Tax The Financial Sector To Pay For Protecting Undersea Cables, Says Former Cabinet Minister

The financial sector should be taxed to pay for protecting the UK’s underwater cables that transmit billions of pieces of data including online transactions, a former Cabinet minister has said.

In her first extended interview since losing her seat of Berwick-upon-Tweed at the 4 July General Election, Anne-Marie Trevelyan, the former Tory secretary of state for both trade and international development, said the industry wrongly assumes that the vital cables can be protected from sabotage.

“The corporations who use them, who make the vast proportion of our tax receipts – all our financial services, they assume, in the nicest possible way that actually if there was a problem we the government, every government would have a solution and would be able to fix and protect it,” she told the Bourke & Ryan podcast. 

“And that isn’t yet true.

“There is a whole series of challenges to our economic security which we have got to look in the eye.”

Undersea fibre optic cables transmit 99 per cent of the UK’s digital communications with the outside world. 

But because they lie on the ocean floor the critical infrastructure is vulnerable to attack from hostile actors like China, Iran and Russia who could sever the cables and severely disrupt the UK economy. 

Trevelyan said that it should not be up to her former constituents in Berwick to pay for strengthening the nation’s underwater defences.

“The global maritime threats are real and we need to ‘assess value’ them and then come at the problem the other end,” she said. 

“And say, not 'well we’ll get to our defence and security when we’ve got a bit of extra cash', but 'what is the threat to our economic security'.”

She said knowing the value was key to how knowing how to solve the issue of what