Speeches and Statements

Securing the Critical National Infrastructure

A speech by John Reid, then Home Secretary, to RUSI on the threat to the Critical National Infrastructure on 25 April 2007.

Thank you for being here and thank you also for that rather awesome list of positions that, as I look back, I have had the privilege and honour to lead posts in government. General Jackson, Mike Jackson, friend of all of us, was speaking the other night at a police dinner, and he adamantly refused to call me Home Secretary but referred to me throughout as Secretary of State, since, he said, the rate of velocity from change of office to office that I’d had, meant that he always had to use a generic title to cover every possibility because by the end of the speech I may be holding another office.

But it has been a hugely exciting period for me going through these because so many of them, defence spokesman, in opposition, then armed forces, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and then Secretary of State for Defence, now Home Secretary, have concerned this great issue of security and it is the first obligation of government to secure the life, and liberty, and lifestyle of our people and therefore I am greatly honoured that I have been asked to play any part in that. I am also honoured to have been invited here today, thank you for that invitation I am delighted genuinely to be here.

When last we spoke, many in the audience, it was the launch of the Security and Resilience Industries and Suppliers Council, known as RISC, which was a big occasion on its own right, and in addition, on that occasion I was able to announce that we would be carrying out changes at the Home Office in order to allow us to expand our capacity of the government on security and counter-terrorist matters and to give you some principled indication of the direction in which we are moving. I promised then to inform you of the nature of our plans for the future because you are one of our key partners in that common fight against terrorism and the fight for security.

I have always said that we can never achieve the security of this country by government or agencies alone, it will involve the total fight of a common effort of everyone in this country, all the citizens in this country, all the agencies of this country and the private and public sector. And just as we face a common threat, so it can only be met by a common response.

Now, your conference today on the Critical National Infrastructure, the CNI, addresses the 21st century security from a different but a strongly related perspective to that of terrorism, and I thought therefore that out of the promise that I had made to you, and also the contextual framework for your conference, it would be useful for me to let you know what is happening as the government refocuses our efforts, particularly through the Home Office.

As Home Secretary I have responsibility for both aspects of UK security. So today I want just to briefly set out my vision of a Home Office, refocused on security in terms of the challenge of the 21st century and the security implications of that, what the government is doing and how the private and voluntary sectors’ contributions are vital to that. I want to make two things absolutely clear at the start; the first is that over the past few years, our police and security services have performed heroically in defending this nation from terrorist attacks. Even in the last couple of years, just slightly longer than the period during which I have been Home Secretary, I know of half a dozen occasions on which tragedy, sometimes on a massive scale, has been averted by the efforts of our security and police services and I want to pay tribute to them.

The changes that we are introducing by refocusing the Home Office on immigration, crime and counter-terrorism, are intended to supplement those efforts that those on the ground in our police and security services have already been making. I can promise you and through you, people in this country, 100% commitment from everyone involved, 100% dedication, but I have to be straight; we cannot promise 100% success; that would be an insult to your intelligence and to my integrity to indicate that we can ever guarantee that when fighting terrorism. And therefore I have to be clear, that in that battle against terrorism, though the effort will be maximum, the guaranteed outcome can never be taken for granted. So we are making these changes because we cannot afford one ounce of complacency in this struggle against terrorism. Indeed it is that very lack of complacency that leads us to confront the fact that this struggle will be unrelenting and of lengthy duration. But my message today is also that a world of unrelenting change can enable liberty to flourish and to prosper. Conversely, security policy fed only on fear would debase the values, and ideas, which we British at our best have advanced over the centuries.

For all its uncertainties, our future has to be about advancing liberty and security, not choosing between liberty or security. In other words, in the struggle to protect our national security to counter terrorism, or to protect our Critical National Infrastructure, to engage the whole country in that, scaring the people does not produce security, we are led to value security through what our liberties enable us to appreciate.

And that is the context for one of the great challenges of this century; in many ways, what we have come to call the Critical National Infrastructure, CNI to those in the know, embodies the latest phase of a long historical process of globalisation of a world shrinking as people come together. During the 19th century, telegraphy, combined with steam engines, the massively new technology of the age, particularly steam engines at sea and on land, built worldwide networks, and these in turn drove up the mobility, not only of tradable goods and capital but also, to some extent, what constituted mass migration in those days. It drove it to hitherto unprecedented levels in the 19th century because of that technology, during what was an early phase of globalisation.
Some of the consequences of 19th century globalisation spurred the insecurity and the wars of the 20th century. Electronic networks have brought about a massive wave of globalisation in the wake of the Cold War in the latter end of the last century. Nearly two decades on from the end of the Cold War, it is easy to lose historical perspective on the enormity of events in human history we are living through. From a relatively static world of inviolable national borders, iron curtains, concrete walls that prohibited movement and limited movement or likely controlled transport and communications networks, we now live with the massive mobility of people and the knowledge that they produce, and use, on an unprecedented and growing scale. The consequences of that great change are both global and local.

