Cycle Paths or Defending our Critical National Infrastructure?

The resignation by our Defence Secretary John Healey should trigger real concern. The UK faces levels of threat to its critical national infrastructure and economic security that was considered alarmist when I was talking about this only 3 or 4 years ago. But at last everyone else sees the challenge too. John Healey has resigned as Defence Secretary because his military chiefs made it clear they could not support the Prime Minister’s inadequate funding commitment – something like only a third of what is needed to get the UK investing in the defence tools we need for the current threat picture.

The debate about defence spending too often stays at the level of percentages of GDP. 2%. 2.5%. 3%. These numbers speak to commitment, and our allies take note. But the numbers mean little unless people understand what is actually at stake. So let me put some flesh on the bones.

Approximately 97% of global data traffic — including the financial transactions that underpin the City of London and the broader British economy — travels through undersea fibre-optic cables. The UK sits at the centre of an extraordinary global web of this infrastructure, much of it crossing the North Atlantic and the North Sea. Independent analysis suggests that disruption to these cables would cost more than £1m per hour in lost revenue — and that is a conservative baseline figure that does not capture second and third-order economic effects. A single day of disruption to the financial cable flows connecting London to New York could cost the British economy somewhere between £500 million and £2 billion, depending on which cables are affected and for how long. A week of sustained disruption would be categorically catastrophic — not merely disruptive. We are talking about settlement failures, frozen liquidity, broken supply chains, and a crisis of confidence in sterling that could take years to repair. The City of London generates roughly £100 billion annually for the UK Exchequer. Interrupt its nervous system for seven days and the damage would be catastrophic for the Treasury to pay weekly public sector wage bills and debt interest payments.

Then there is gas. Norway supplies about 30% of the UK's natural gas, delivered via the Langeled pipeline and interconnectors. If that supply were severed for a week — through sabotage, conflict, or coercion — there would be an immediate impact on UK energy prices. But as we also have limited domestic storage capacity, analysts have estimated that a one-week Norwegian gas supply disruption during winter months could add between £1 billion and £3 billion to national energy costs, and push household gas bills up by double-digit percentages within days. Industrial users — steel, chemicals, food processing — would face curtailment orders. Some production would simply stop. The downstream job losses and economic contraction would be felt for months, not weeks. This is not scaremongering. This is arithmetic.

And electricity? The loss of a single major power station — whether nuclear, gas-fired, or interconnector-dependent — removes between one and three gigawatts from the national grid at a stroke. Depending on season and demand, that can mean rolling industrial cuts, grid instability, and a cost to the economy of several hundred million pounds per week in emergency balancing measures, lost industrial output, and damage to sensitive digital infrastructure. We saw a glimpse of this vulnerability during the August 2019 blackout, when the loss of just 1.4GW affected nearly a million people. A sustained outage of a major station would be of a different order of magnitude altogether.

None of these scenarios is fanciful. The Nord Stream pipelines were blown up. Baltic Sea cables have been severed — repeatedly, and not always by accident. A shadow fleet of vessels operates across the North Sea and North Atlantic, sometimes dragging anchors, sometimes not. We are literally seeing Russian submarines cruising our shore lines mapping our undersea infrastructure. Our adversaries are studying our vulnerabilities almost with impunity. They know that they don’t need to invade with boots on the ground – our modern democracy can be brought to its knees with targeted disruption to the infrastructure our economy depends on.

This is why the commitment to increase defence and security spending matters — and why credibility is everything. The world is more dangerous and febrile than only two years ago. So we must up our effort and credible deterrence. Deterrence is not a posture. It is a calculation made by an adversary about the costs and risks of action. If those who would wish us harm believe we lack the surveillance capability to detect threats to our cables and pipelines, the naval assets to respond to them, or the political will to act decisively, the calculation shifts in their favour.

We must invest in the Royal Navy's ability to monitor and protect the seabed. We must fund the intelligence and sensor networks that give us early warning. We must work with our JEF allies and NATO partners on joint protection frameworks for shared infrastructure. And we must be honest with the British public about why this spending is not a luxury — it is the price of keeping the lights on, the gas flowing, and the economy functioning. The fact that today, just as the Defence Secretary resigned over a huge defence funding gap, a different part of government was announcing £4bn for cycle paths is beyond ludicrous – Government always has to make choices, it is constantly balancing one priority over another.  As a minister at the heart of our Covid crisis I had to make many tough decisions on cutting budgets in important areas, because the money was needed more urgently to fund vaccine work, build hospital capacity, keep families funded through furlough and so on. Choices are always being made, trade-offs negotiated. I am afraid that better cycle ways along our coastline for viewing oncoming submarines is not the priority I would make. Nice to have can never trump protecting our nation’s security.

Credibility in defence is not built in Whitehall. It is built in the North Sea, on the ocean floor, and in the decisions we make today about what we are prepared to pay to protect tomorrow.  All credit to John Healey for wielding the only real power a politician has – his moral courage to resign and make clear what the real threat picture looks like for all of us.