Everyone wants resilience - nobody wants to pay for redundancy
Ask anyone in Westminster whether the UK should be resilient, and the answer is yes. Ask whether we should pay, today, for capacity we hope never to use, and the conversation gets harder. The gap between wanting resilience and funding it is our single biggest preparedness risk. Everyone wants resilience; nobody wants redundancy. And resilience, stripped of the jargon, is largely redundancy with a better name.
Resilience is redundancy with a better name
Start with what the word means: resilience is the ability to absorb a shock and keep functioning. That does not come from one clever fix; it comes from having options, including spare capacity, more than one supplier, back-up power, the means to repair what breaks, and people who know what to do when it does.
These are not solutions readily available at the last minute; they require planning and investment when things are working for when they don't.
Take the cables on the seabed. Around three-quarters of Britain's transatlantic data capacity runs through just two cables, both landing in Cornwall, carrying hundreds of billions of pounds of transactions a day. Most damage is accidental - anchors and fishing gear, not sabotage - so the routine picture is genuinely good. But when a cable is cut, it must be fixed quickly, and a repair ship can take well over a week to reach a fault in British waters. A dedicated repair vessel sitting in port is a pure cost with no return, right up until the moment it is the only thing that matters. It is an example of classic resilience investment the market will never make alone - exactly what Government is now, rightly, weighing whether to fund.
The same logic runs through the networks we use every day. It is hard to put a figure on what our digital infrastructure is worth: it is the foundation of Britain's economy, underpins public services such as the National Health Service, connects society to the online world, and enhances almost every aspect of daily life.
Television and radio increasingly reach us over the internet rather than by broadcast, and the old copper telephone network is being retired for newer, more capable systems. But all of it rests on one thing: the electricity grid that powers it, and that interdependence is at the heart of the resilience debate. Ofcom's resilience guidance, published in June, highlights this priority by identifying the energy and telecommunications sectors as a key focus for the next two years, with backup power targets ranging from hours at street cabinets to days at core network sites.
Compliance is not resilience
Cyber is the same story in a different costume. The Cyber Security and Resilience Bill, now before the Lords, is welcome and should pass quickly. It widens the rules to cover data centres, the companies that run other organisations' computer systems, and critical suppliers, and it sharpens reporting and penalties. We, as techUK, support it. But the truth is that a duty to report an incident and a bigger fine are tools, not outcomes, and compliance is not the same as resilience. Serious incidents keep rising: the National Cyber Security Centre handled more than double the number of nationally significant attacks last year. Widening the net is sensible where the evidence supports it but it is not, by itself, readiness.
Insurance, not an afterthought
So, what would move us from wanting resilience to having it? First of all, stop treating it as a contingency to argue over after the event and fund it in advance, as national insurance. We do not wait until the house is alight to debate whether to insure it. Optionality - the spare capacity, the repair capability, the trained engineers, the backup power - has to be paid for and in place before the crisis. Because by the time everyone agrees it was worth the money, the incident has already happened.
One practical first step would cost very little: give digital infrastructure resilience a single, named owner across Whitehall. Today it is split across departments - so, in effect, no one's job to be ready for the whole. Resilience that is everyone's responsibility becomes no one's.
Our networks' routine resilience is strong. The gap is in preparedness: the spare ship, the spare capacity, the spare people. Closing it is neither glamorous nor cheap. But the alternative is to keep agreeing, after every avoidable failure, that we should have paid for it in advance.
As Associate Director for Digital Infrastructure at techUK, Sophie leads work across telecoms infrastructure, security and resilience, supply chain diversification, advanced communications technologies, spectrum policy, cloud, and data centres. She brings these areas together into a dedicated Digital Infrastructure unit that reflects the priorities of Government, Ofcom, and techUK’s members. Sophie also oversees the Spectrum Policy Forum, the UK’s leading cross‑industry platform focused on shaping spectrum policy and maximising its economic and social value. In addition to her policy leadership, Sophie is a regular speaker, panellist, and moderator at industry events and conferences. She frequently facilitates discussions on the future of digital infrastructure, telecoms security, the evolution of advanced connectivity, and the wider economic and societal impact of emerging technologies.
techUK is the trade association which brings together people, companies and organisations to realise the positive outcomes of what digital technology can achieve. With over 1,100 members (the majority of which are SMEs) across the UK, techUK creates a network for innovation and collaboration across business, government and stakeholders to provide a better future for people, society, the economy and the planet.