Now, it would be wonderful if unleashing such liberated human potential and the mobility of persons and knowledge enabled through new technology and political change, it would be wonderful if those opportunities could be unleashed in a danger-free fashion, unfortunately that is not the case. Fast-evolving forms of terrorism and conflict make clear the dire penalties for a naïve approach to 21st century security, which is clouded by the undoubted opportunities that are offered.

The Critical National Infrastructure we seek to protect is, by its very nature, integral to the global and local networks we need for our wellbeing and our prosperity, they are an integral part of that opportunity. These same networks and their characteristics can also empower us in a hugely advanced fashion, but they can also empower our adversaries. They can empower them by subverting individuals, by allowing the opportunities for individuals or groups to be conditioned, to be influenced with content that nurtures and unconstrained intention to wreak massive human destruction, they are a vehicle for the conditioning, for instance, of suicide bombers, in its first instance. They help these new opportunities, or these new vehicles that bring such opportunities to us, also help proliferate knowledge of capabilities that are literally killer applications in the literal sense rather than just the metaphorical sense. In other words, the very technology and infrastructure that brings to us the opportunities of the modern globalised world are also vehicles through which the two elements of threat, that is, intention, conditioning, leading people to be willing to commit unconstrained destruction and the capability to do it, that is, the application of knowledge of chemical biological or nuclear capacity, both of these are available to some lesser or greater extent, through the very infrastructure that brings us the opportunities in an economic or an educational sense.

And in addition to that, they can encourage recklessness about the indiscriminate consequences of the targets they select for attack, and in that context, we have to deal with making our assessments about how that threat may appear in order to carry out the protection of that very infrastructure that could be used to enhance the threats and just as during the Cold War, here we are dealing with secrets and mysteries. Of course, the secrets then during the Cold War were the capabilities of the Warsaw Pact and the shape of their orders of battle, secrets that we might be able to discover, and on occasions, might be the mysteries concerning the intentions of perhaps rogue individuals in what we assumed was otherwise irrational bureaucracy despite the fact it was our adversary. We came to know a great deal about the Warsaw Pact secrets, but the mysteries of their intentions were an abiding concern to all of us concerned with the security of our country and of our infrastructure.

Today the position is reversed; today al-Qaeda make no mystery of their intentions, indeed their unconstrained attempt, intent, to wreak havoc on us among others, but courtesy, in large part, of electronic networks, their secrets have become more of a challenge, their order of battle, how they intend to carry out their intention of unconstrained destruction, that is more difficult to gauge. And it's in the face of that challenge that the proven dedication and commitment of our police security and armed services can be taken for granted, but their capacity, like the capacity of any human organisation, to always get it right, cannot be taken for granted. The pace and scale and intensity of innovation in our adversaries are capable of allowing us no room for complacency at all and therefore we need to be faster, brighter, more agile than our adversaries to face the challenges of 21st century security.

So what are we doing about it? The review which I undertook at the end of last year, the review of our counter-terrorism capability was able to identify a means off adding to our existing capacity in ways that would enable a radical step-change in our approach to our security.

Refocusing the Home Office and creating a Ministry of Justice will give the government strategic capacity fit for the challenges of today and the future.

It is vital that in the 21st century we have a department, in my view it is vital, that we have a department which concentrates on personal, community and national security in all its aspects, from neighbourhood policing through the normal work of the British, traditional British bobby, to organized crime at home and abroad, to the managing of immigration, right through to the fight for counter-terrorism. That is the vision of global and local security which I put forward, and it's why I believe it’s necessary, given the challenge to us which is now seamless, a challenge from terrorists which runs though domestic, foreign, defence affairs and which is rooted not only in the act of terrorism but in the ideology and the battle for values which underlines the spur towards that act. So that integrated and comprehensive approach to security, I believe will need to come from adding capacity to, and through, a new strategic centre. The establishment of that centre in the Home Office is not a one-off event, because we need to concentrate our energies in developing and constantly evolving plans that anticipate our adversaries' next move, so that Office of Security and Counter-terrorism, the OSCT, will play, I believe, a pivotal role in this, it will hopefully provide that faster, brighter and more agile approach to the terrorist threat through a new drive, cohesion, and by providing a greater strategic capacity in our fight against terrorism.

