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National Security: Infrastructure

The Government has made significant progress in reviewing current legislation in relation to critical undersea infrastructure (CUI), including the Submarine Telegraph Act 1885.

As the Government announced in May, later this year we plan to publicly consult on proposals to modernise and strengthen our legislation.

Defence is continuing to work closely with the Cabinet Office and other Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) Lead Government Departments to deliver the Strategic Defence Review recommendations for a new deal for the protection of CNI.

We are working across Government to take a data-driven approach to identifying the CNI most essential to the UK’s ability to sustain and respond to conflict. By contributing Defence data to the Cabinet Office's CNI Knowledge Base, we are fulfilling the commitments set out in the Resilience Action Plan and improving our understanding of the infrastructure, dependencies and vulnerabilities that would be most critical in a conflict scenario.

This analysis is informing our Home Defence planning by ensuring that we align Defence resources and capabilities to the protection of the most important infrastructure against a broad spectrum of threats, from hybrid activity through to conventional conflict. It will also help to identify what Defence could contribute to support the protection of other priority CNI that is essential to the functioning of the country.