MoD runs into political minefield over Y2K compliance

The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) is being accused of trying to hide its millennium bug problem for fear of generating national panic.

In the space of four months, 4,500 systems that were once considered critical to national security have disappeared from the MoD's publicly filed millennium compliance report. In September, the MoD's compliance project listed 6,189 systems as mission critical. But by the time the December report was released, the number had dropped to 1,672.

Ian Hugo, assistant director of Taskforce 2000, accused the MoD of narrowing the scope of its Y2K project without offering an explanation. "They lost almost 5,000 systems between September and December," noted Hugo.

Hugo said the department has promised to make 100 per cent of critical systems millennium compliant in time - but the only way they can keep that promise is to drop systems off the list. "There is more and more severe prioritisation going on. I don't know what's dropping off the critical list, but I suspect it must be very important. And once a system is off the critical list, it's more likely to fail because it receives less attention."

Shadow defence spokesman Keith Simpson, said the situation is extremely worrying. "If you had a breakdown of systems, you could have a degree of paralysis. It could be quite critical if you're in operations in Bosnia or in Iraq with a lot of systems going down. That would slow up the decision-making process. It could threaten life."

The MoD has so far refused to explain why it has made the changes to its critical list. "The MoD will never tell us," said shadow defence spokesman Robert Key. "But you don't need any imagination to work out that the effects could be severe."

However, an MoD spokesman insisted the allegations are "absolutely not true".

"There are some systems that have been taken off the critical list," the spokesman admitted, "that's because they aren't considered critical." As compliance work developed it became apparent that certain systems, previously considered critical, were no longer so," he claimed. "There are no safety implications," he insisted.

However, in a later conversation with Silicon.com, he denied that any systems have been downgraded from critical to non-critical. Instead, he said some had been made redundant, and some were aggregated where they had previously been considered individually.

Paul Beaver, group spokesman for military specialist Janes Defence Weekly, said: "I suspect there's some fudging going on here. The political masters have said to them 'get the list down', and the civil servants are complying."

Robin Guenier, executive director of Taskforce 2000, agreed that the MoD is under pressure to "get the records right" to avoid panicking the public or embarrassing the government. But he warned: "The government is in danger of laying a trap for itself. If they claim everything's good, and then it goes wrong, people will get pretty damned angry."