Original article ISPreview UK:Read More
A major newspaper has today claimed that the UK government’s imminent National Security Review (NSR), which is due to be published next week, will expand the definition of national security spending to include everything from a third runway at Heathrow Airport to food prices and rural broadband provision (e.g. the £5bn Project Gigabit scheme).
The move, says the Telegraph (paywall), could make it easier for the Government to reach a hypothetical future defence spending target of 5% of GDP (currently it’s at 2.33% and could reach 3% by around 2029) and, in fairness, telecommunications networks are already considered to be part of Critical National Infrastructure (CNI).
Suffice to say that there might be at least some merit in considering broadband / mobile / internet connectivity related investment as part of national security, and most of us do depend upon it as a critical service. But even so, many people would probably expect national security spending to be focused squarely on areas like the military (soldiers, drones, tanks etc.) and the new approach risks being a bridge too far for how we define such investment. We’re also unsure whether such a change would bring any tangible benefits.
On the other hand, it wouldn’t be the first time that a government has utilised a touch of creative accounting in order to make something seem bigger than it actually is. But we’ll need to wait until the full NSR is published in order to find out exactly how it might choose to categorise broadband investment. Time for a quick poll while we await a response from the government to our hails.
Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post’s poll.