Question to the Ministry of Defence:

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, with reference to the 2025 Strategic Defence Review, what progress has he made in a) developing options for the protection of CNI in the event of crisis or conflict, including a new Reserve Force, and b) presenting new plans to the Secretary of State by December 2026, as outlined in Recommendation 27.

Defence is continuing to work closely with the Cabinet Office and other Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) Lead Government Departments to deliver the Strategic Defence Review recommendations on the protection of CNI. A number of options for providing supplementary contingent forces are under consideration and plans will be presented to the Secretary of State by December 2026.

We are working across Government to take a data-driven approach to identifying the CNI most essential to the UK’s ability to sustain and respond to conflict. By contributing Defence data to the Cabinet Office's CNI Knowledge Base, we are fulfilling the commitments set out in the Resilience Action Plan and improving our understanding of the infrastructure, dependencies and vulnerabilities that would be most critical in a conflict scenario.

This analysis is informing our Home Defence planning by ensuring that we align Defence resources and capabilities to the protection of the most important infrastructure against a broad spectrum of threats, from hybrid activity through to conventional conflict. It will also help to identify what Defence could contribute to support the protection of other priority CNI that is essential to the functioning of the country.