Examination of Witnesses

Telecommunications (Security) Bill – in a Public Bill Committee at 2:01 pm on 19 January 2021.

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Dr David Cleevely, Helen Duncan and Mike Fake gave evidence.

Photo of Steve McCabe Steve McCabe Labour, Birmingham, Selly Oak 2:44, 19 January 2021

Q We move on immediately to the fifth panel. We are going to hear now from Helen Duncan, who is the managing director of MWE Media, and Mike Fake—have I pronounced your name correctly?

Mike Fake:

It is Mike Fake, as in genuine.

Photo of Steve McCabe Steve McCabe Labour, Birmingham, Selly Oak

Q I apologise. I have got it now; that is very clear. It was kind of you to clear it up for me. Mike Fake, director and co-founder of Lumenisity, and Dr David Cleevely CBE, who is an independent investor in several telecommunications companies. We have until 3.30 pm for this session. Could we start with Helen Duncan? I ask you to introduce yourself for the record.

Helen Duncan:

I am a consultant and freelance journalist, specialising in RF technology and the wireless sector. I have been writing about this industry for the past 30 years. Prior to that, I was a practising engineer in the high-frequency electronics industry.

Mike Fake:

Thank you, Mr Chairman. Hello, everybody, and thank you for giving me the opportunity to give evidence at the Committee today. I am director and co-founder of Lumenisity, and I have spent the past 30 years in telecoms fibre optic components.

Lumenisity is a spin-out from the University of Southampton, and we have developed a new fibre optic cable technology, in which data travels 50% faster than in a conventional cable, which would digitally shrink the UK; provide a more responsive internet; increase the physical separation of data centres, moving them out of big conurbations; and potentially reduce the cost of deploying 5G. We are building a company to engineer telecoms solutions and innovatively scale up the manufacturing base in the UK.

Our opening statement is that we support the principles of the telecoms security Bill. We see the diversification strategy as critical for successful execution. It is a real opportunity to build a secure, UK-leading network, fostering new entrants and technologies in the UK telecoms supply chain, and to leverage innovative solutions in manufacturing scale in the UK.

A challenge for SMEs, which I would like to highlight, is ensuring sufficient scale-up investment. This is an expensive step and it is difficult to raise this level of capital independently, so we need a combination of public and private funding. Lumenisity is part of an overall eco-system to improve the UK competitive position in a growing next-generation economy. In summary, we would like to see this as an opportunity for a positive change, rather than a retrospective solution to a singular problem.

Dr Cleevely:

My name is David Cleevely. As you have pointed out, I have invested in a number of telecoms companies and sold a few of them successfully. I have been an adviser to the Government and Ofcom. I was one of the experts who helped with the Communications Act 2003. To ensure I have full disclosure, I was on one of the boards of the MOD for eight years, looking after our ICT for all of defence, in theatre and the back office.

If I may, I would like to make three points very briefly. First, I would like to explore perhaps outside of this Committee a little bit more the edge cases for what constitutes a telecommunications network. Although provisions in the 2003 Act, sections 125 to 128 or so, cover quite a lot of things that are extended in this Bill, I think we need to think rather more carefully about what a telecommunications network actually is, in a world where many of these things are distributed, both in hardware and software.

The second point I would like to make is about the spending on R&D and procurement. I am sure we will get on to that. We need to solve a problem that is deep-seated in the UK economy about the difficulty of translating R&D and deployment into real practice. I have some further comments I could make on that.

Finally, I note that in the previous session last week, Miriam Cates picked up on one of the contributors, saying we could not forecast 20 years into the future, and Alex Towers asked about a contested story to do with Huawei back in 2005. I would like to point out that I had a small part in all of that and can verify that that was discussed. I will not go into details, as you would probably imagine I would not.

One of the things I participated in then was the Foresight cyber trust and crime prevention project. A lot of the things that we are talking about today were indeed forecast 20 years ago. There are some lessons that we can explore later in the Committee from that experience, if you wish to do so.

Photo of Steve McCabe Steve McCabe Labour, Birmingham, Selly Oak

Thank you. The first question is from James Sunderland.