To do that it has to harness more effectively the contribution of science, innovation and the partnership with the private sector and academia in that fight to mobilise the resources of the nation, in public, in private, in the security, the academia and the industrial-commercial sector in order to present that maximum effort against terrorism in this country. Those contributions will enhance our strategic investment decision among other things, so the Office of Security and Counter-terrorism will bring stronger leadership and greater coordination of our strategic campaigns and at the heart of those campaigns we should always remind ourselves, will be the struggle for values and ideas, that is a strategy for prevention intervention with our strategy for public protection.

Now your particular interest lies in other aspects of the critical national infrastructure, but counter-terrorism and protecting the CNI share many characteristics – an attack on CNI, the critical national infrastructure, will not respect borders, the ambition of terrorists to cripple financial markets will have global and local repercussions and I am sure that I do not have to remind this audience of al-Qaeda’s declared aim, to bleed us to bankruptcy. That will not be a wound that will afflict only this country, were they ever able to achieve it – it will have global repercussions. I don’t have to remind you of their call for attacks on the energy supplies of the West, which would have enormous incalculable damage wrought if that were to be achieved.

So in February the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure was formed by merging the National Security Coordination Centre with the National Security Advice Centre. This merger affirms that the terrorist threat may come in physical or electronic form. It’s easy to appreciate the devastation of a physical attack and what it might bring but we must never underestimate the potentially devastating consequences of an electronic attack, for all the reasons I have outlined earlier. That Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure adds further significant capacity to our focus on 21st-century security. That brings us then, Richard, to how the private and voluntary sector can contribute.

The critical national infrastructure makes the interdependencies of the public, private and voluntary sectors more complex and more vital, while security remains the first duty of government, it is the ultimate duty of the public at large, and the business which we all rely on for wealth and for wellbeing, it is therefore crucial in my view that we work together, not only domestically but with international partners, but also here at home with other government departments, the private sector, industry, academics and others to ensure that we understand, and that we share, to the maximum, our knowledge of the threat and how to counter it, and I believe that the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure will play a crucial role here going forward, it will provide for instance, comprehensive, all-inclusive security advice on all forms of threat, from one credible and reliable source to all of our critical national infrastructure. So ultimately securing that national infrastructure is a responsibility for all of us, this means public, businesses and government working together, it is in all our interests and that is the main reason that I have come to address you this morning, Richard. It is also what brings me back to my overriding message of liberty and security.

It is clear that the most challenging aspect of 21st-century security is the scale, pace and intensity with which innovation can happen. That is true in all aspects of our lives. We cannot allow our adversaries in this struggle to match us or to dictate the pace of innovation on their terms. In driving that pace of innovation, of new thinking and change, we can, I believe, turn threats into opportunities. The competitiveness of the private sector is vital here, whether from a critical national infrastructure or counter-terrorist perspective, your contribution to security comes from making innovation happen, comes from driving change of ideas, of better, more effective ways of doing things, through healthy markets rather than the blighted prospects on offer from our adversaries, or merely relying on some centralised bureaucratic thinking. And therefore my message is none of us can be complacent.

The determination of terrorists to damage the people and the lifestyle and the liberties of the people of this country can never be underestimated, but I am more determined that ever that we should protect the values, ideals and security of the law-abiding citizens of this country, and are accountable for assisting the Prime Minister in coordinating our security strategy here at home, it is a responsibility, Richard, which I take very seriously indeed, I believe it is crucial that a home secretary should waken up every morning thinking about the security of the nation first and foremost, every single day. That is why have refocused the Home Office and that is what I am now able to do.

So, I conclude by restating what I said at the start because I believe it to be such an important message. A world of unrelenting change can enable liberty to flourish and prosper. For all the uncertainties, our future has to be about advancing security and liberty, not choosing between liberty or security - as I said, scaring people does not produce security nor does fear create healthy markets for security or for any other business, we have to have a degree of confidence and resolution without one ounce of complacency because rather than what I have described, of fear being the fuel of our determination, we should be and are led to our pursuit of means of securing the nation through what our liberties enable us to do for our common good and the common good of the people of this country. Thank you very much for your invite here today, Richard.