you may nod your heads at, that funding tends to happen around emergency preparedness and resilience after something has gone wrong. It is quite sad that this is a known thing within our world. Everyone just says that when the next incident comes, we will get some budget, and we will be able to handle it.
I give a shout out here to Gartner, which I am sure you have heard of. It is trying to assist emergency preparedness managers and security managers in getting funding at board level. It uses business speak so, for service level agreements that you would use against a customer, it calls them protection level agreements, where you are able to explain the level of protection versus the cost. That is quite a wise thing to do. Sadly, that is the only thing I can add on funding.
Margaret Read: There are quite a lot of different barriers, so I will try to focus on the resilience point. It is about investor certainty and confidence, that they know that things will be stable and that, therefore, they can invest particularly in skills and those kinds of things. The supply chain needs to be ready for the kinds of issues that we are seeing. Again, they need stability and certainty.
One thing that NISTA has been doing on that front is something called the infrastructure pipeline. That is setting out a long-term picture—it is really important that it is long term—about the projects that are coming up, where there is certainty and confidence, so that the supply chain can invest in skills, kit, technology and so on.
My third point is that it is sometimes quite difficult to make the case for maintenance. We are finding that it is quite easy to put off maintenance because you cannot see the issues, as they do not arise immediately. We are therefore working with others in the Treasury on a value for money review to identify the main drivers of poor asset condition. One of those, as I said, is about how you make the case for maintenance and make sure that the money goes in. That is the case in the private sector as well as the public sector. It is well known, for example, that maintenance has been lacking in the water sector. The Government are changing standards on that to make sure that this is not the case going forward.
The Chair: We are going to move on now to infrastructure related to defence.
Q134 Baroness Mobarik: What does the 2025 strategic defence review mean in practice for the development, security and resilience of the infrastructure that underpins UK defence, including digital, industrial and importantly, space capabilities, bearing in mind that four pages were devoted to space in the SDR?
Martin Frobisher: First of all, we work closely with the military on what they require from the rail network, whether that is within the UK or assisting them in planning for moves further abroad. We have got a clear understanding of the capability of the UK network and what can be moved on rail in various ways. We have got a detailed understanding of the gauging, which is the space that the vehicles would occupy if they were moving by train, so we work closely with defence logistics on that. We provide the support that is needed from the UK railway to support defence.
In terms of digital and cyber, that is very much an internal activity, where we are looking at protection of the UK railway and its systems from the cyber threat. We have a good team internally within Network Rail and, for our business systems, we have ISO 27001, which is the standard for cyber security. We work very closely with the security services, and they inform us of relevant threats. We also have co-operation across the railways of Europe on cyber, so if the team in Deutsche Bahn identify any issues, they talk with my team and vice versa.
We have a lot of work to do to constantly improve our resilience to cyber—it is an ever-changing landscape. But we have got a team that works closely on it, we are well supported by government agencies, and we have a good network of contacts with colleagues throughout Europe.
Baroness Winterton of Doncaster: Are you satisfied with the Cyber Security and Resilience (Network and Information Systems) Bill?
Martin Frobisher: I am not an expert on that Bill. I understand the cyber security risks in rail and could give you a detailed answer about all we are doing to protect ourselves. We have the certification about the patching and measures we need to take to prevent an incident from happening. Our thinking at the moment is in preparation for when it does happen, because this is a threat that you cannot assume you can always prevent. While we have good measures on prevention, we are now also stepping up our capability on response. We have been working with a couple of concepts, such as digital lifeboats, which is the concept of having standby systems prepared and built, ready to be used in the event that our main systems are compromised. We have been investing in that capability so that our critical systems have offline back-ups that are properly segregated and ready to go.
There is also the concept of “big red buttons”, as we have called it: sometimes, you need to respond very fast, and if the people who have the capability to lock systems down need to go up the chain of command, that slows down the response. We have tools that can respond and lock systems down, and we have pre-delegated the authority to people on what they can do in various scenarios, so that they are not seeking authority by committee as those authorities are already in place and the reactions are pre-planned. We have done a great deal to respond. I am not an expert on the Bill, but I can talk about our practical measures.
The Chair: Let us hear from the other two panellists in response to Lady Mobarik’s original question about the strategic defence review, and then I will bring Lord Peach in.
Polly Copeman: I have already discussed the kind of challenges with that middle layer of the strategic defence review, of how we operationalise this. The only comment I would like to make is around the whole-society approach that is discussed and desired from that. The relationship between the public, the Armed Forces and the private sector is fundamental to this being accepted and funded correctly.
There are two parts to that. We cannot expect the public and private sector, and even other government organisations, to be resilient and to support military or defence capabilities without understanding the threat. Without sounding like a broken record, really good threat intelligence is needed, and we need mechanisms to share that cross-sector.
The only other thing, which I thought of then, is around this dual-use technology. There are a lot of private sectors out there that have wonderful technology that could support military organisations and certainly our Armed Forces, but there are real challenges around the competitive nature of a private organisation. If it has developed intellectual property that it holds dear, and it wants to sell it to the rest of the private sector and make money, it is quite difficult for it to then go into military contracts, even though they can be quite lucrative. I think there is some delay in being able to utilise that technology for some of those reasons. I can only speak for what I have been seeing subsea in Norway with development around pipeline infrastructure.
Margaret Read: I am afraid I cannot really provide any further evidence, but I suggest you ask the Ministry of Defence, who are responsible for this.
