Space Industry (Indemnities) Bill

Debate between Cherilyn Mackrory and Mark Garnier

2nd reading
Friday 23rd February 2024 Commons Chamber

[Cherilyn Mackrory (Truro and Falmouth) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Woking (Mr Lord) on bringing forward this private Member’s Bill, which I rise in support of. Following my hon. Friend the Member for Wyre Forest (Mark Garnier), I will take us from the City of London, on which he made some brilliant and valid points, to the space sector—we are almost in danger of having some joined-up thinking in this place today!

One would not be surprised to see a Cornish MP rising on these Benches when we are speaking about space. We have a lot to say in Cornwall about the space sector. Cornwall is in fact at the forefront of the UK’s developing space economy and is playing an increasingly important role in the national space programme to ensure that as many people as possible contribute to and benefit from the economic growth. Cornwall’s data, space and aerospace strategy ambitions include: mitigating and reversing environmental degradation; restoring nature and seeking to protect businesses and communities from the impact of climate change, both locally and globally; working with the Government to grow the UK space economy as a whole; and, growing the Cornwall and Isles of Scilly economy to deliver jobs and international investment, while offering an outstanding quality of life for its people.

Cornwall and Isles of Scilly local enterprise partnership made space one of its main priorities some time ago. If the House will indulge me, I would like to pay tribute to one of the key players, Mark Duddridge, who we lost suddenly last year. Mark used to be chair of the local enterprise partnership. Sadly, a matter of hours after I was in a Zoom meeting with him from this place, he tragically and suddenly died. Mark has left a hole in the industry and business community in Cornwall, and is very fondly remembered. New MPs look for the people they can trust, with knowledge in all these things, so that we can gain our own knowledge and learn about them, and Mark was certainly one of those people for me.

Mark said of the space industry:

“We’ve backed Cornwall’s spaceport bid from day one because we saw the potential for Cornwall to play a vital role in the UK’s space economy ambitions and create high value jobs.

The global space industry could triple in value to more than $1 trillion by 2040 and what’s driving that is climate change, security and telecoms. The facilities we are helping to fund at Spaceport Cornwall are already having a catalytic effect and attracting new space companies to Cornwall.”

One of those is international space logistics company D-Orbit, which will establish a satellite assembly, integration and testing facility at Spaceport Cornwall’s Centre for Space Technologies, with support from the European Space Agency. Mark played a key role in that, and others are continuing his work. He was a talented and passionate advocate for Cornwall, and has left a large hole.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Woking for bringing clarity to the industry as a whole. As he has mentioned, where we had a “may” we will now have a “must”. That is always important so that industry knows what it is doing. Members may not know that Cornwall has more than 150 business involved in the space industry, and 35 local and national partners. In 2023, 1,300 people in Cornwall were employed in the space industry, which was worth about £88 million; by 2030, we expect more than 3,000 people to be employed in it, with a potential value of £1 billion.

My hon. Friends have mentioned some of the businesses and services employed by the space industry. Let me add to that list the marine protection areas that we are deploying not just around UK waters but globally, because that is done via satellite. How do we know how bad climate change is in different parts of the world? Satellites do that for us.

When I was a Cornwall councillor, we had interesting debates about the benefits of the spaceport in Cornwall. Some of our environmentalists were concerned that we were sending huge great jumbo jets off into space and that it would cause a lot of pollution, but my belief— and that of a lot of my constituents—is that the good outweighs the bad given the amount of information that we can now get, and that surely we in Cornwall want to provide the jobs and infrastructure to allow that information to come back to Earth.

So what else is Cornwall doing in the space industry? There is artificial intelligence and professional services—we have space lawyers in Cornwall. This legislation will be of great interest to them and how they can help their clients, and they are abreast of it all. Foot Anstey is one such firm providing those services.

We recently had drone tests over the bay of Falmouth by a company called Open Skies Cornwall. I pay tribute to the Falmouth harbour commissioner, Miles Carden, for spearheading that project. When huge tankers are ashore in the bay of Falmouth, or if in high seas it is too dangerous even for pilot boats, drones can take out medical supplies and bits for the boats. That could save lives, and could certainly save a lot of money for those companies, so they are a great investment.

Another tech company, Farfields, operates at Mylor boat harbour with Mylor Boat Hire. It is testing electric eco-launches using a low-cost satellite network rather than wireless systems so that checks on the battery voltage of a boat’s electric motor can be done via GPS. Checks can be done on bilge pumps and all sorts of other things on boats. All that is happening as part of the space industry, which is not just about launching rockets into space, and it is vital.

My hon. Friend the Member for Woking mentioned the Newquay spaceport. That was 10 years of work. I again pay tribute to Melissa Quinn, who spearheaded much of that project. Despite what people have said in the press, the Newquay spaceport was a huge success; everything that Newquay and Cornwall did worked perfectly. Cosmic Girl ran into issues—sadly, the mission was unsuccessful—but Newquay proved that we could have a spaceport in the UK. That is what mattered to Cornwall.

