FST JOURNAL

Recent events have shown the damage that can be done when there is a lack of resilience in national infrastructure. From a fire at a substation closing Heathrow, to flooding affecting the electricity grid and IT and telecoms issues (accidental or cybercrime) leading to shutdowns. This is a global issue. On Wednesday 28th January 2026 the Foundation held a discussion event to explore key threats to our national infrastructure and how technology can help us understand and protect against those threats.

The speakers were:

• Natalie Black, Group Director at Ofcom
• Professor Peter Bonfield, Vice-Chancellor at the University of Westminster, and Chair of the FloodReady review
• Blythe Crawford CBE, Director Grail at Tiberius Aerospace, and adviser to the Alan Turing Institute
• Joanna Cavan, Managing Director at the UK Telecoms Lab and National Physical Laboratory
• Dr Deborah Petterson, Director of Resilience & Emergency Management at the National Energy System Operator (NESO).
• The Rt Hon the Lord Willetts FRS, FST Chair

Opening the panel discussion, Dr Deborah Patterson began with a story. She said “It is midnight, maybe you're in bed, and there's smoke, dark smoke, no light, and there is someone banging at your door. Why? Because there's been an explosion. A substation is on fire, and it will take five days to put out that Blaze.” That was a reality for 127 people on the 20th of March last year (2025) in West London, she said.

As well as introducing the new public body – the National Energy Systems Operator (NESO) of which she is the Director of Resilience and Emergency Management, she addressed the critical importance of energy resilience and its connection to other essential infrastructure, such as telecommunications. She used the example of a major substation fire in West London to illustrate the widespread impact of energy failures on homes, businesses, transportation, and emergency services. The incident she mentioned, which disrupted power for up to 70,000 customers and affected hundreds of thousands of travellers, exposed vulnerabilities in infrastructure not yet officially deemed critical.

She said that as we decarbonise, weather becomes our fuel. It is the cornerstone of our clean energy future, but it is also inherently variable. Adaptation is a strategic imperative. Heat Waves strain our grid. Storms and fires damage our infrastructure. Cold snaps drive up demand, and when there are storms, industry must step up and respond. We are in a heightened few years of space weather, solar flares, coronal mass ejections that produce electric fields on our surface that can damage energy assets.

Dr Patterson explained NESO's independent role in safeguarding the UK's energy system through risk analysis and recommendations to government and industry. The focus, she said is on proactive strategies to anticipate and adapt to risks—including extreme weather, space weather, cyber-attacks, and physical sabotage—that are becoming more frequent and complex.

Her first example of the North Hyde substation fire highlighted that there was no shared understanding across organisations such as Heathrow Airport, Transport for London, and the National Grid of the resilience needed, due to their different niches and focus. The varying degrees of preparedness and resilience across different sectors was stark.

She concluded by emphasising the need for a shared understanding of resilience, encouraging collaboration between government and industry to meet rising societal expectations in an interconnected world.

The second speaker was Natalie Black, Group Director of Ofcom. Her talk highlighted the critical importance of resilience in the UK's digital and energy infrastructure, emphasising that such resilience was not a luxury, but the quiet, unseen foundation that keeps the country functioning. She said that her job was to ‘inject some urgency’ into the discussion. She represented a regulatory perspective, underscoring how a single technical failure—such as a software error in a telecom network or a subsea cable fault—can have severe and widespread impact on businesses, individuals, and entire communities. These vulnerabilities reveal the interconnected and fragile nature of modern society.

As someone who has lived and worked in Asia, Nathalie said that it was like ‘living in the future’ where the impacts of climate change andgeopolitics were very real and digital adoption was sky high. She said that resilience was part of the national psyche. She argued that resilience is central to national security, economic stability and public trust here too.

The proliferation of digital technologies has deeply embedded communications into daily life, making robust networks vital for everything from finance and healthcare to education and emergency services. However, she said that the consequences of network failures are both economic—costing hundreds of millions or even billions—and social, disconnecting people and potentially putting lives at risk.

Nathalie explained that the evolving responsibilities of Ofcom and industry now call for resilience to be designed into systems from the outset, not merely patched on after vulnerabilities appear. She noted that modern risks compound and cascade due to interconnections across sectors and supply chains, and that innovation—such as AI, satellite communications, and advanced cybersecurity—offers new tools for anticipating and mitigating these risks.

A key message was the need to shift the national conversation: resilience should be valued not just in terms of network coverage, but also in terms of performance and reliability. Regulatory enforcement, market incentives, and international cooperation are stressed as essential elements for achieving this.

Nathalie concluded by saying that resilience requires ongoing foresight, learning, governance, and strong partnerships between government, regulators, industry, and international partners. Trust in infrastructure is fundamental, and safeguarding it must remain a relentless, long-term commitment.

