The Government has made a short but legally important statutory instrument under the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction Act 2026. The regulations were made on 14 May 2026, laid before Parliament on 15 May 2026 and will come into force on 10 July 2026. As published on legislation.gov.uk, the instrument performs one specific function: it sets the meaning of digital sequence information in relation to marine genetic resources. Signed by Seema Malhotra, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, it is a technical measure designed to support the wider operation of the 2026 Act.
The operative rule is concise. For the purposes of the 2026 Act, digital sequence information in relation to marine genetic resources means DNA or ribonucleic acid, or RNA, sequences in digital form. That wording is narrow and precise. As drafted, the definition is limited to nucleic acid sequence data held digitally, rather than a broader category of scientific or biological information.
The legal basis is section 27(1) of the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction Act 2026. Parliament used that provision to leave the detailed meaning of digital sequence information to secondary legislation, and these regulations now fill that gap. In practical terms, that matters because a statutory scheme works more predictably when a technical term has been fixed in law. Courts, officials and affected organisations now have a common starting point when interpreting the marine genetic resources provisions of the Act.
The regulations extend to England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. That UK-wide extent is significant for consistency, particularly in an area where research activity, data handling and public administration can cross internal jurisdictional boundaries. The explanatory note states that the instrument is made in connection with UK implementation of the Agreement under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea on the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Marine Biological Diversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction. In other words, the definition sits within the domestic legal work needed to give effect to the new international marine biodiversity framework.
For research bodies, data repositories and commercial users working with marine genetic resources, the immediate effect is not the creation of a large new compliance regime. The main change is legal certainty: a term that could otherwise have been left open to dispute now has a clear statutory meaning before the Act's wider framework beds in. The drafting also sets a boundary. On the face of the regulations, digital DNA and RNA sequences are inside scope, while other forms of derived or associated data are not expressly included here. If ministers later want a wider definition, that would probably require further legal or policy action.
The explanatory note also says no full impact assessment has been produced because no, or no significant, effect on the private, public or voluntary sectors is foreseen. Instead, the Government points readers to the impact assessment prepared for the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction Bill. That signals the character of this instrument. It is a definitional regulation, not a major new regulatory burden in its own right. Even so, from 10 July 2026 it will settle one of the key technical terms in the UK's emerging law on marine genetic resources beyond national jurisdiction.