Brits warned about next nationwide 'Armageddon alert' system test
Nationwide tests of an “Armageddon” Government emergency alert could take place every two years, a top Whitehall official revealed today.
Roger Hargreaves, director of the Cobra emergencies committee unit at the Cabinet Office, told MPs more trials would be carried out, after the "massively successful" test in April.
“It is international standard practice to do regular test messages. I think there is a case for doing it every two years, but we haven’t got a ministerial decision on that,” he said. “Every two years is what we would probably advise ministers but we’re yet to get a view on that.”
Roger Hargreaves, director of the Cobra emergencies committee unit at the Cabinet Office (parliamentlive.tv)This would pave the way for a test in April 2025. He also revealed one in 10 mobile phones failed to receive during the first nationwide test in April. He blamed network operator Three for millions of devices not receiving the vibrating siren message.
Confirming “about 90%” of handsets got the alert, Mr Hargreaves told the Commons Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee: “We would have hoped to get higher than that. The big drop off in available phones was because one of the networks - Three - the message didn’t go through to all users, it went to about 10% of their users in England rather than all of them.
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“That was the main driving factor in the number falling below the 95% plus that we had hoped for.” The loud alarm was planned to ring at 3pm on all devices using 4G and 5G networks in the UK on April 23.
The alert rang for 10 seconds and displayed a message notifying phone users that no action was needed in response to the test. Some smartphones also read out the message.
Mr Hargreaves told MPs: “Even with what happened with Three it was still massively successful from our perspective because it reached so many more people than any other comparable means of communication that we previously had access to.”
Mr Hargreaves also explained a glitch that meant some users received a second message the next day - and a spelling mistake in the Welsh version. Some cell towers failed to receive a signal telling them to stop broadcasting the alert - meaning messages were still received up to 24 hours later.
Former Welsh Secretary David Jones got the alert in his North Wales constituency and received a second the next day when the train he was on crossed the border into England. He also blasted a spelling error in the original text, which Mr Hargreaves blamed on an auto-correct facility.
For the words "others safe", the message read "eraill yn Vogel" when it should have been "eraill yn ddiogel". There is no letter “v” in Welsh and Vogel is a ski resort in Slovenia.
Mr Hargreaves said: “When you put a Welsh language message into an English language system, pretty much every single word comes up with a little wiggly blue line underneath it requiring spell checking. Obviously it doesn’t because it’s in Welsh.
“When you load the thing onto the system, if you don’t have a space after the last full stop and you press ‘return’, it auto-corrects the last word - which is why it was capital V, Vogel, because it was changing it to an English language proper word. The key learning from that is you put a space after the last full stop.”
He said the trial could have gone ahead years earlier, but “no-one was willing to pay for it”. MPs heard some “successful” tests took place “in several areas” in 2013 - a decade before the UK-wide trial.
“When departments were asked about whether they wanted to invest in this, there wasn’t an appetite from departments to contribute to that system,” he told the committee. But the coronavirus pandemic triggered a rethink.
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“At the start of Covid we needed to communicate with the public in a very quick, very broad way. We did do it using SMS but it was really not very effective and that generated the need to get on and deliver cell broadcasting.”
The system was ready for testing at the end of 2021, but Russia’s military build-up on the Ukrainian border, which led to the invasion on February 24, 2022, delayed a trial.
“There was a lot of concern in government that were we to launch a new national emergency alert system which no-one, in the generality of the public, had heard of just after a nuclear power began a European war, there might be alarm,” he added. "Ministers were concerned and wanted to give a bit of space between that event and the launch.”
The Tory leadership drama which toppled Boris Johnson, briefly propelled Liz Truss to No10 and eventually led to Rishi Sunak becoming Prime Minister also delayed a test. Mr Hargreaves said: “There was a period of political uncertainty for the Government through 2022 and we waited for new prime ministers to arrive. Then the present Prime Minister arrived and wanted to push ahead.”
National Preparedness Commission chairman Lord Toby Harris aid an emergency alert system could have been used to save lives at Grenfell Tower. Some 72 victims perished when the West London tower block caught fire in June 2017.
Four years earlier, an emergency alert system had been devised by the Government, but no department wanted to fund it, a senior civil servant told the Commons Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee.
National Preparedness Commission chairman Lord Toby Harris said a system to send messages to local mobile phones could have been used when the blaze broke out.
“It could have saved lives at Grenfell,” he told MPs. “The watch commander, if he had control of it, would have been able to draw a map, a line around Grenfell Tower to deliver that.”
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