UK Biological Security Strategy 2023

Monday 12th June 2023 Written Statements

[The Deputy Prime Minister (Oliver Dowden)]

The Government are today publishing the 2023 Biological Security Strategy. The strategy sets out the Government’s ambition to ensure that by 2030 the UK is resilient to a spectrum of biological threats and a world leader in responsible innovation, making a positive impact on global health, economic and security outcomes.

The new strategy will equip us to respond to a spectrum of biological risks—improving our preparedness to future pandemics, but also hardening our defences to biological weapons and mitigating the risks of biological accidents and incidents. To overcome these threats, we must be proactive, collaborative and holistic in our approach.

We will adopt a globally-facing, UK-wide posture that strengthens resilience and deterrence, projects global leadership, and exploits opportunities for UK prosperity and science and technology advantage. We will continue to work closely with industry, academia, the devolved administrations and our closest international partners to encourage responsible innovation while ensuring the UK is able to turbo-charge our thriving life sciences and biotechnology sectors, stimulating growth, creating high-tech jobs, and attracting inward investment.

The strategy will prioritise national capabilities to shore up our current defences, learning and applying lessons from our experiences through covid-19.

Key commitments include:

Developing a biothreats radar and national biosurveillance network to detect and monitor emerging biological threats to the UK;

Establishing a new UK Biosecurity Leadership Council, bringing together academic and industry leaders to help establish the UK as a world leader in responsible innovation;

Developing new UK-based microbial forensics tools and capabilities to support efforts to attribute biological incidents and deter the proliferation and use of biological weapons;

Engaging with industry to further UK efforts to achieve the 100 days mission—reducing the impact of future pandemics by making vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics available within 100 days of a future outbreak;

Formalising the leadership structures that oversee our biological security—including a lead Minister who will report annually to Parliament;

Establishing a biological security task force in the Cabinet Office to co-ordinate UK-wide efforts on biological security, including exercising our response to future threats.

Copies of the strategy are today being laid in Parliament.

[HCWS841]