Photo of James Sunderland James Sunderland Conservative, Bracknell

Thank you for the opportunity to ask the first question. Welcome and thank you for giving us your time. I note from the biographical notes that all three of you have clear commercial backgrounds with what appear to be British-owned firms. I am very pro-British myself, as you would expect as a British MP, so may I ask your opinion on the extent to which the telecoms Bill will offer opportunities to British firms?Q

Mike Fake:

I think the diversification strategy is important. It is great to see the national telecoms centre proposal and the £250 million for research and development. One concern is whether that will be enough. Listening to earlier parts of the hearing last week, BT said that they it invests £500 million per annum and Huawei has a revenue of probably $120 billion per year. Sorry, did I say, “million”? I meant billion. What do they invest in research and development? Probably $2 billion a year. The opportunity I see is that we have a short-term focus for network equipment manufacturers to replace high-risk vendor equipment, but it will be difficult in that period for other new entrants to get their share.

The opportunity is to foster new entrants in technologies in the UK telecoms supply chain, and to leverage innovative solutions for manufacturing scale in the UK. Another issue is that there is a lot of focus on the radio access part of 5G, but that is only one small part of the network. There is optical fibre connectivity from the masts, and transport to the network’s core: that is critical to the network’s security and performance.

Helen Duncan:

When I started my career, the industry was dominated by big names such as STC, Plessey, GEC and Racal. They all received funding from defence organisations such as the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment at Malvern. They used a lot of the spin-offs from that technology to develop their telecoms capability. That all ceased in the 1990s after the Berlin wall came down and cost-plus was abolished and so on. It is significant that independent industry research shrank in those times. We are now, at last, seeing a bit of stimulation going back into British industry thanks to the catapults, like Andy Sellars’, and this could be an opportunity, if not to return to those days, to put some investment in and to develop the talents we have in this country.

Dr Cleevely:

The Bill is a great opportunity, as the other speakers have said. In technical jargon, it is a necessary but not sufficient condition. It does provide some great opportunities. I am an investor and have created a number of British companies of which, like you, I am very proud. We do, however, need to think carefully about how the market actually works. A number of speakers before us talked about the way in which the number of suppliers has come down in this business. We need to be careful in thinking about how we intervene to set the rules of the game and to encourage certain kinds of behaviour. I am very familiar with one example that relates not only to Government but also to large corporates: the notion that you go through a procurement department that is forcing you down on price, and it does not have the notion of innovation as one of its key performance indicators. The notion of innovation, on the other hand, is built into a lot of the systems that are employed in other countries, primarily the United States, as a way of evaluating whether a technology should be procured or not. We need to think rather more carefully about how we foster that development and growth of smaller companies into larger companies, particularly with this view about innovation.

For example, Ofcom is an economic regulator—one of 11 or so economic regulators in the UK. It has always, below the radar, treated innovation as one of the things it ought to be fostering. I would suggest, for example, that alongside the consideration of this Bill, we think about how we push innovation rather more firmly and put some money behind it in terms of procurement.

Photo of Dean Russell Dean Russell Chair, Speaker's Advisory Committee on Works of Art

Q I would like to understand what the impact would be of bringing forward the 2027 deadline with regard to many of these measures. If I could ask Mike in the first instance, please?

Mike Fake:

Obviously, we have got two things to do here. We need to replace the existing vendors’ equipment, but in parallel, if we can invest in the UK supply chain—we have a very healthy supply chain in the sense that there are a lot of companies which provide optical components and subsystems into the equipment manufacturers. We need to do both things at once. We need to swap out the equipment, and also invest in the new companies coming up, so that in the future we can have a much more future-proof, innovative, secure and leading network.

Pushing the timescales forward, we have to recognise that in the short term we are going to be stuck with two alternative vendors that we need to swap out, but if we can invest in the up-and-coming, innovative, small SMEs and really foster those, as the previous speakers have said, I think we have got a real opportunity to change things and to have a world-leading, British, high-UK content network moving forward.

Photo of Dean Russell Dean Russell Chair, Speaker's Advisory Committee on Works of Art

Thank you. Could I ask Helen the same question?

Helen Duncan:

I think there are some real practical difficulties in swapping out the equipment. It sounds simple; you just take one radio out and put another one in, but I think you would find that cell sites would be down and consumers would be complaining.

There has been some research recently by a company—albeit funded by Huawei—called Assembly Research, which estimates that it would put the UK three years behind in its programme of 5G deployment. At a time when communications are key to our surviving the unusual circumstances of the pandemic, it seems counter-intuitive to think about putting even more strain on that by moving the deadline closer. I think perhaps it should be the installation engineers who work for the networks we should be putting this question to: how much disruption is it going to cause?

