Page:ISC-China.pdf/173

Rh Such attacks are designed to provide China with—primarily—IP, in order to give it a shortcut on research and development time and costs, thereby giving it an advantage over competitors. It also allows China to identify technologies and IP that could be acquired through legitimate investment.

Of potentially greater concern than the power stations themselves are the supply chains. The supply chains for Hinkley Point C and Bradwell B will each involve large numbers of UK companies ***. We questioned witnesses who told us that *** in the supply chains in the Civil Nuclear sector ***. NCSC described ***. The Joint State Threats Assessment Centre (JSTAT) and NCSC assess that ***.

NCSC explained that, in conjunction with MI5 ***:

*** previously we looked very much at our National Infrastructure in counter-terrorism terms—things you can put bollards around—and that didn't help very well with the logical assets and digital infrastructure that webbed across our infrastructure—you know, how telco [telecommunications] is linked to Energy…

*** allows us to understand how these things touch—and what that is bringing out, of course ***

NCSC said that, as a result:

we have stood up new capability in this area, *** and will allow Government to target our resource in the areas that reach across sectors in a way that we have not been able to do before.

China appears routinely to use its proposed foreign investments for political leverage ***. China's very significant investment in the UK's Civil Nuclear sector would therefore seem to provide it with very significant leverage. However, the Intelligence Community *** assess that China is unlikely explicitly to use those investments to exert leverage over the UK, as doing so may compromise China's wider economic and commercial objectives: the DNSA confirmed that the Intelligence Community have ***.

Nevertheless, they acknowledge that "[the application of leverage] is still possible and over the lifetime of the projects Chinese tactics may change". We should not therefore be