From 12 February 2026, the life sciences will be reclassified in law as Key National Infrastructure, with tighter restrictions surrounding disruptive protest activity. Contrary to some claims from campaigning organisations, the right to protest peacefully is not affected in any way. Protest rights are protected in this country under articles 10 and 11 of the Human Rights Act 1998, which further strengthens Common Law rights of association, and internationally via the European Court of Human Rights. The right to protest peacefully is an essential part of our democracy and will not be prevented.
What does the new legislation mean?
For the purposes of the regulations, life sciences infrastructure is defined as infrastructure where the primary purpose is:
- pharmaceutical research or development, or;
- the manufacturing of pharmaceutical products for medical use, or
- used for or in connection with activities authorised by a licence under the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986.
The new legislation states that it is an offence if a person's actions interfere with, or prevent, key national infrastructure's intended purpose for the operation of the life sciences. Preventing such infrastructure from working includes cases where the intended purposes are significantly delayed from being used or operated. What this new legislation seeks to do is address protest activity that poses threats or disruption to the work that these facilities are carrying out. This includes blocking access to facilities, intimidating staff, or interfering with time-sensitive research. Similar restrictions already apply to protests near airports, rail networks and power stations. The principle is consistent: where disruption risks broader harm, additional safeguards apply. Those found guilty of an offence can potentially be fined or jailed for up to 12 months.
Evidence to support the legislation
There have been multiple instances at life science facilities in the UK in recent years where protests have moved beyond peaceful demonstration into disruptive activity. Many of these can be prosecuted, such as the attempted arson at ‘peaceful protest’ Camp Beagle last year. However, the law has not kept pace with many malicious and disruptive activities that prevent legal and profoundly necessary businesses from operating normally.
These include instances where anonymous members of a wider, legal group cross the line into illegal behaviours using the legal protest as cover, or activists use a loophole where people with no previous convictions are used to conduct illegal acts since they will attract lighter sanctions than repeat offenders. These activities can further be centrally coordinated en masse to compound the effect.
The modern world also allows forms of disruption that didn’t exist when public order laws were first conceived, such as the effects of lots of, sometimes legitimate and sometimes unpunishable, online actions to overwhelm a system. This effect was seen when activists targeted the Pirbright animal health institute, bizarrely in the belief that it was involved with 5G-related mind control, leading it to suspend some of its operations. Elsewhere, activists have targeted businesses with veiled threats that border on extortion without triggering malicious communications laws, and posted fake negative reviews that rarely get taken down by social media platforms. This tactic only became illegal in 2025 under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, but it is another example of how laws must always evolve to reflect the changing world. When Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, where websites are maliciously overwhelmed with traffic, were made illegal in 1990 everybody saw the sense in that. The principle here is no different.
Clarifying the law
The legal changes were made through a Statutory Instrument (SI), a standard Parliamentary mechanism used to update and clarify existing legislation. Most legislation is amended in this way because the process for the Houses of Commons and Lords is slow by design and would quickly become overwhelmed with the scale of amendments needed for the country to function. For every legislative change that goes through the main chambers, 20-30 go through as SIs instead.
The Public Order Act 2023 includes the provision that the Secretary of State may amend the list of protected infrastructure by way of a SI. While SIs do not receive the same level of debate as primary legislation, they are not full laws and still receive an appropriate amount of Parliamentary approval and oversight. This amendment was voted on in Parliament three times: twice in the House of Commons, where it was approved 3-1, and once in the House of Lords, where a motion to drop the amendment was defeated 5-1. The change reflects a policy judgment about how existing protest law should apply in a modern context and is not an attempt to remove civil liberties.
The importance of the life sciences
The new legislation is designed to protect the life sciences sector because of its enormous importance for the security, and to a lesser extent prosperity, of the UK. It is not solely designed to counter threats to animal research but to ensure that the whole sector is able to operate effectively, with animals being a small but essential part of that.
The recent experience of the Covid-19 outbreak demonstrated the damaging effects of a global pandemic, which for many people are ongoing, in terms of health conditions triggered by the virus itself, delayed education and economic reverberations. We were able to get out of the pandemic as fast as we did only because of our capacity to research and scale a vaccine domestically using the scientific infrastructure that makes such a response possible.
It is not possible to predict pandemics, but their drivers are measurable and current conditions suggest the probability of another pandemic is higher now than at any point in the last century. The risk is essentially 3% per year of a pandemic occurring each year, which compounds year-on-year so that in 5 years it’s 15%, 10 years 30% and so on until it is more likely than not to occur.
In addition to this, we are at the greatest risk from bioweapons in human history. There is no question that hostile nations have started, if not completed, work on novel bioweapons.
Our ability to respond to that cannot come second to people’s right, not to protest, as that is unaffected, but to disrupt a sector that is crucial to our public health thus causing harms to others that they have no right to cause.
We hope that this amendment will allow life science establishments to continue their lawful work, while also allowing protestors to register their views about the use of animals in research in a peaceful manner.
Last edited: 12 February 2026 15:08
