Why Burnham's plan to fight disinformation matters for UK crisis preparedness
Insights Perspective
Madeline Rolfe, Senior Strategy & Insight Manager
25 September 2026
This week at the United Nations headquarters in New York City, Prime Minister Andy Burnham gave his first address to the General Assembly. He announced plans to create a new National Centre for Information Defence to detect and disrupt AI-enabled disinformation campaigns by hostile states.
"Today I am tasking our security chiefs to begin work on a new National Centre for Information Defence, to detect, attribute and disrupt these kinds of hostile state information attacks."
The Centre is expected to bring together expertise from intelligence agencies, government departments, law enforcement and social media companies to combat what he has described as "information warfare". Burnham linked the new Centre to concerns about Russian activity in the UK, including disinformation campaigns and attempts to interfere in the 2019 general election: “Russian agencies have used every means at their disposal to spread lies and disinformation and prey on people’s fears.”
The announcement acknowledges that information threats are increasingly a key part of the environment the UK needs to prepare for and respond to in a crisis.
Why misinformation and disinformation are preparedness issues
Our research, with Dame Sara Khan for the National Preparedness Commission, The Fraying Social Contract and its Implications for National Preparedness, found that declining trust, social cohesion and confidence in institutions can create opportunities for extremists, hostile foreign actors and bad-faith actors to exploit uncertainty and division.
The rapid advancement of digital technologies has changed the scale and speed at which this can happen. Social media enables harmful narratives to spread quickly across local, national, and international borders. Algorithms can amplify divisive content, and generative AI reduces the barriers to producing harmful content at scale.
This matters particularly in a crisis. When people are uncertain about what is happening, they need timely information from trusted sources. However, misinformation and disinformation can create competing narratives that undermine confidence in official communications and make public responses less predictable.
The consequences can extend beyond online spaces and affect public safety. In September 2024, during severe flooding across southwestern Poland, misinformation and disinformation reportedly rose by 300 per cent. Concerningly, this led to a wide range of false or misleading information circulating at the time of the crisis, competing with crisis management plans, which tend to be based on the assumption that the public will listen to and believe the authorities and will respond positively and appropriately to their advice.
What our research recommends
Our report recommends that the government should invest in digital technological capabilities to identify emerging threats, detect problematic content, and support crisis response and communications. This includes the capability to:
Monitor evolving narratives and identify coordinated campaigns by malign actors
Support rapid responses to misinformation and disinformation
Maintain scalable standing capabilities, so that additional resources can be deployed during crises (when information threats are likely to increase significantly)
Coordinate actions across government and relevant partners
Develop crisis protocols and countermeasures for different information environments, including social media, private messaging services, AI and traditional media
How well does the new Centre match our recommendations?
A National Centre for Information Defence is the next step on our national response to misinformation and disinformation. This ambition must translate into a capability that can operate effectively in times of crisis. The Centre must be able to not only identify and track hostile campaigns and narratives, but also enable us to respond and counter, including supporting the removal of harmful content.
This Centre needs to operate within clear protocols for crisis management, as well as powers available to effectively counter misinformation and disinformation, regardless of the actor, all of which will depend on good collaboration with platforms and other partners.
Should the Centre tackle false information spread by people in the UK, not just foreign governments?
An important consideration from our research is that the UK's information environment is shaped by both foreign and domestic actors.
Our research identified the impact of domestic bad-faith actors who may spread misinformation and disinformation for financial gain or to build online influence. The monetisation of social media can create incentives to produce content that is highly emotive or designed to provoke division or uncertainty among the public.
These actors can operate alongside, and sometimes amplify, the narratives of hostile foreign actors. During periods of heightened tension, it can become difficult to distinguish between foreign influence, domestic amplification and misinformation that is spread unwittingly.
For this reason, the new Centre will have to determine how it distinguishes between the domestic and foreign information threat and how much this matters in practice.
How can a government-run Centre earn public trust?
Our research found that low trust in institutions is already a vulnerability that malign actors exploit. Therefore, the Centre should be cautious about inadvertently deepening the divisions and mistrust it is intended to address.
Transparency about what the new Centre can do, and its limitations, will be important, along with appropriate oversight and accountability. Particular attention should be paid to safeguards for freedom of expression.
The new Centre will also need to be cross-sector. It should work closely with technology companies, intelligence agencies, academia, civil society and international partners.
The announcement of the new National Centre for Information Defence presents an opportunity to strengthen not only the UK's ability to respond to information threats, but also to enhance national preparedness more broadly.
A key consideration is ensuring that the Centre's capabilities can keep pace with a fast-evolving information landscape.
As our research found, information threats undermine social cohesion and democratic resilience, and in turn affect the UK's preparedness for emergencies. Misinformation and disinformation can shape how the public responds to crises and how much they trust the institutions responsible for managing these challenging situations.
Information security should be considered an integral part of national preparedness, alongside physical security. The new Centre therefore has an important role to play in ensuring the UK is prepared for this range of threats that can shape how modern crises unfold and how effectively they are managed.
