Ministers have been urged to create a “National Counter Disinformation Centre” that would protect UK democracy from malign actors both at home and abroad.
The call, made by members of parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, follows an investigation into foreign information manipulation and interference – FIMI for short.
MPs said “malign state actors” such as Russia, China and Iran, along with non-state actors like Daesh, were increasingly weaponising the information environment to “sow distrust, undermine cohesion, and erode confidence in democratic institutions and norms”.
The committee said lessons the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office has learnt by defending democracies abroad from foreign disinformation need to be developed and applied in the UK as “a matter of urgency”.
Its report on FIMI said that while looking at disinformation overseas, members had been struck by the familiar patterns they saw.
“The UK has been the victim of FIMI and although it is not of the scale we saw elsewhere, we nevertheless learnt how quickly malign actors could build up their adversarial networks,” they said. “It led us to ask whether the excellent work being done overseas by the UK to counter FIMI was also happening at home.”
However they said “unnecessarily fragmented” efforts across Whitehall mean there has been slow progress towards the government’s initial “whole-of-society" approach, set out in last year’s Strategic Defence Review.
According to the committee, seven government departments have responsibilities for combatting FIMI. It said the principal players are FCDO, the Ministry of Defence, the Home Office and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.
Further capacity comes from the Cabinet Office, which has overarching responsibilities for national security and crises; the Department for Culture, Media and Sport; and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government.
DSIT is responsible for online safety and information threats in the UK. It also inherited responsibility for the Counter Disinformation Unit from DCMS in 2023’s machinery of government changes.
Foreign Affairs Committee members said that under the current system, no one department or associated body has overall leadership. “This has created a system which seems to prioritise discussion and bureaucracy over action,” they said.
Their report said a more effective model already exists in the form of the National Cyber Security Centre, which is based within GCHQ and brings together government, intelligence agencies and the private sector into one organisation.
MPs said the proposed National Counter Disinformation Centre should be placed on a statutory footing, be subject to oversight by parliament, and be directed to understand, identify and combat foreign information manipulation and interference campaigns pitched against the UK.
The report said the centre should be similar to Sweden’s Psychological Defence Agency, Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation, and France’s Vigilance and Protection against Foreign Digital Interference service.
Committee chair Dame Emily Thornberry said she had been “shocked” to learn how widespread organised disinformation has become.
“It is the new warfare and open liberal democracies are sitting ducks," she said. “From pushing provable lies, to planting false seeds of doubt, disinformation is the weapon of choice of hostile states seeking to destabilise democracies. It seeps into societal cracks, seeking out our vulnerabilities to exploit them. It aims to undermine our sense of identity and cohesion, and even our ability to tell fact from fiction, in order to leave us divided and weakened.”
Thornberry said “hybrid attacks” perpetrated by Russia – such as sabotage, assassination and FIMI – amounted to a “war against the West” and that the UK must be ready to defend itself, with the proposed National Counter Disinformation Centre at the heart of efforts.
“We also found that the government hasn’t communicated the scale and depth of the threat that disinformation poses to the public,” she added. “Frankly, we need a bit less caution and bit more candour. Government should, when appropriate, declassify examples of disinformation and provide regular briefings to the media and civil society organisations.”
The committee's report added that members are concerned the government is not adequately utilising the expertise and evidence collated by FCDO’s overseas network to inform the UK’s domestic approach to combatting FIMI.
MPs said ministers should provide evidence to the committee on how government utilises its overseas network to detect, defend and deter foreign information manipulation and interference, and how these insights are informing policy responses.
They also called for a funding boost for FCDO’s newly formed Hybrid Threats Directorate, to be paid for by from the planned increase in defence spending to 3.5% of gross domestic product by 2035.
The FCDO said foreign secretary Yvette Cooper had recognised in a speech in December that the term “disinformation” did not begin to capture the “industrial scale approach from some malign actors”.
“That is why we have built world-class cyber security, expert law enforcement and intelligence capabilities,” she said.
The department said it welcomed the select committee’s inquiry and would provide a full written response to its findings in line with parliamentary processes and timelines.