Government at Loggerheads With Critics Over Emergency Alerts as Test Looms

An emergency alert regarding a stay-at-home order during the COVID-19 pandemic is viewed on a mobile phone in Eastern Ontario, Canada, on Jan. 14, 2021. (Sean Kilpatric/The Canadian Press)

The government has urged people not to try and deactivate the emergency alerts system on their mobile phones ahead of a nationwide test on Sunday and has said the system is in the public interest and could be used to warn of terrorist attacks, mass shootings, or even nuclear threats.

Millions of smartphones across the UK will emit a loud alarm and vibrate at 3 p.m. on Sunday as the government conducts a test run.

But critics, including a number of Conservative MPs, have said it is unnecessary and could cause anxiety, especially among old people.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, a former Cabinet minister, said on his GB News programme: “If something is building up to a great disaster, are we to assume that people are so stupid that they haven’t paid any attention to what’s been going on? And this seems to me to be a mistaken role for the state to be taking.”

‘Back to the Nanny State’

He said: “It is back to the nanny state, warning us, telling us, mollycoddling us, when instead they should be letting people get on with their lives and make sensible decisions for themselves. And really it’s an extensive intrusion of the information that was used during COVID.”

The system—based on similar structures in Canada and New Zealand—is designed to warn people about severe weather situations such as floods and wildfires or other emergencies in their local area.

Craig Mackinlay, another Tory MP, told the Daily Telegraph he did not understand why the emergency alert system is needed.

“It’s something we’ve managed to live and breathe without for all these years. It may scare a few people, I think particularly the elderly, wondering what all this is all about. I can’t see any imperative for it,” Mackinlay added.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s official spokesman said: “We would encourage people not to switch it off unless it is the right thing for them to do so. Obviously, people are free to make their own decisions about what’s right for them, so we are not prescriptive. But we do think that this is a system that has the potential to alert people to significant danger. So, of course, we would encourage people to opt in.”

The decision to award the £5.7 million contract to Fujitsu has also been greeted with anger after the Japanese company’s involvement in the Post Office IT scandal led to a public inquiry.

Thousands of sub-postmasters were accused of stealing money from the Post Office due to a glitch in Fujitsu’s Horizon accounting system and Lord Arbuthnot, a Conservative peer and former MP, told the Daily Mail the decision to work with Fujitsu is “strange and disappointing.”

Several smaller tests have already been run in parts of Suffolk and in Reading, Berkshire, and the government insists the system is necessary and needs to be tested on a national level.

Around 5 percent of those in the Reading sample opted out of the system after being part of the pilot and there is a growing opposition to it on social media.

At a press conference earlier this week, a Whitehall official said: “At the moment, our plans for this first pilot phase relate to severe weather and flooding, but we do expect the use of the system to broaden out. This is about threats to life and limb and situations where specific advice can be issued.”

He added: “You can conceive that we could use this in an abduction situation, or where there was a dangerous criminal on the loose, or where we require the public to look for something for that reason. We’re going to be led by discussions with the police and other emergency services on this.”

It could also be used to warn people of “car bombs” and “civil nuclear incidents,” he said.

“If we were to move to the use of the system for this reason, we do so quite cautiously,” the official added.

The government said it had been working with a number of charities to ensure vulnerable people were not distressed by Sunday’s test.

Emergency Alert Could Have Saved Lives

In many parts of Canada, emergency alerts have been in existence for several years. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police was heavily criticised for failing to use the Alert Ready system in April 2020 when a gunman, who was driving a fake RCMP car, went on a 13-hour killing spree in Nova Scotia.

Gabriel Wortman killed 13 people in the village of Portapique on the night of April 18, 2020, and then lay low for several hours before resuming his killing spree the following morning, claiming another 9 victims.

Instead of sending out an emergency alert to all mobile phones in Nova Scotia late on the Saturday night, the Mounties chose to make an appeal on Twitter and consequently, many people were oblivious to the fact there was a killer still on the loose on the Sunday morning.

Last month the Mass Casualty Commission published a damning report (pdf) on the Wortman shootings, in which it said, “Alert Ready was the best available tool to warn the Nova Scotia public about the mass casualty and to provide updates as the information available to the RCMP changed.”

PA Media contributed to this report.