Dr Cleevely:

I would like to echo what Helen said, but in a rather different way. There is an engineering problem, which is what we have been dealing with, but there is also a human behavioural problem. Anybody who has worked in a large corporation or worked on these large projects will know that the way in which people approach the problem, and the way they think about it, the way they want to programme it and the urgency they feel, is driven as much by the psychological issues as it is by the technical. I would urge you to think through how you would encourage the behaviour that you want to see. Now, obviously Government can do that by simply issuing an edict and forcing a deadline, but there may be other ways that you can get more innovation and a more rapid shift than the 2027 deadline, simply by thinking through with the industry—going back to Helen’s point about the engineers on the ground—about what is required. A little bit more detailed thinking on that could yield some very positive result.

Photo of Kevan Jones Kevan Jones Labour, North Durham

Could I just follow up on Dean’s point about the actual date? The date that has been set is 2027, and the equivalent that is going to go in is basically going to be two vendors, Ericsson and Nokia. I think it was you, Mike, who said earlier that there are opportunities for UK diversification. What will drive that? If you have operators who have put brand-new equipment in in the lead-up to 2027, what will be the incentive for those companies to look at alternatives to thatQ ?

Mike Fake:

That is a difficult problem to solve, but I think it is important that innovation is a powerful force, and you can turn around things in this new world very quickly. Although you have old legacy systems, and you replace everything from overseas vendors with old legacy systems, you need to keep moving forward. In terms of optics, we probably have one of the world’s leading telecom fibre optics innovation capabilities in the world, through the universities. We have a whole bunch of small and medium-sized enterprises out there, and they are struggling to make that step to some scale and to get that innovation deployed in the network. But I think innovation—

Photo of Kevan Jones Kevan Jones Labour, North Durham

Q Not to cut across you, but, while I accept all that, if from the operator’s point of view they have just invested a lot of capital in ripping out equipment and putting new equipment in up until 2027, what will the incentive then be for those operators necessarily to look at new technologies?

Helen Duncan:

I do not think it is necessarily the case that they will just use Ericsson and Nokia equipment. Vodafone, for instance, has committed to equipping something like 2,500 cell sites with open RAN equipment, so they are taking a forward-looking view and trying to stimulate that themselves.

Dr Cleevely:

If I may intervene here as well, it is curious, is it not? The economists will tell you that sunk costs are sunk costs and you should always move forward, and that is something to hold on to. Human nature says, “Well, we’ve invested in this—let’s see if we can sweat that asset to make the most of it.” A constructive dialogue with your finance director or chief financial officer is always an essential part of all this, and, for example, it is important to understand what is driving the risk that a company is running, its weighted average cost of capital and its cost of borrowing on the market.

Essentially the point is this: if you can get more business and improve your service, and get more customers and make more money, as a result of doing investment, then that is what you will do. The key point here is whether we can find a way of making it clear and straightforward to the most truculent of finance directors or chief financial officers that this is a good investment for the future. In there lies the key, because you need to get the incentives right.

Photo of Chi Onwurah Chi Onwurah Shadow Minister (Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy), Shadow Minister (Digital, Culture, Media and Sport), Shadow Minister (Science, Research and Innovation)

Q Welcome to all of you, and thank you so much for joining us. May I say, particularly to Helen Duncan—I should also have mentioned this earlier when we had Heba Bevan—that it is great to have two other female electrical engineers giving evidence to the Committee. I hope we have many more such qualified representatives of the technology sector in Committees in the future.

We have talked a little about how we got here; Helen, you worked for Marconi, and I worked for Northern Telecom, which bought STC, one of our last UK companies providing telecoms equipment. Without putting words into your mouth, I think the situation could be characterised by a lack of investment in innovation and in British sovereign capability. Now that we are seeking to reverse that, or to jump ahead of that, what interventions could best guarantee the long-term security and resilience of the UK telecoms network, with UK sovereign capability supporting it? Is the £250 million diversification strategy set to achieve that? Can you give examples—I am looking for quite concrete examples—of what you might add or change? David, you talked about needing to give the right incentives to the mobile operators. The telecoms supply chain review was quite clear that there is not an incentive right now in the supply chain to deliver security in mobile networks. What interventions and what incentives should there be?

