Resilience body warns against scrapping UK's tall tower broadcast network

A report from the National Preparedness Commission (NPC) has warned that the UK's proposed plan to switch off terrestrial TV in favour of broadband streaming "risks … over-concentrating communications on internet-based networks".

The NPC describes itself as an independent, non-political body focused on preparing the country for major crises, threats and incidents. Its central argument is that the plan to retire Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) has been treated as a broadcasting policy question, without weighing what the shutdown would mean for national resilience.

Background to the switch-off plan

In June 2026 the Government proposed switching off DTT signals in either 2034 or 2044, as part of a wider shift towards internet-based streaming. The NPC's complaint is that the proposals mainly considered broadcasting policy and did not factor in the relevance of national resilience.

The report points out that the Government has already recognised the broader risks of depending on modern digital infrastructure. The Government's Chronic Risk Analysis states: "Modern infrastructure, ranging from power grids to traffic systems, are deeply reliant on and integrated with digital platforms. Disruptions can lead to catastrophic failures, endangering safety and the economy."

The underlying question is how a society that has become dependent on IP-based infrastructure would stay informed if the internet went down, without an effective national backup.

Five key points

The report sets out five main arguments.

The risk environment has changed. The NPC cites recent incidents to argue that disruption is no longer exceptional. These include the April 2025 Iberian Peninsula blackout, which left more than half of Spanish mobile users without service within hours; the March 2025 North Hyde substation fire, which closed Heathrow Airport for almost a day; and Storm Éowyn in January 2025, which left around a million homes without power and some communities offline for six days. The report warns that interconnected systems mean a single failure often cascades across sectors, especially where systems share dependencies on power, the internet, satellites and global software supply chains.

The tall tower network is a sovereign capability that cannot be replicated. The network of more than 1,450 sites, including 16 of the UK's 20 tallest structures, reaches 98.5% of UK households through a one-to-many architecture that is terrestrial, physically distributed, high-elevation, secure and self-contained from the internet. Alongside DTT and radio, it hosts services used by the emergency services, energy and water companies and government departments. The BBC's FM Rebroadcast Standby Network underpins the Government's "Go In, Stay In, Tune In" household emergency protocol. The report argues that removing DTT would not modernise the UK's communications capability but narrow it.

DTT anchors the economics of the whole network. The network operates as shared infrastructure with a fixed cost base recovered across all its users, and DTT is by far the largest single user in cost terms. The report says maintaining DTT through 2044 is crucial for the economics of other users. Without it, the knock-on increase in transmission charges for the radio sector would be around 35%, enough to put the range of services available to listeners at risk. Replicating these services without the existing network is described as a multi-billion-pound endeavour, set against the £80m to £90m annual cost to the public service broadcasters of DTT after 2034.

Resilience policy already favours multiple routes. The report notes that resilience planning across government seeks to avoid single points of failure: the electricity grid is designed with redundancy, cash is protected as a fallback when digital payments fail, and the UK is investing in sovereign Positioning, Navigation and Timing capabilities. The NPC argues communications policy should follow the same logic. If households are advised to keep a battery-powered or wind-up radio for emergencies, the infrastructure that broadcasts those services should also be protected.

Internet-based services have created shared dependencies. Many services now rely on the same underlying infrastructure: electricity networks, broadband and mobile connectivity, data centres, cloud providers and subsea cables. When one part fails, the effects can spread across multiple services. The National Risk Register 2025 identifies reliance on digital platforms as a source of chronic risk. The report concludes that a resilient communications strategy should keep a terrestrial broadcast layer available when internet-dependent systems are disrupted.