In brief: Home Affairs Minister Senator Helen Miles has promised to introduce updated emergency legislation following drone disruptions at Jersey Airport last weekend. She told a scrutiny panel that the current law, dating from 1990, was drafted in “completely different times” and is no longer fit for purpose. Jersey’s emergency risk register is also being updated to include drone threats.
A 1990 Law Meets a 2026 Problem
There is something almost poetic about an island that prides itself on being ahead of the curve discovering that its emergency rulebook predates the World Wide Web. Senator Helen Miles, Jersey’s Home Affairs Minister, appeared before the Children, Education and Home Affairs Scrutiny Panel this week and made no attempt to dress up the situation: the Emergency Powers and Planning (Jersey) Law 1990 was drafted, as she put it, “in completely different times”, and “things have changed hugely” since it was first approved.
The immediate prompt for this legislative soul-searching was drone activity over Jersey Airport last weekend, an incident that exposed a gap not just in Jersey’s statute book but in its emergency risk register. Senator Miles told the panel that Jersey’s risk register “actually tends to follow what has been on the national emergency risk register”, and then delivered the rather arresting admission that “drones weren’t on that one either”. So Jersey was, in a sense, in good company, though that is cold comfort for anyone whose flight was disrupted.
What the Minister Is Proposing
Senator Miles told the panel that what Jersey needs is an “enabling law around resilience” that also allows “flexibility within that to respond to emerging situations”. Panel member Deputy Chris Rebindaine pressed her directly on whether updated legislation would help the Island respond to “cyber-attacks, infrastructure failures and, dare I say it, drones?”, and the Minister confirmed that this is precisely the kind of threat landscape the new framework is intended to address.
The approach she described is deliberately broad rather than prescriptive. Rather than listing specific threats, which, as the drone episode illustrates, can catch authorities off guard, the aim is to create a legal structure flexible enough to accommodate threats that nobody has yet imagined. “You don’t know what you don’t know,” Senator Miles reflected. “And I guess that was the issue with the drones over the weekend.”
Her department is already taking one concrete step: updating the Jersey emergency risk register in the wake of last weekend’s disruption, ensuring that drone activity is formally recognised as a threat requiring a planned response.
Why This Matters Beyond the Airport
Jersey Airport is not merely a convenience for islanders wanting a weekend in London. It is a critical piece of infrastructure for a community that depends on air links for everything from medical transfers to the movement of goods. Any disruption to it is, by definition, a matter of island-wide concern, and the fact that the legal framework for managing such disruptions has not been substantially updated since the early years of John Major’s government is a legitimate cause for scrutiny.
The broader question of emergency preparedness, covering cyber threats, infrastructure failures and novel security risks, is one that governments across the world are grappling with. Jersey’s small size is both a vulnerability and an advantage: the Island can move quickly when it chooses to, and a focused piece of enabling legislation, if well drafted, could give authorities the tools they need without the bureaucratic sprawl that tends to afflict larger jurisdictions.
Source: Bailiwick Express
