Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy - Inquiry Launch: Biosecurity and national security

Following up the previous Committee’s partially completed inquiry into biosecurity in 2019, and the continued salience of such pandemic risks with Covid-19, the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy is examining how biosecurity is addressed in national security planning and resilience implementation. 

Purpose of the inquiry

The Government’s last Strategic Defence and Security Review in 2015 categorised ‘Disease, particularly pandemic influenza, and emerging infectious diseases’ as a tier-1 (‘highest priority’) risk. 

In March 2018, the Government’s National Security Capability Review elevated ‘diseases and natural hazards affecting the UK’ to be one of six principal challenges likely to drive national security priorities over the coming decade. Pandemics and emerging infectious diseases have also been categorised as a top-tier risk in National Security Risk Assessments (NSRAs). 

The Committee will soon be briefed by the Government on its latest NSRA [see Chair’s letter to Prime Minister]. The Government published a ‘Biological security strategy’ in July 2018, signed by the Home Office, the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs, and the Department of Health & Social Care, and intended to coordinate a cross-government approach to biosecurity threats, whether they materialise naturally, accidentally or deliberately. 

The arrival of Covid-19 now presents a test case for that Strategy and the Risk Assessment process, as well as for the UK’s system of national security oversight and governance. The Committee’s inquiry will take forward its earlier examination of Biosecurity, including the written evidenceit received for that inquiry from the Government in September 2019.

The Chair of the Joint Committee, Margaret Beckett MP said:

“The Committee recognised last year the importance of pandemic diseases like Covid-19 as a national security issue, when we started an inquiry into biosecurity. 

“We are now launching a follow-up inquiry which gets to the heart of how well pandemic risks have been addressed in the national security machinery – the oversight by the National Security Council; how well the lessons of exercises in the UK were learnt by the Government; and whether risk assessments actually drove resilience plans and resource allocations before we faced having to deal with the sort of national emergency we are now grappling with.”

Send us your views

The Joint Committee is calling for written evidence, in particular addressing: 

• The main drivers of biosecurity risks to human health in the UK, including from pandemics and emerging infectious diseases;

• How, and how effectively, these risks are monitored and assessed by the UK Government, and by whom; and whether the specific type of risk to the UK represented by Covid-19 fell within such monitoring and assessment processes;

• The extent to which the Government has supported domestic preparedness against biosecurity risks in terms of:

• The extent to which the Government’s planning for pandemics in the 2015 Strategic Defence & Security Review, the subsequent National Security Capability Review and the 2018 Biosecurity Strategy helped in guiding that preparedness;

• The extent to which policy-making in this area draws on cross-government input, and how well preparedness plans have taken a genuinely ‘fusion doctrine’ approach (that should optimally combine UK capabilities to promote ‘security’, ‘influence’ and ‘prosperity’ objectives);

• In regard to the oversight of such policymaking and the management of biosecurity risks within overall national security risks: the roles and responsibilities of the National Security Council, relevant Government departments and agencies, and how their work is coordinated with that of the Devolved Administrations. 

Submissions should be sent in by 22 June. You can submit evidence here.

Later, we intend to examine progress on the Government’s ‘Integrated Security, Defence & Foreign Policy Review’, including how well it is addressing different ‘tiers’ of risks, including risks such as pandemics, and how well the national security implications of Covid-19 are being absorbed in that Review. We anticipate our initial inquiry feeding into that later work.