Q135 Lord Peach: My question is really about stress-testing beyond exercises where you were testing one sector at a time. First, do you think we stress-test sufficiently when there are multiple threats and multiple things have gone wrong? Secondly, to dive into the regional structures, which you touched on a little bit earlier, are you convinced that these, particularly in England, are strong enough if there is a multiple-threat problem?
Martin Frobisher: In rail, our exercises always involve escalation—something happens, then something else, and then another thing. That has been the basis on which we plan many of our exercises: to prepare for a scenario where we are dealing with difficult problems and multiple problems. It starts with something simple and routine, and then we generally look at more complex scenarios as an exercise develops.
For us, the regional structure fits very well with our gold, silver and bronze command structure. The local region has a regional leadership team, which manages it to gold level; then we put a national strategic crisis team above it, which looks beyond the rail region, and we make sure that we have an overall co-ordinated national response. We have a very structured response to incidents, and we rehearse and practice those.
Polly Copeman: I think this is absolutely spot on and is one of the key issues. I spoke about this hybrid situation that we might be in as an instant-impact or rising-tide incident occurs. When we role-play scenarios—and I can say this because I am not in your position here, guys—we always do that to win. We might run a tabletop with the top team where we drip-feed in scenarios and they come out as the heroes and solve it or not.
There needs to be wargaming—that sounds a bit aggressive, but there need to be these scenarios that we can fail and learn from within a safe environment, where we stress-test the decision-making. I absolutely agree with you, Lord Peach, that we need to do that in real time—what if it happened today, at this time, right now? We need to build proper planning assumptions around that.
I was very privileged to briefly work on the Olympics, where we were building planning assumptions. You need to make these things as real as possible when you do them: for example, if we needed police officers right now, how many are there around the building, how many could respond, and how capable are they? You build in the mechanisms to understand that as it is today. That is a fantastic question, and I think we need to do more of that.
Margaret Read: The Cabinet Office leads on the national exercise programme, so you may want to take some evidence from it on that. The other thing I would say is that I think the resilience standards work is really important in this space, because it is thinking across the whole system, rather than just on a sector-by-sector basis. Those standards, once they have been mapped by the Cabinet Office by the end of the year, will then be tested and thought about in terms of the interdependencies but also of affordability, so that we can make sure that the standards are deliverable for an emergency and for everyday life.
Q136 The Chair: Thank you. While we are on defence, and before we move on to the final question, could I ask another one, particularly of Martin and Margaret? How aware are your sectors of critical national infrastructure, and of the seven baseline resilience requirement commitments of NATO that the UK has signed up to, some of which involve transport—roads as well as railway, I assume? If you are aware of them, how compliant is your sector with them, and are you aware of any monitoring of compliance within your area of CNI?
Martin Frobisher: The answer is yes. I have a personal role as a reservist: I am the Army’s link to the rail industry through what is called the Army staff corps, and I am very closely involved in some of that planning. Next week, I am at an exercise which is being led by Home Command, and we have been invited as the rail representatives. We have a close working relationship, and we understand the issues and the detail.
The Chair: Who do you feed in your monitoring outcomes to?
Martin Frobisher: The part of the military that is obviously interested in rail is the chief of defence logistics, Andy Kyte, and his team; within that, Chris Chant is the rail expert. We have strong working relationships with the people we need to deal with.
The Chair: Margaret, what about other critical national infrastructure sectors?
Margaret Read: I should clarify that the role of NISTA is not to oversee the resilience of those sectors, so I am not personally involved in any of those issues that you are raising. You would need to take them up with the relevant government department that is the lead for the relevant sector.
The Chair: Polly, any word you want to add on the NATO baseline commitments?
Polly Copeman: No, just that they are discussed in Norway, where I am currently located, and they are supported and widely distributed; it is not just for CNI.
Q137 Baroness Paul of Shepherd’s Bush: Thank you so much; you have obviously showed us your expertise today. In that context, my final question is a very open one: if you had one recommendation that you would like to make to the Government about preparedness and resilience, what would it be?
Martin Frobisher: For me, it is about managing ageing assets and investing in critical infrastructure. We will make the case for the rail assets as part of our next funding review, very numerically and very logically. But there is a trap: if you look at what has happened in Germany, where Deutsche Bahn has underinvested for many years, it has led to resilience problems. We understand our assets, we are making the case for investment, and we will do that very logically and rationally; we just appeal to the Government to go through that in the right way and make the right investment in infrastructure.
Baroness Paul of Shepherd’s Bush: Do you have any wider comment about resilience, beyond your own sector, from your experience?
Martin Frobisher: No, I would not be qualified to comment.
Polly Copeman: I believe it is about having a clear mandate and funding of this middle layer, which needs to go cross sector. I keep saying this, but it needs to cut across all sectors, the public and the private, to understand that risk picture. It is not a strategy document but an operating model: who is making the decisions, when and where, and can we operate in this cross-sector space?
It needs to assign clear ownership and not be scared to set minimum standards across the board; I think there are some of those in some of the legislation we have discussed, such as recovery time objectives, but we need to be clear that this is UK infrastructure and resilience and this is our expectation.
It should encompass these exercises, going to Lord Peach’s comment, with data modelling and regular system-wide stress-tests. I feel that we are prepared in certain pockets, and there is some amazing work going on, but it is about the consistency and accountability for a department or individual to look at that messy space in between.
Margaret Read: I am afraid that, as a government official, I cannot answer that question.
The Chair: Thank you very much to all three of you. This has been really helpful. You have given us lots of food for thought, and we are very grateful.
