---

Scientific Advice (Emergencies)

That is a very good question. Are Government always perfect at ensuring that all the information and knowledge is harvested and garnered from all parts of Whitehall and well beyond, including all the agencies and organisations? No, not by any means. A big part of the role of my officials in the civil contingencies secretariat is to try to ensure that we bring that body of knowledge together as best we can. One would hope that in an event like the volcanic ash eruption, the Ministry of Defence would be intimately involved—I am sure that it was—in assessments and decision making. However, it is a perfectly good question. It will not always be perfectly answered, but we are conscious of the need to maximise the bringing together of all the knowledge on this front. My hon. Friend the Member for South Basildon and East Thurrock and others talked about space weather. That is potentially a big hazard with really serious impacts. We need to deal with it in a thorough way. The truth is that more work is needed to understand what the wide range of impacts would be from a serious event. The Department of Energy and Climate Change is engaged with National Grid, the energy emergencies executive committee and the British Geological Survey to consider the implications of a severe space weather event for the electricity system as a whole, including the potential impacts on generator transformers and further consideration of the transmission network. We in the Cabinet Office will continue to work with other sectors that could be impacted to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the vulnerability. Work on that issue continues. The only other time when there was a major event was in 1859—the Carrington event, which has been mentioned. That was a very different world. There have been other events, but they tend to be localised. The likelihood of such an event is therefore not high, but it is real and we need to address it in the best way we can. My hon. Friend the Member for South Basildon and East Thurrock asked whether we were participating in the European Space Agency's space situational awareness programme, which runs until 2012. We have subscribed to it. It defines the steps that need to be taken on space surveillance and space weather. The UK Space Agency will engage with the potential space weather user community and data service providers to assess the relative priority of funding space weather activities within the ESA space situational awareness programme. That will obviously need to be reconciled with competing demands for other programme opportunities and existing financial commitments, but no clear conclusion has yet been reached. However, we are very aware of the risk, and a great deal of work is going on in relation to it. I turn to the question of cyber security, which is obviously a serious matter. It was identified in the strategic defence and security review as a high risk, and a significant budget has been attached to the national cyber security programme; as Minister responsible for the Office of Cyber Security and Information Assurance, I have oversight of that programme. Our approach is to ensure that we invest in building capability, as capability is relatively scarce. We have an affordable centre of excellence and expertise at GCHQ. This is a question not only for the Government but for the whole economy. We discern a marked range in the degree of preparedness of private sector companies on cyber security. Some are highly developed, but it is not only companies focused on internet activities that are vulnerable; it goes much more widely than that. Some companies that ought to be concerned about cyber security do not take it as seriously as they should. Over the coming months, we will be encouraging them to address it seriously. It should be on the agenda of every risk and audit committee, to ensure that it is properly understood and dealt with. In a few weeks' time, I shall be publishing the Government's cyber-security strategy and I hope that it will receive attention and be debated by the House. These are most important matters, and we must do our best to get them right.