The Prime Minister has said he will see what more can be done to monitor the cost of Russian hostile activity against Britain, after being told that no department collects the information.
Graeme Downie, the Labour member for Dunfermline and Dollar, put the annual bill at around £2.5 billion. “The Putin tax, the cost of Russian attacks on the UK, both cyber and physical attacks, is costing the British taxpayer around about £2.5 billion each year,” he said. “Over the research my office conducted in the summer, however, we were unable to find a great deal of information about what the true cost of Russian hostile activity might be, due to government not collecting that information.”
He went on: “Can I ask the Prime Minister if he will commit the government to collecting more of that information, and to publishing it to the UK public on a regular basis, so that they know the true cost to the UK taxpayer of Vladimir Putin’s aggression?”
Andy Burnham replied: “Can I say to my hon. Friend that this was a topic of conversation with Chancellor Merkel in our meeting in Berlin last week, and the cyber attacks that both Germany and the UK face are multiple, and they pose serious risks for British business. It’s why we have launched a new partnership on hybrid attacks. I agree with him about the importance of monitoring the data, and I will see what more we can do on that front.”
The figure comes from The Putin Tax, a report published this month by Mr Downie with Dr Dominic Reed, which puts the annual cost of Russian hostile activity against Britain at between £2 billion and £2.5 billion and describes itself as the first attempt to measure that burden. He used the top of his own range in the chamber.
The request he put to the Prime Minister matches the first of the report’s four recommendations, that the government publish an annual report to Parliament estimating the economic cost of hostile foreign-state activity, with attribution to specific states wherever possible. The report found that nobody in government brings the information together, describing instead a patchwork spread across Whitehall, regulators, security agencies, infrastructure operators, insurers and private companies, each holding only part of the picture.
