National Security Bill

National Security Bill

“Measures will be introduced to support the security services and help them protect the United Kingdom.”

The purpose of the Bill is to:

● Further protect our national security, the safety of the British public and our vital interests from those who seek to do the UK harm, in line with the manifesto commitment to ensure the security services have the powers they need.

● Undertake the biggest overhaul of state threats legislation for a generation to provide our world class law enforcement and intelligence agencies with an enhanced suite of tools, powers and protections to tackle the full range of evolving state threats.

● Prevent the exploitation of our civil legal aid and civil damage payments by convicted terrorists.

The main benefits of the Bill would be:

● Enhancing our ability to deter, detect and disrupt state actors who target the UK, preventing spies from harming our strategic interests and preserving the integrity of our society.

● Restricting the ability of convicted terrorists to receive civil legal aid and ensuring that terrorists cannot gain civil damages which might fund terrorism.

The main elements of the Bill are:

● Reforming existing espionage laws (Official Secrets Acts 1911, 1920 and 1939) to provide effective legislation to tackle modern threats.

● Bringing in new offences to tackle state-backed sabotage, foreign interference, the theft of trade secrets and assisting a foreign intelligence service.

● We will introduce a Foreign Influence Registration Scheme requiring individuals to register certain arrangements with foreign governments to deter and disrupt state threats activity in the UK, bringing the UK into line with similar schemes in the United States of America and Australia.

● Providing powers to allow state threats to be tackled at an earlier stage, by expanding the ability to prosecute people for preparing activities, and for other offences that are committed by those acting for a foreign state to be labelled as state threats and sentenced accordingly.

● Introducing new civil measures to use as a tool of last resort where prosecution of a hostile actor is not possible. This includes the ability to restrict a state threat actor from access to certain places, or where they can work and study, preventing any harm from being done where there is no other option to prosecute or disrupt the activity.

Territorial extent and application

● The Bill will extend and apply across the UK.

Key facts

● Our espionage laws date back to 1911 and do not account for how threats to our national security have evolved and diversified over time. Russia’s action in

Salisbury, China’s attempts to interfere in our democracy and persistent effort by foreign actors to steal intellectual property generated in the UK demonstrate why we need new laws to help the intelligence agencies and police detect, deter, disrupt and prosecute state threat actors seeking to harm the UK.

● This legislation will further support the extensive previous and ongoing crossgovernment efforts to counter state threats, including the recent Economic Crime (Transparency and Enforcement) Act 2022, in light of the Russian invasion of

Ukraine, and the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill also being introduced in this session.