Space Industry (Indemnities) Bill

Lord Willetts Excerpts

Friday 5th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Willetts (Con)]

My Lords, I very much welcome this Bill, which has already received support from across the House. Looking around at noble Lords here this afternoon, I welcome the House of Lords UK Engagement with Space Committee investigation. We should listen to the wise advice we are already getting from members of the committee, and I look forward to its report. I declare an interest as chair of the UK Space Agency and chair of the Regulatory Innovation Office. In light of that, I will make some quick comments.

First, space launch is undoubtedly a fantastic UK opportunity. We have already heard about our spaceports in Newquay in Cornwall and up in Scotland in the Shetlands, SaxaVord—two fantastic opportunities for us. We were right to get legislation on the statute book early on to provide a regulatory regime for space launch; I remember the debates in your Lordships’ House in 2016-17 as that Bill went through, and it has been an advantage for us to have the legislation in place.

However, there is this defect. It was understood at the time when we were debating this, but it is possible that some bean-counters in the Treasury thought they might be able to avoid an extremely speculative long-term liability without putting a clear obligation on government in the Bill. That defect is now widely recognised and is tackled in this Bill. I strongly support it. Moving from “may” to “must” is very important; it is a big difference, as every parent knows.

I will briefly comment on some other aspects of space, in particular the reports of the abolition of the UK Space Agency. I assure the House that reports of our abolition are rather exaggerated. Although the ultimate decision is for the Ministers to whom we are accountable, I will explain what is going on as I understand it. The UK Space Agency was an arm’s-length body. What grew up, over quite a few years, was one group of people sitting in the UK Space Agency doing our stuff, and another group sitting in the relevant department for the last couple of years, DSIT, monitoring what we were doing. It was clear that an awful lot of effort was going into one group of people in the UK Space Agency reporting to another group of people in DSIT, with emails going back and forth, when our activities should be outward looking and focused on business and the science community. Bringing these two activities together has great potential to deliver a more efficient and higher-quality space agency.

Ministers have already decided and announced that the new entity bringing together the existing space agency and DSIT officials will be called the UK Space Agency. There is still a lot of work to be done on exactly how it functions, and Ministers will be deciding on that in the coming months. I very much hope that at the end of this we will see less time spent on internal reporting processes and more time devoted to strengthening the UK space industry and serving the interests of space science. I therefore hope that the recommendations from the Lords UK Engagement with Space Committee reflect that ambition behind the changes that have just been announced.