Critical Undersea Infrastructure Security and Resilience White Paper: industry feedback session

Event overview

On 22 October 2026, the government published Critical Undersea Infrastructure Security and Resilience: Proposals for Modernising the UK's Legislation, a White Paper led by DCMS jointly with the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. It sets out the most substantial overhaul of the law protecting the UK's subsea cables and pipelines in well over a century.

Subsea telecoms cables carry around 99% of the UK's international data traffic, and gas pipelines supply around 74% of UK gas. The government's review concluded that current law, much of it dating back to the Submarine Telegraph Act 1885, does not do enough to deter damage, place clear security duties on operators, or give government the powers it needs in a serious incident.

What the White Paper proposes:

• New criminal offences and tougher penalties - The 1885 Act would be replaced with a new offence of causing a "security compromise" to subsea infrastructure, covering physical damage, cyber-attacks and preparatory activity such as mapping or surveying.

• Security and resilience duties for telecoms cable providers - Owners and operators of subsea cables, including consortium members, would have to manage security risks, respond to and report incidents (including faults and outages), inform users of significant risks, and potentially register with a regulator.

• A national security direction power - The Secretary of State could direct cable providers and repair-capability providers to act during serious incidents, for example by sharing information, rerouting traffic, preserving evidence or prioritising repairs.

• Regulating fibre-optic sensing - Technologies that turn cables into sensors (such as Distributed Acoustic Sensing) would need to be notified to government in advance, meet baseline security requirements and could face conditions or, in exceptional cases, be prohibited.

• Jurisdiction and enforcement at sea. The proposals include powers to stop, board and detain vessels, and set out how far UK law would reach beyond territorial waters.

Benefits and takeaways

What techUK is doing:

We will submit a response to the consultation on behalf of our members and industry. The proposals have direct implications for cable owners and operators, data centre and cloud providers, telecoms companies, sensing technology suppliers and firms whose services depend on subsea connectivity, so we want our response to reflect the full breadth of the membership.

We are gathering views in two ways:

• One-to-one calls - we want to speak with industry organisations individually to understand how the proposals will affect your organisation. To book a call in with the team, please contact joshua.turpin@techuk.org and raya.tsolova@techuk.org

• This webinar - we will walk through the key themes of the White Paper and share our first draft response for feedback during the session.

Please note that we will only be responding to the proposals most relevant to techUK and our members.

Who should attend

Organisations working in policy, government affairs, security, legal and regulatory compliance, network operations or infrastructure, particularly those involved with subsea cables, international connectivity, data centres, energy interconnectors or sensing technology.