Helen Duncan:

Starting from how we got into this situation, in the 1990s we had three incumbent base station manufacturing companies in the UK, which were Orbitel in Nottinghamshire, and Motorola and Lucent Technologies, both in Swindon. They survived for different lengths of time: Orbitel closed down in 1996 when Ericsson took over, Motorola ceased base station manufacturing in 2002, but stayed open and was then sold to Nokia, and Lucent became Alcatel-Lucent and was closed down. Mergers and acquisitions have clearly played a huge part, as did the dotcom bubble and, as I mentioned, the removal of funding from the defence sector.

Heba made the point that to support semiconductor manufacture in the UK, the £250 million would not even start to scratch the surface. We need to concentrate a little bit further up the food chain. We have some very good capability in this country in component and subsystem manufacture based around the chips. We have some good design capability for chips that are then manufactured in the larger foundries elsewhere in the world. Supporting those activities, the design and the manufacture of components and subsystems, would give us a good basis and improve resilience.

I also want to mention that we have some capability in this country in the test and measurement sector with Spirent and VIAVI Solutions—although VIAVI is an American-owned company, it manufactures RF and wireless test equipment in the UK. By definition, test is ahead of the curve on development. If you can make equipment to test something, you can actually make that equipment, because it is much more complicated to make the test equipment than it is to make the base station or the handset itself. Those companies deserve our support as well. That was a very long question, Chi; I am not sure I covered every aspect you were asking about.

Dr Cleevely:

Thanks, Chi—nice to see you. One of the things that was mentioned in the session a little bit earlier was standards, and I think one of the things that changed telecommunications between the 1970s and the dotcom revolution was the emergence of some of these more open standards, such as TCP/IP for running the internet and so on, and HTML for doing the web browsers. I think we could be putting a lot more money and effort into defining some of those standards, because if you define the interfaces for pieces of equipment correctly, you can allow people to come in and provide bits of equipment that can conform to those interfaces. That is one very concrete thing.

You are right to say that, until relatively recently, the penalties on security and so on—the consequences—have been very small, but in terms of behaviour, you need both carrot and stick on things like this. You need to have something that will give the telecom operators a real reason to do something, which might be as simple as a kitemark that says, “The telecoms network you are using has been certified as secure.” That may or may not be the kind of thing that would engender the behaviour change, but it is noticeable that with a number of things like Telegram and WhatsApp, that is seen to be quite an important thing.

Finally, the networks of people are important in all of this. I noticed that the Government have spent some money on the 5G networking across the UK, which is being run by Cambridge Wireless, which I am very proud to have helped set up. We talked in the previous session about the cluster of people down in Bristol working on semiconductors and so on, and I think the Government should be putting some money into networking people together across the UK, and between regions in particular, to have ways in which we can be exchanging ideas and getting to understand what each other is doing. We complain about silos in Government and siloes in corporate, but we have siloes across every single component of this industry, and it is no good to sit in a part of the west midlands, Cambridge or Belfast and not talk to other people about the issues, the standards and the technology. While we seem to think that that gets delivered by the free market, in reality that is not happening, and I think the Government in particular need to intervene to connect up all these people.

Today, I launched the Northern Ireland Engineering Hub for the Royal Academy of Engineering—I am chair of the enterprise committee—and that was specifically picking Northern Ireland because of its deep engineering history in order to start to connect it with a lot of the other things that are happening in the rest of the United Kingdom. I think we need more of that, and I think that out of it will come the same blossoming of innovation and engineering that we have seen previously when people have been connected up together. I am a great optimist on that.

Photo of Steve McCabe Steve McCabe Labour, Birmingham, Selly Oak

Mike, did you want to say anything else?

Mike Fake:

I would just add that the radio part of this network is very important, but there is also a fibre optic network that connects it back to the core, and if we can invest in innovation—which means investing in the people who are coming up with the ideas, at the universities and so on—and in the SMEs, there may be clever ways in which we can get to scale manufacturing. That is not just for radios, but potentially hardware boxes, looking at gateways and so on, and also optical fibre, for instance. I support wholeheartedly what the other two witnesses have said, especially the point on open standards that David made.

Photo of Steve McCabe Steve McCabe Labour, Birmingham, Selly Oak

I am just going to go to the Minister, and then I will come back.

Photo of Matt Warman Matt Warman The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport

Q Thank you for the evidence you have given so far. It seems to me, over the course of a lot of the evidence that we have heard over the last several sessions, that there is a lot of consensus on standards being hugely important and on building on clusters, in both existing businesses and the networks that David was just talking about. If you look into the short and medium term, what are the immediate interventions that you would make, rather than the longer term things to build up in the next few years?

