Whitehall is reportedly considering the old-school technique in preparation for potential winter blackouts
Carbon paper copying has been “stress-tested” by Whitehall staffers as Britain braces for potential blackouts this winter, the Financial Times reported on Friday, citing three officials familiar with the matter.
The old-fashioned copying technique may be used for internal government correspondence, and was already tested during recent emergency drills.
“The idea is you’d have people running up and down Whitehall handing out carbon copies of documents to colleagues at other departments or agencies, to keep people in touch,” one of the officials told the newspaper.
This is all about addressing concerns over how to keep the government communicating with each other in the event of a crisis.
Carbon paper has been one of the elements of the drills carried out across some departments to stress test how the government could keep functioning in the event of a major crisis such as a widespread energy blackout or nuclear war, the newspaper explained.
The emergency drills were carried out as part of a cross-government program called Yarrow, established back in 2021 “to improve planning and resilience by central and local government and industry for dealing with a national power outage,” according to the officials, who insisted it was not directly linked to the energy crisis stemming from the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
“This program predates those events,” one of the officials claimed.