Clause 1 - Meaning of ''emergency''

Part of Civil Contingencies Bill – in a Public Bill Committee at 10:30 am on 27 January 2004.

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Photo of Mr Richard Allan Mr Richard Allan Shadow Spokesperson for the Cabinet Office, Cabinet Office, Shadow Spokesperson (Business, Innovation and Skills), Shadow Spokesperson (Trade and Industry) 10:30, 27 January 2004

I should like to speak to the amendments tabled by the hon. Member for North-East Hertfordshire. There is a lot of sense in many of them. Amendment No. 7, which refers to severe damage to property, relates to justified concern that the scope of the Bill and the powers as we understand them are associated primarily with human welfare, which is repeated throughout the provisions. A major concern for the Joint Committee was that human welfare should remain the focus. The notion of damage to property sits awkwardly within the scope of the Bill and the hon. Member for North-East Hertfordshire was sensible to propose a severity threshold. I shall be interested to hear the Minister's response to that.

Amendment No. 8 refers to money disruption and, again, the hon. Gentleman has raised an important point. Parts 1 and 2 of the Bill are not mutually exclusive and there may be situations in which regulations are brought into play under part 2. One could imagine that something that disrupted the money supply so significantly that it was causing chaos throughout the country—such as a terrorist attack on the Royal Mint or on a key component of the money supply—might require the Government to bring in exceptional powers under part 2. However, that might also require a local component in relation to the way in which money was distributed to people locally. Should local authorities plan for such circumstances, or are the circumstances so extreme that it is not worth them putting the effort in? Could they do anything useful if such circumstances were to occur? It is incumbent on the Minister to respond—specifically to the money point—to try to explain where he thinks the local authority realistically could perform a function. If it cannot and there is not to be a useful end product, there is not much sense in including the measure in the Bill as a duty on which local authorities will have to spend money.

The most significant amendment that I wish to speak to now is amendment No. 9 on the electronic communications networks. Valid concerns have been raised about the amendment. In particular, there is a risk of confusion about the different regimes that apply to an electronic communications provider. BT is the classic example of a large national provider. We must remember that there are also local providers such as Kingston Communications, which is listed in the regulatory impact assessment as the kind of provider that would be affected, and distributive providers, such as Thus, which has customers all over the country. It is a very distributive network, because it is not obvious that they are concentrated in one region. There is a strong presence in Scotland but, increasingly, there is a presence in many other areas.

All those companies work on tight margins and all of them are naturally worried that they will be brought into a framework in which they will have to answer for the local plans to many different bodies. The regulatory impact assessment says that, to fulfil its requirements,

''each business in Category 2 will in practice need at very most 5 days a year of the time of a senior manager and ten days of a professional at a more junior level.''

It goes on to explain in detail why it thinks the impact will be negligible. It also says that the burden on utilities represented in many different areas must be multiplied by the number of areas in which they must respond. Telecoms providers are worried that the measure could become a burden.

The regional utilities, on the other hand, will be hauled in by everybody. If a key installation is a customer of one of the smaller telecoms providers in a certain area, it might be legitimate under the Bill for the local authority to call in that telecoms provider. However, the provider might have only that one customer and no other significant presence in the area, so the cost to the business in those circumstances clearly will be disproportionate to the value of its business there. Those are valid concerns to which the Government must respond.

The other area of confusion relates to the overlap between the provisions in the Bill and the other regulatory requirements imposed on businesses. Telecoms businesses in particular have requirements to Ofcom to provide a certain level of business continuity and they clearly have requirements to provide business continuity. There is a genuine fear that they will have to go beyond simply demonstrating how they would offer a telecoms service to important local providers in an emergency. They will have to justify how they will keep their network running in all circumstances. They need to do that for their shareholders and for Ofcom, but they should not have to do it for every local authority. The fear is the extent to which that line could be blurred by the wording of the Bill. The amendment is an important test of that.

In his opening comments on the programme motion the hon. Member for Ribble Valley referred to the other side of the electronic communications network. I was tempted to dive in then, but you quite correctly

steered me away, Sir John. I thought that, fortunately, we could come back to electronic communications networks at this point. On a point of accuracy, the hon. Gentleman said that central networks could be hacked into quite easily by people walking in with laptops. I hope that the Minister will be able to confirm that that is not the case. The Government spend a great deal of money on a Government-secure network, and the whole point of that network and its cost is that it cannot easily be hacked into. Plenty of other systems can be, but I hope that the Government's cannot.

I hope that we do not go away from the Committee with the idea that Government networks such as NHS networks and so on can be brought down so easily. However, the point is valid in the context of the Bill; there is a risk that a local authority will rightly have to assess where essential networks are in place. Whether it is the authority's own network or another government network, the authority will have to assess how resilient the network is.