Dr Cleevely:

Thank you, Minister. On the short-term stuff, I am very reluctant to dash in on some of these things. I have started a few businesses. It is always a mistake to try to spend money too quickly, because you do not quite know how it is working, but if you are asking me where I would specifically spend some money, I would start to spend it on groups of people and existing researchers, connecting them up, having seminars and workshops, starting to fund little bits of research, opening up some competitions, and getting some ideas for where the standards might be—putting oil in a mechanism that has seized up and become somewhat rusty.

With relatively little money—we are talking about nothing like Heba’s amounts that you need to spend on a fab plant—I think you could free up a lot of stuff, but you need to put in, at the same time, quite a lot of investment in monitoring all of that, so that you are learning from the process. There are a lot of brilliant engineers and brilliant people in the United Kingdom. My impression is that we do not do enough to connect them up, so my first action would be to use the catapults, the academies, our brilliant universities and fabulous corporations.

Honestly, as we have already heard, we have some marvellous stuff going on in telecoms manufacture. Start to bring those people together. That costs money to service and to actually make it work. That is where I would start, and I would have a framework for what kind of information we were going to get out of that, so that it was not just a nice party, as good as that is, or a talking shop. A distributed catapult would be one way of thinking about it.

Helen Duncan:

I absolutely agree with what David has just said. I would also suggest one specific area where some intervention could be very timely, given that a lot of antenna engineers were made redundant just before Christmas when a company called Axell Wireless went into administration. Antennas have not been mentioned, but Huawei holds an awful lot of intellectual property in antennas. That will be a weakness going forward. In the past, we had some significant antenna capability in this country, most of which was bought up by Cobham, which has now said it has no interest in telecoms at all. It was because they sold Axell Wireless that it has now gone into administration. That is a specific case, but it is just one example of an area where it is not too late to reverse a particular trend.

Mike Fake:

I completely support David and Helen’s comments.

Photo of Steve McCabe Steve McCabe Labour, Birmingham, Selly Oak

We have about 11 minutes left. I will go to Kevan Jones, who I think had a question that was prompted by a reply to the Minister. Then I will try to go back to Chi and to the Minister before we finish.

Photo of Kevan Jones Kevan Jones Labour, North Durham

Q It is just a quick one. We are talking a lot about Government, and what Government can do, which is fine. But when it comes to attracting sufficient private sector investment in some of these emerging technologies, how will you kick-start that? I ask because that will be the acid test for growing some of these companies.

Helen Duncan:

I think hardware technology has a very poor image with investors and we could probably take an initiative to try to improve that, including trying to attract the right people to take up careers in hardware rather than software, as it is seemingly becoming not so glamorous but it underpins the whole thing.

Dr Cleevely:

Helen, I think you are right. It is very interesting that these days, if you want to get investment in a company—I have personal experience of this—you present it as a software company that needs a little bit of hardware to make the software work; you do not say at all that it is a hardware company. That is one thing to note.

More seriously, on the general point about private investment and interest in these things, this is a matter of setting up the rules of the game so that it makes sense for the private investors and the private people to get involved. None of this is achieved by Government; none of it is entirely achieved, indeed, by the private sector. This is one of these areas, these issues, where you need to think about how Government set the rules up and set the incentive structure so that the private sector explores the environment—because Government cannot work out exactly how this is going to turn out. The private sector can then explore it. That is why, for example, procurement is so important. If you can procure from a number of different sources and encourage people to move forward, you will explore the possibilities of innovation much more rapidly than any single company or any single Government can. We need to construct the rules of the game so that the private sector can start to deliver what the private sector is really good at. I talked about oiling the wheels; I am talking about unblocking drains at this point. We really need to make sure that the mechanism is working properly.

Mike Fake:

I would support that. I will just add that some of the mechanisms that we could explore are things like the competitions where Government put in a certain amount and private industry puts in a matching amount, but it has to be significant; it has to be a large investment—something that will make a difference, something that will take the thing from the early innovation stage through to full-scale manufacture, in the UK.

Photo of Steve McCabe Steve McCabe Labour, Birmingham, Selly Oak

Q When you say that that has to be significant and large, do you want to put a figure on it? [Laughter.]

