We live in a complex, electrically powered world – but the more connected everything becomes the more catastrophic it is when that fails.
In the drive towards efficiency over the last five decades, we’ve lost backup systems, says Lord Harris.
An example of this is the new communication system being adopted by the emergency services, which will replace radio comms with mobile phone network technology, says Lord Harris, “so if the mobile phone goes down it will also impact on emergency services communications”.
However, the government insists “moving emergency services onto modern 4G and 5G technologies” is “resilient and reliable”.
Government enthusiasm for resilience is nothing new. Oliver Dowden, the then deputy prime minister, launched the last Conservative government’s disaster planning initiative in May 2024. The launch was somewhat overshadowed by Sunak announcing an election on the same day but, two years on, calls for at least three days of resilience have only grown stronger.
At the beginning of researching this article I spoke to an engineer about the UK’s TV and radio transmission masts, their lonely isolation from the rest of the digital landscape sounded like a failing. It now feels like an argument in their favour.
The current urgency for disaster planning is coming at an interesting moment for technology we used to rely on. The UK’s copper wire landline system – which would work even in a power cut – will be switched off on 31 January 2027. The future of FM radio is also under government review.
The response from the government was that while copper landlines had been a useful fallback during power cuts, they were now unreliable and difficult to repair.
As I ended my call with Kemp, I asked him if his report had helped improve our readiness for a Black Sky. He paused.
“If anything, we’ve gone backwards,” he said. “Switching off the public switch telephone network, I think shows that there has been really no thought at all about how you communicate when you’ve no longer got power.”
While writing this piece last Saturday I had to break off for an hour because my street was suddenly plunged into darkness. We had a power cut.
I found my emergency torch, but the batteries had leaked. My candles had been pushed to the back of a cupboard and I had no idea where I had put my wind-up radio with its emergency torch.
It felt like an omen.