Quantifying Britain's maritime dependencies

The 2025 review says 70 percent of Britain's 2021 gas imports came from Norway, 95 percent of global data travels through undersea cables, and 46 percent of British food is imported. It adds critical-mineral supply chains, North Sea pipelines, overseas bases and defence hubs in Cyprus, Gibraltar, Germany, Oman, Kenya, and Singapore to the systems connected by the sea. Those figures turn maritime security from an abstract slogan into a description of how energy, communications, food, industry, and military access reach Britain. They provide the economic and infrastructure baseline against which the review's later fleet proposals can be judged.