Mike Fake:

I walked into that one, didn’t I? I just come back to my earlier point, which was that it is really great that the Bill is proposing £250 million of money for research and development over five years, but if that turns out to be £50 million a year and then you think just about BT, which is spending £500 million a year just on its network, the £50 million really is not very much, is it? It is appreciated—it is really appreciated—but it is not a significant amount in the context of that.

Photo of Chi Onwurah Chi Onwurah Shadow Minister (Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy), Shadow Minister (Digital, Culture, Media and Sport), Shadow Minister (Science, Research and Innovation)

Q Helen, you were absolutely right to emphasise, in terms of how we got here, with no UK telecommunications network capability, that as well as being about under-investment, which I mentioned, it was about acquisitions—many acquisitions of UK capability and capacity. We have the National Security and Investment Bill going through the House; in fact, that is coming back for Report tomorrow. It will make national security—although not economic security—a ground for intervening in acquisitions and investments, but it will not make investment in companies any easier. We are talking about concrete measures—what measures could Government take, or could be taken, to make significant additional investment available or easier?

Helen Duncan:

That is an interesting question.

Helen Duncan:

You cannot stop mergers and acquisitions happening, but if you can put in some sort of criteria that companies that buy British companies need to give a commitment to continue to invest in this country for a set period of time—whether or not that is practicable—that would help.

The most important thing is to make the companies themselves strong enough so they are not targets for asset stripping, as has happened in the past. All the measures that we are talking about to oil the wheels, as David says, will make our companies stronger and able to compete in what is still a global market. I think making our companies competitive is the key to this.

Dr Cleevely:

There was a thing called the Macmillan gap, which led to the emergence of the Industrial and Commercial Finance Corporation in the late 1940s. Translated into modern terms, that gap is investments required of around about half a million to £5 million or £10 million. We are still living with that, and that gap was identified in the 1920s. We have a structural problem in the United Kingdom about the way in which we invest in some of what would in Germany be called Mittelstand—those smaller companies. I think you are quite right, Chi, to draw attention to that as a particular risk profile. People do not want to put money necessarily past the seed stage into what I would call late series A and into series B.

The other point is procurement. As I have mentioned before, if you have a client or two who is prepared to buy kit from you, you not only get money but you get experience and expertise and you develop your company. We need more incentives for procuring from those kind of middle-sized companies, because out of those will come the giants of tomorrow.

My experience in Cambridge and elsewhere is that quite often, many of those companies say they are entirely private sector driven, but actually they have been the subject of lots of Government procurement and interventions along the way. That is particularly true in the United States where the SBIR scheme is very important.

Photo of Steve McCabe Steve McCabe Labour, Birmingham, Selly Oak

Do you have anything you want to add to that?

Mike Fake:

I do not have anything to add to that. I support what has been said.

Photo of Steve McCabe Steve McCabe Labour, Birmingham, Selly Oak

I am going back to the Minister, Chi, because I am conscious of time.

Photo of Matt Warman Matt Warman The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport

Q Thank you. It is a very simply question in some ways in that it follows up on a lot of what David has been saying. Obviously, when we have talked about £250 million, that is to work with the private sector, and where we have run test beds and trialled programmes, we have talked about match funding. Presumably, you would think that is a sensible approach, but I wonder what you think the limits, or what a reasonable proportion of Government investment in a company might look like, rather than simply the traditional match-funding model. I know this is sort of “how long is a piece of string”, but in terms of stakes and all that sort of thing, there is obviously a spectrum, isn’t there?

Dr Cleevely:

Well, Minister, my instinct is not for the Government to not take stakes in companies, so I think that that is beginning a distortion of—

Dr Cleevely:

The primary way to do it is: first, let’s set the rules and regulations. Secondly, let’s put some pump priming into the networks to allow people to talk. Thirdly, let’s see if we can get the procurement sorted out so that these companies can actually get the lifeblood pumping through them. Fourthly, if you really need to, because of security or other strategic interests, are there things such as the British Business Bank or other mechanisms that can act as intermediaries? You do not want the Government directly intervening in this stuff. That is the hierarchy in which you deal with this. On exactly how that works in a particular case, I have not spent enough time thinking of a detailed response.

Photo of Steve McCabe Steve McCabe Labour, Birmingham, Selly Oak

I am afraid we have run out of time. I know we could have gone on a bit longer, but thanks very much to our witnesses. That concludes this session.