Emergency Service Network Programme

Question

14:50:00

Asked by

To ask His Majesty’s Government what progress has been made in delivering the Emergency Service Network programme.

My Lords, in December 2024, the Home Office awarded the user service contract for the emergency service network to IBM and its partners. The programme’s attention is now on producing a plan with our partners, focusing on mobilisation and delivery of key capabilities to deliver the emergency service network. Programme delivery dates with milestones will be available in the spring.

My Lords, I thank the Minister for that Answer, and I declare my interests as in the register. Members may not know this, but this is essentially about moving the police emergency services, the fire brigade and the ambulance service from a radio network to a mobile phone network. That should have been delivered in 2017, but here we are in 2025 and we do not yet have an implementation date. The initial cost of £2 billion is now in excess of £12 billion. I wonder whether the time has come for a radical new approach. Instead of pursuing the present idea, which was a good one, of having the data and radio system on a mobile phone network, we could pursue those two avenues separately, so that we make progress and do not waste more money on a programme that has struggled to make any progress.

I am grateful to the noble Lord, who will be aware that I can be responsible only for activity post 4 July 2024. There was significant time and money overspend under the previous Government. However, he is right that the service will provide for 300,000 users across Britain, 107 emergency services, 44 police forces, 50 fire and rescue services and 13 ambulance trusts, as well as 300 other organisations that use Airwave for this important purpose. I hear what he says, but we have set a course of action and a direction of travel. He will no doubt monitor that, and I want to ensure that the switchover from Airwave to the new emergency service network happens as quickly as possible. As he knows, it will take some time to bed in following the ending of the previous contract and the beginning of this contract. I hope that the House will bear with me on that delivery in due course.

My Lords, this saga goes back so far that I was the telecoms Minister when this was first being discussed, in 2015. I am glad that progress has been made, but with the greatest respect to the noble Lord, setting a new course of action at this late stage would not necessarily be the right thing to do. The fundamental point is that the Home Office should not be building or contracting a mobile phone network, and I am glad that BT/EE is in charge of it. What worried me was reading that the Home Office itself is planning to build 300 masts. How does this programme correspond with the DCMS’s programme for a rural network shared between the mobile operators? It seems that the left hand and the right hand may each not know what the other is doing.

Given the overspend, I do not know whether the noble Lord was the left hand or the right hand in the previous Government. But whichever he was, I declare an interest: I was the Police Minister in 2009-10, and this had not started then. The delay, obfuscation, overspend and costs happened entirely on the previous Government’s watch. However, let us put that to one side. The key thing is ensuring that our police forces, fire services and others have appropriate services. The Home Office will provide some masts because there are some security implications, which we need to examine and deliver on. I hope that I can reassure the noble Lord, and the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, that the Home Office will have a grip on this and will deliver, and that it has a three to five-year plan to get the basics in place, with a handover as soon as possible.

My Lords, I refer to my policing interests as listed in the register. I am pleased that the Minister acknowledges the grotesque excess expenditure and delays that are clearly the fault of the previous Government. What consideration is being given to the resilience implications of the emergency services using a mobile phone network? At the moment, if the Airwave network goes down, the police and other emergency services can use mobile phones to communicate with each other. If something affects the mobile phone network, what will be plan B?

Plan B is part of plan A, which is also to provide the 292 4G mobile phone sites that the noble Lord mentioned in his question. We have picked this up. We have made a decision to terminate the previous contract; we had a court case to do that. We are now putting in place a revised contract—we have to exit the former contract—and resilience will be built in to make sure that this is the most important service that can be provided, because this is how police, fire and other emergency services communicate with each other in times of difficulty. It is an absolute priority for the Home Office to get this right, and I hope that we will do so in the course of the next few years.

My Lords, I keep hearing that the Government want us to be leaders in AI, but it is very difficult to work out how this can be when the Government have not dealt with the fact that the police are being run as an analogue operation in a digital age. It almost beggars belief that all 43 police forces in the UK use different IT systems, the majority of which do not even speak to each other. We have just heard about the 51 year-old police national computer; that is never going to be sorted in the next, goodness knows, five to 10 years, and it stores only very basic biometric data. Many of the drones the police are using are clapped out and need to be replaced. When are the Government going to wake up to the major problem the police have got with technology and actually provide the funds to deal with this once and for all?

The noble Baroness makes an extremely valid point. There are 44 police forces in total—43 plus the British Transport Police—and they have a range of different technological methods of gathering information and working. Obviously, from a taxpayer efficiency and a security point of view, we want to make sure that we get the best deal. Part of the Government’s efficiency drive will be to look at how we can work with police forces, which are independent, to do that downstream. The change we have made from the previous Government’s position will save the taxpayer £200 million per year when up and running. That is a more efficient way of getting a better service for the taxpayer.

His Majesty’s Opposition look forward to monitoring this programme according to the timescale set out today. What assurances can the Government give that the emergency service network will ever deliver what it set out to do, especially in light of the ongoing vast expenditure of the programme?

Let me give the noble Lord this assurance: I am not sure how we will monitor it, but it will be better than the previous Government’s monitoring. The previous Government’s overspend and the delays—as mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe—were all, dare I say it, on his watch. We signed a contract in December and it is a significant amount of taxpayers’ money—potentially £19.2 billion over a 28 year-period. The Home Office, with colleagues, will monitor the introduction, delivery and efficiency. As we do so, and as we have done with the previous contract that his Government signed, if it becomes inefficient, we will take action. We are now in discussions with Airwave and Motorola to find recompense for the taxpayer for the overspend that was inflicted on his watch.

Has the Minster read the latest leader in the Economist, which sets out the irrefutable case for the substantial rearmament of this country and its western European neighbours if we are to provide adequately for the security of our people? Does he accept that that is a question not just of pure military power but of national resilience, in which emergency communications play a crucial role? Further to the question from the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, can the Minister assure the House that this new system, whenever it comes in, will be fit for purpose in a potentially hostile environment?

The noble and gallant Lord is absolutely right. Any future Airwave system has to be resilient to potential hostile actor threats and attacks. That is built into the system, and it is something we are cognisant of. The security element of that is extremely important not just in an emergency services context but in the context of any other form of communication. The noble and gallant Lord will know that there are hostile actors who seek to do harm to the United Kingdom. Our job is to stand up to them and to provide resilience accordingly.