British ministers want up to 14 years in prison for anyone who deliberately damages a subsea cable, and they propose to retire a statute drafted when the telegraph was cutting-edge technology.
The White Paper published Thursday would replace the Submarine Telegraph Act 1885, which capped the fine for culpable negligence at £100. Intentional damage to critical subsea energy or telecoms infrastructure would carry a maximum of 14 years, while reckless or negligent damage draws unlimited fines.
Why an 1885 statute stopped fitting
Government figures put roughly 99 percent of the country’s international data traffic on subsea cables and 74 percent of its gas supply on undersea pipelines. In April, British forces exposed a Russian operation nearby, said to involve an attack submarine as a decoy while two specialist vessels surveyed cable routes.
Telecoms minister Ian Murray framed the gap plainly, arguing the threats have shifted amid suspicious Russian activity, while some governing laws are more than a century old.
Duties that land on operators
Subsea telecoms companies would take on a legal duty to identify and manage security risk. Ministers would gain powers to direct operators where proportionate for national security, and Whitehall wants to regulate fibre-optic sensing, which reads activity at sea through the cables and could leak sensitive data into hostile hands.
The proposals answer last year’s finding by Parliament’s Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy that planning centred on single cable failures rather than a coordinated strike across Atlantic and European routes. They meet a harder truth too. Fishing gear causes as much as 97 percent of faults, and proving who cut a cable on the seabed is a different difficulty from sentencing them.
None of it is law. A 12-week consultation opened Thursday, with ministers deciding afterwards how far to go.
