Space Industry (Appeals) Regulations 2021

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Tuesday 29th June 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, look at the sheer vastness of what is before us, all to regulate space. The clue is in the name: space is largely empty; that is why we call it space. The noble Lord, Lord McNally, counted more than 200 pages. When I put all four of these SIs together, I counted more than 500 pages, 90% of them to do with the powers of the regulators in extreme and precise detail: the appeals procedure, the make-up of the arbitration panels and all the rest of it. Do we really need this kind of prescriptive law to regulate the vastnesses of what Cardinal Newman called the “sidereal firmament”? Sure, you need some rules and agreements among countries. As we began to sail the high seas, we developed maritime laws and the law of the sea as we went along. A similar process should pertain as we sail the wide seas of space, but in this manner, with this level of detailed prescription, we are asking for unintended consequences.

Noble Lords may say, “Well, what if something goes wrong? What if there’s a crash and we need to work out what the insurance would be and who would be liable if a bit of satellite fell on some other country? We must have some regulatory framework”, but here is the thing: our common-law system is remarkably good at adapting to new technologies and hitherto unencountered situations. In fact, almost every new technology was accommodated in our growing legal system by the application of general principles, for example the general principle that, if you have a dangerous thing in your possession, there is a responsibility on you to keep it leashed. When mining began for the first time, like space exploration now, it was a situation not previously encountered by people who had to determine liability and responsibility—yet we coped.

I want briefly to quote Rylands v Fletcher, a case from 1868. Water from the defendant’s reservoir had flooded the mine shafts of the plaintiff. The judge—rather brilliantly, I think—said:

“We think that the true rule of law is, that the person who for his own purposes brings on his land and collects and keeps there anything likely to do mischief if it escapes, must keep it at his peril, and, if he does not do so, is prima facie answerable for all the damage which is the natural consequence of its escape.”


Those are the general principles that should govern satellites and the charting of space.

Regulators are constantly playing catch-up. They will never be as smart as the innovators. Governments will always be rushing to keep up, asking things such as, “How do we regulate clean meat, GM foods, 3D printing or AI?” or whatever the latest thing is. In doing so, they almost always get it wrong because they cannot foresee the situations that the innovators in the private sector are already dealing with. That is why this volume of precise, Civil Service-written regulation—I must say, I have not been here long but I can tell the difference between stuff that Ministers have decreed and stuff that the bureaucracy is just churning out regardless of who is in office—and this kind of legal act almost invites disproportionate and unintended consequences. How extraordinary that they should be pursuing us even as we blast off and leave our ancestral planet. We cast off the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God and we find that, even so, the clammy grip of the regulator drags us back into its orbit.