The third speaker, Blythe Crawford CBE, Director Grail at Tiberius Aerospace also has extensive experience in the UK Ministry of Defence as a former Royal Air Force (RAF) air commodore. He discussed the critical importance of resilience in national security, using Ukraine’s response to the Russian invasion as a case study. His talk highlighted how resilience is a systems property revealed under stress, noting Ukraine’s rapid adaptation across data communications, energy, and logistics. He said that Ukraine did not set out to become resilient but was forced to do so very quickly. By offshoring data, leveraging Starlink, diversifying energy, and quickly pivoting manufacturing (such as wardrobe makers becoming drone makers) to support defence, Ukraine demonstrated that resilience is about robustness, recoverability and adaptability, not perfection.

In contrast, Blythe Crawford warned that Western systems have become fragile due to efficiency-driven centralisation and cost-cutting, leading to vulnerabilities in data, energy, communications, and supply chains. He said that fragility grows quietly during peace time. For example, here in the UK we hold our data in data centres based in urban centres optimised for cost and latency rather than survivability. He said that we have a huge reliance on GPS which can get jammed in times of conflict and that our energy systems are brittle. Real-world incidents, such as cyberattacks and infrastructure breaches including news updates that we have seemingly come to normalise such as infiltration of drones in classified spaces and the like, illustrate that the West is already operating in a pre-conflict phase.

Blythe Crawford concluded that there have been recent positive steps in the UK—such as diversifying communications, securing energy, and federating manufacturing—and argued that resilience is not an expensive luxury but a necessary investment. The costs of systemic failure, he noted, far outweigh the investments required to build robust, redundant, and recoverable systems for both national security and economic prosperity.

The next speaker was Joanna Cavan, Managing Director at the UK Telecoms Lab. She highlighted the essential role of telecommunications as the backbone and connective tissue of all sectors, including energy, defence, healthcare (citing an example of a ‘pill camera’ swallowed by patients to detect bowl cancer and based on telecommunications), finance, and transport. Disruptions to telecom networks, she explained, can trigger widespread impacts on daily life, economic stability, national security, and international confidence. At the UK Telecoms Lab, teams conduct advanced security research to safeguard critical telecoms by proactively ‘hacking into’ telecom systems to identify and patch vulnerabilities before they can be exploited by cybercriminals or hostile states. She said that the recent vulnerability found in the lab by the UK telecoms advanced vulnerability researchers would have cost the UK economy £1bn per day if it has been exploited. It would have caused a sever mobile phone outage.

Joanna discussed two major threats: the growing frequency and severity of cyberattacks targeting telecoms, and the increasing complexity of modern networks, which now rely on distributed software, data, satellite, and cloud technologies. She said that these factors make telecoms both more powerful and more vulnerable. Notable examples included cyberattacks in Luxembourg and the global, persistent 'Salt Typhoon' campaign. She argued that traditional security measures are insufficient in today’s interconnected environment.

Instead, she advocated for a holistic approach—combining strong partnerships, skilled personnel, and a security-first culture—while also embedding resilience by design into technology development and international standards. She concluded that national resilience in telecoms is not just a matter of security, but also of economic prosperity and the protection of citizens’ way of life.

The final speaker was Professor Peter Bonfield, Vice-Chancellor at the University of Westminster, and Chair of the FloodReady review. He outlined some of the conclusions of the FloodReady review - a detailed examination of property flood resilience in the UK, which notes the increasing risks posed by climate change and extreme weather. Professor Bonfield said that over the past decade, the prevalence of flooding had grown, with millions of properties now at risk—especially from surface water flooding, which is less visible but widespread. His presentation highlighted the disproportionate impact on society’s most vulnerable, who often face repeated property damage, lengthy displacement, and escalating insurance costs.

Traditional approaches, which replace damaged materials with identical ones, have proved inadequate, subjecting households to cycles of loss. The review advocates for practical, system-wide solutions: preventing water entry with flood doors and air brick covers, using water-resilient materials for faster recovery, and taking steps to reduce surface water flooding.

A central message to Professor Bonfield’s presentation was the importance of collaboration. He described how mortgage lenders, insurers, government bodies, builders, manufacturers, and community volunteers had been brought together to set clear goals and responsibilities within the review. Recommendations include training and certifying competent professionals, creating registers to ensure trustworthy work, and providing accessible information to empower households—such as the mobile “floodmobile” outreach initiative.

Overall, he called for coordinated, practical, and people-focused measures to boost property flood resilience and mitigate the long-term impacts of flooding across the UK.

To watch to the full discussion including the Q&A that followed,  click here.