Part of Telecommunications (Security) Bill – in a Public Bill Committee at 3:30 pm on 21 January 2021.
Chi Onwurah
Shadow Minister (Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy), Shadow Minister (Digital, Culture, Media and Sport), Shadow Minister (Science, Research and Innovation)
3:30,
21 January 2021
I rise simply to support the excellent speech made by my hon. Friend the Member for City of Chester. I thank him for his very kind words. In the Amendment, he makes an important contribution in ensuring that ofcom knows what it needs to know and in putting the onus more firmly on the network providers. I simply ask the Minister to respond to the points that my hon. Friend made in his concluding remarks about being forward-looking.
A challenge for us as a nation in securing our networks during such fast-paced technological change is looking backwards to the problems we have had rather than forwards to the evolving and new threats. During the evidence sessions, we were accused of fetishising 5G as if that was the only security challenge, because of the visible problem with Huawei, and that we were not looking more broadly. I admired Ofcom during my time there because it was set up to be a forward-looking regulator. To achieve that aim, when it comes to the sweeping new requirements around security that are placed on it under the Bill, it needs to be able to see what changes are happening and are likely to influence future evolving threats. To do that effectively, amendment 11 requires the network providers to notify Ofcom of planned or actual changes.
It is worth remembering that—I made this point earlier—if BT had been required to notify Ofcom or another body of changes to its network as Huawei moved to a greater and more dominant position in its network, that might have rung alarm bells more generally. We have also already mentioned the shift that we are seeing on the importance of software and software configuration and services in controlling the network. Requiring providers to notify Ofcom of planned or actual changes to the network would make that evolution more easily visible and therefore provide Ofcom with greater visibility of how all our networks are evolving and what new threats may arise as a consequence.
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Ofcom is the independent regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industries, with responsibilities across television, radio, telecommunications and wireless communications services.
Ofcom Web Site http://www.ofcom.org.uk
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Ofcom is the independent regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industries, with responsibilities across television, radio, telecommunications and wireless communications services.
Ofcom Web Site http://www.ofcom.org.uk
