Commonground
Senior Moderator
Published 8 July 2025
Ministerial Foreword
The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster
It is hard to overstate how important biosecurity is in our changing world.
The first priority of any Government is keeping the public safe. And the uncomfortable reality, in 2025, is that the range and scope of the threats we face has never been greater.
Pathogens are evolving all the time, and diseases continue to have ruinous effects on populations across the world.
Whilst rapid advances in fields like engineering biology are unlocking better and faster ways to treat infectious diseases, they also present opportunities for state and non-state actors, hostile to our values and way of life, to harness these new technologies for harmful use. international biosafety and biosecurity norms, standards, practices and strengthen non-proliferation instruments and mechanisms Our national security depends on us not only keeping pace of these threats, but getting ahead of them.
This basic principle is at the heart of the 2023 UK Biological Security Strategy (BSS).
It heeds one of the urgent lessons of Covid-19. The pandemic was a global wake-up call that showed how devastating the costs are if countries collectively fail to prepare. The absence of crisis must not lead to complacency or inaction. Enduring public safety depends on consistent investment, planning and vigilance.
The BSS brings together policies and programmes across-Government that are building the UK’s resilience to a spectrum of biological threats. The BSS comprises serious and practical measures that will consistently improve our resilience. It includes an increased focus on R&D, in areas like engineering biology and artificial intelligence (AI), to unlock new biosecurity solutions and drive growth in our world-renowned life science and biotechnology sectors.
We have already fulfilled a number of the commitments we made in the Strategy at the end of last year. This includes: appointing a lead minister for biosecurity and an expert unit at the centre of Government; developing a Biothreats Radar that upgrades our early-warning disease monitoring capabilities; and the launch of the Microbial Forensics Consortium.
On top of this, we have signed up to the WHO Pandemic Agreement to strengthen future preparedness and response, published a new action plan for antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and established new guidance and capabilities to protect the public against misuse of new and emerging technologies.
The UK already has huge strengths in fields like engineering biology and metagenomic sequencing, which has the potential to identify new, unexpected pathogens in the first few patients who become infected, rather than months later. But we have more to do and further to go in reinforcing our national biosecurity in the long term. We are committed to doing exactly that.
The Rt Hon. Pat McFadden MP
Introduction... Continued https://www.gov.uk/government/publi...mplementation-report-june-2023-june-2025-html
Ministerial Foreword
The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster
It is hard to overstate how important biosecurity is in our changing world.
The first priority of any Government is keeping the public safe. And the uncomfortable reality, in 2025, is that the range and scope of the threats we face has never been greater.
Pathogens are evolving all the time, and diseases continue to have ruinous effects on populations across the world.
Whilst rapid advances in fields like engineering biology are unlocking better and faster ways to treat infectious diseases, they also present opportunities for state and non-state actors, hostile to our values and way of life, to harness these new technologies for harmful use. international biosafety and biosecurity norms, standards, practices and strengthen non-proliferation instruments and mechanisms Our national security depends on us not only keeping pace of these threats, but getting ahead of them.
This basic principle is at the heart of the 2023 UK Biological Security Strategy (BSS).
It heeds one of the urgent lessons of Covid-19. The pandemic was a global wake-up call that showed how devastating the costs are if countries collectively fail to prepare. The absence of crisis must not lead to complacency or inaction. Enduring public safety depends on consistent investment, planning and vigilance.
The BSS brings together policies and programmes across-Government that are building the UK’s resilience to a spectrum of biological threats. The BSS comprises serious and practical measures that will consistently improve our resilience. It includes an increased focus on R&D, in areas like engineering biology and artificial intelligence (AI), to unlock new biosecurity solutions and drive growth in our world-renowned life science and biotechnology sectors.
We have already fulfilled a number of the commitments we made in the Strategy at the end of last year. This includes: appointing a lead minister for biosecurity and an expert unit at the centre of Government; developing a Biothreats Radar that upgrades our early-warning disease monitoring capabilities; and the launch of the Microbial Forensics Consortium.
On top of this, we have signed up to the WHO Pandemic Agreement to strengthen future preparedness and response, published a new action plan for antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and established new guidance and capabilities to protect the public against misuse of new and emerging technologies.
The UK already has huge strengths in fields like engineering biology and metagenomic sequencing, which has the potential to identify new, unexpected pathogens in the first few patients who become infected, rather than months later. But we have more to do and further to go in reinforcing our national biosecurity in the long term. We are committed to doing exactly that.
The Rt Hon. Pat McFadden MP
Introduction... Continued https://www.gov.uk/government/publi...mplementation-report-june-2023-june-2025-html