Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, pursuant to the Answer of 13 June 2019 to Question 261279 on Huawei: 5G, what recent assessment he has made of the merits of assessing 5G equipment for resilience and reliability prior to deployment.

5G standards are still being ratified and the hardware and software that implements them is still being updated often during early commercial service. As a result, there are limited benefits in testing 5G equipment pre-deployment due to those changes and updates. The National Cyber Security Centre is focusing on those deployments and software releases in the UK which are most important.