[Mark Garnier]

To reinforce that point, it is a rather peculiar thing about the British that we tend to look at failure as a problem. Exactly this type of thing happened with the launch of the SpaceX Starship. The minute it cleared the pad, the mission had been entirely successful. When that enormous rocket—bigger than a Saturn V rocket—went spiralling out of control and blew up, the SpaceX team let out a cheer, because they had got it right. We sometimes get it wrong in the UK. As my hon. Friend mentions, there was a problem with the rocket itself, but the UK got it absolutely bang on the money in every single way. The licensing and everything went perfectly right. The fact that a second-stage fuel filter went wrong has nothing to do with Newquay or the Government. The spaceport is a real success story.

[Cherilyn Mackrory]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention, and I will pass on his regards to the good people of Cornwall. He is absolutely right: it was a brilliant project from start to finish. We had engagement locally and nationally, and the local MP, my hon. Friend the Member for St Austell and Newquay (Steve Double), worked with the project from start to finish.

Let me explain what it meant to the people of Cornwall. It has inspired a whole generation of children in the county. I actually feel sorry for colleagues who go into schools to talk about mining and renewables, and who try to inspire children to go into such careers, because Melissa Quinn went in and absolutely wiped the floor with them. She has inspired a whole generation to go into space careers. A lot of kids and families in Cornwall think, “Because we live in Cornwall, this isn’t for us,” but it absolutely is for us and our children.

Because of the project, we have seen investment go into Truro and Penwith College, which now has the facilities to train engineers and to do virtual welding and all sorts of things. I have no idea what goes on there, but the facilities are very shiny and fabulous. Martin Tucker, the principal, has been fully engaged with this project and others to ensure that the kids who were inspired in primary school at the beginning of it can carry out their training in Cornwall and go into careers in the county. Cornish MPs have been fighting for this for a decade or more, and it is starting to happen now, thanks to that project.

Cosmic Girl ran into problems. Newquay was only ever supposed to have one or two launches a year. Are we going to get another one? Yes, I absolutely hope that we are, but it is not just about working towards launches. The project means that we have the know-how, the supply chains and the knowledge to support other launches around the country and across the world. It is fantastic that the spaceport is still there, and we should keep it going. I know that the Cornwall and Isles of Scilly local enterprise partnership and Cornwall Council are still very enthusiastic about ensuring that we harness the expertise and do not let any of it go.

The other large company that Members may or may not have heard of—I am sure my hon. Friend the Member for Woking has heard of it—is Goonhilly Earth Station. When people drive right down into the west of Cornwall and the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for St Ives (Derek Thomas), they will look across the moorland, see huge satellite dishes and think, “My goodness! What on earth are they doing there?” Goonhilly is fantastic—the world’s first private deep space communications network. It provides additional capacity to the NASA and European Space Agency networks. Any deep space mission that Members have heard of will have been supported by Goonhilly and the team there.

I do not know whether Members have seen the Australian movie “The Dish”, in which the characters have a small amount of time when they are the only ones on Earth supporting whatever deep space mission or moon landing mission is taking place. Goonhilly started a bit like that, but it has developed so much more. I cannot remember the figures off the top of my head, but the capacity for the amount of data that can be stored at the facility is phenomenal. Ian Jones, who runs the facility, is always looking for people to go and see what brilliant things they are doing, such as radio astronomy, supported by cryogenically cooled 30-metre antennas. It is a part of the global space communications network.

On our ambitions, we hope that by 2030 Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly will be a leader in the national space programme, exploiting the physical, digital and intellectual assets of the area, and using satellite data to overcome local and global challenges, such as the impact of climate change, which we have heard about. By 2030, data, space and aerospace will have contributed an additional £1 billion to the economic value of Cornwall and the Isles and Scilly through increased productivity and jobs turnover, creating twice the average gross value added per capita of £45,000 or more.

To facilitate those strategic ambitions, we have identified local and national strategic leads to support us in maintaining awareness of the priorities. That is vital following the aftermath of what happened at Newquay. As I say, this is still very much part of Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly LEP’s priorities. It is interlinked with all the other industries we are trying to promote in Cornwall, such as renewables and the resurgence of critical minerals. Critical minerals will need to come out of the ground in Cornwall to ensure that we have all these satellites.

As I mentioned earlier, 150 companies are doing all sorts of amazing things. Satellites that are only the size of a Ford Fiesta can now be built and go up into space. We were going to launch a satellite—hopefully this is still a reality—that takes a deep-dive look from space at Cornwall’s landscape and at what we are and are not doing. For example, we have slightly different graded agricultural land. Grade 3b land, which is vulnerable to proposals for solar farms, is actually the most fertile land we have in Cornwall. We are learning all that because of satellites. I could go on and on.

The change my hon. Friend the Member for Woking is introducing today may look like a small change, but it is huge. It will bring clarity to all the companies in the City of London that my hon. Friend the Member for Wyre Forest talked about, and to every single company I have mentioned and more, to ensure that there is a level playing field for everybody, that everything is clear and that they can continue to build and build and build. This is a very exciting future for our country and for Cornwall. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Woking for introducing the Bill.