Ministers are seeking to tighten the biggest revamp of UK espionage laws for more than a century by requiring anyone working undeclared for a foreign government — whether a lawyer, a public relations company or an undercover spy — to declare their activity or face up to two years in prison.
The foreign influence registration scheme, introduced in parliament on Tuesday via an amendment to the national security bill, will force individuals, including lobbyists, who work for a foreign state to record their activity in a public register or face prosecution.
“Unfortunately, there are people working in secret to undermine the UK’s democracy and cause harm to our citizens,” said Tom Tugendhat, security minister, as he introduced the amendment. He added that the scheme would seek to “deter foreign powers from pursuing their pernicious aims through the covert use of agents and proxies”.
Officials said the register was based on similar schemes in Australia and the US. It forms part of a wider legislative update of the Official Secrets Act, and would cover cases including that of Christine Lee. MI5, Britain’s domestic security agency, this year singled out the lawyer and UK national when it took the unusual step of publicly warning that she was an “agent of influence” for China.
This was despite the fact that Lee’s alleged pro-Beijing transgressions were not criminal under current legislation.
The new national security bill, introduced to parliament in May, would also make it illegal for former British military personnel to work for certain foreign powers. It would apply to the 30 former British military pilots that the Ministry of Defence said this week had been lured by the Chinese military with salaries of up to £237,000 a year to train their air crew.
According to one official, even serving personnel are being headhunted to train pilots belonging to the People’s Liberation Army.
Ken McCallum, head of MI5, said the UK was “in strategic contest with states that seek to undermine our national security, democratic institutions and commercial advantage at an unprecedented scale”.
“The new foreign influence registration scheme will make it harder — and riskier — to operate covertly in the UK at the behest of a foreign power. It will also increase openness and transparency around the scale of foreign influence in our political affairs and make it harder . . . to undermine our democracy.”
Under the new scheme, individuals will have 10 days to declare in the public register who directs them, what they have been told to do and when they were told to do it. Failure to register will be a criminal offence, subject to up to two years’ imprisonment.
The government will also have powers, subject to parliamentary approval, to single out a foreign power or entity and make it an offence for anyone in the UK to work for it — unless they are registered. Failure to do so could result in a five-year prison sentence.
There will be some exceptions to the scheme, including for those who work officially for a foreign power, such as diplomats, and employees of foreign news publishers.
The bill will also make it illegal to receive a “material benefit” from a foreign intelligence service and give authorities extra powers to monitor people suspected of engaging in “foreign power threat activity”.
Officials said the new scheme would enable Britain’s intelligence agencies to disrupt the work of undeclared foreign spies by increasing the risk of working covertly in the UK and allowing agencies to take action earlier than they can at present.
“You may be thinking to yourself: what kind of undeclared intelligence officer is going to register?” one official said. “But in our experience, these [foreign spy] agencies . . . think carefully about risk and [a primary aim of the new bill] is to make [their activity in the UK] riskier.”
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