Space Policy

Liz Saville Roberts Excerpts

Thursday 14th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

I thank my hon. Friends the Members for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford) and for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady) for securing this debate.

Tim Peake’s six-hour adventure tomorrow, as part of a team of two Tims, to replace a solar power connection unit in space will be watched with awe by children and adults alike—hon. Members will be glad to hear that I removed from that paragraph a cliché that has already been used.

Tim’s iconic voyage into space, living and working on the international space station, is beamed into our lives tweet by tweet, which is fascinating. He has paid tribute to David Bowie’s “Starman”, and he sends us extraordinary aerial views of the planet, alongside spacesuit selfies. He really gives a feeling of life on the space station, as well as those iconic visions and views, and he raises our aspirations to the farthest frontiers. Let us make the most of this chance to spark young people’s interest in the careers of the future.

The spirit in which this motion is presented is to be greatly appreciated, and there is perhaps potential for not just a single spaceport site, but for a number of sites across the UK. Members with vested local interests in a possible spaceport site in their constituency will inevitably take the opportunity to set out their individual stalls—that is our representative duty. However, the proposal to ensure that fantastic scientific, cultural and technological opportunities arise from UK spaceport development must benefit the United Kingdom as a whole.

With that semi-apology, I will turn to the possible spaceport site at the former RAF camp near Llanbedr. It is in a coastal location surrounded by sand dunes between Cardigan bay and the hinterland of Snowdonia. The site has a 50-year track record of airspace management and operations. It comprises three main runways, the longest of which is oriented in such a way that flights pass over sparsely populated areas. Unique among all the candidate sites, Llanbedr already has access to 2,000 square miles of segregated airspace over Cardigan bay. The airfield was bought by the Welsh Government in 2004 as a strategic asset, and since 2008 it has been leased by Llanbedr Airfield Estates on a long-term lease.

So far the site has mostly been used for testing, evaluating and developing remotely piloted air systems and unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly known as drones. Its most recent initiative relates to the use of drones for protecting fisheries. The site is included in the Snowdonia enterprise zone, which has facilitated improvements including a £1.5 million spend to upgrade its facilities and infrastructure. The Civil Aviation Authority has rightly identified safety as the overriding operational principle for a spaceport. That applies not only to any members of the public and workers using that port, but also to the “uninvolved public”. That would imply that the combination of relative isolation, coastal location and segregated airspace satisfies those requirements as fully as possible.

It is safe to say—others have already made an excellent case for this—that the economic potential for a spaceport, both in the immediate locality and further afield, is immense. The county of Gwynedd is to a great degree dependent on public sector employment and the leisure industry. The constituency of Dwyfor Meirionnydd suffers from seasonal and minimum wage employment, and although official unemployment figures are low, chronic economic inactivity is a very real issue. The demographics of the area indicate a steadily ageing population, as young people move away for higher education and employment. That is the price we pay for dependency on the seasonal tourism industry, a shrinking public sector, and scant Government investment in well paid employment.

Of course, this is in no way simply a local investment in a far western corner of the United Kingdom. Llanbedr has the potential to benefit the whole of north Wales, with its educational powerhouses in the University of Bangor, Wrexham’s Glyndwr University, Grwp Llandrillo Menai, and Coleg Cambria. Indeed, it goes much further than that, because the northern powerhouse would have that development within easy reach, and it is the nearest site to the international travel hubs of Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Cardiff and London. It is also the closest candidate site to the UK space gateway at Harwell in Oxford.

This has the potential to make a real difference to Gwynedd, and indeed to the economy of the wider area and the UK as a whole, yet we are still waiting for the Government to bring us out of the limbo of expectation by providing the operational criteria for the UK spaceport. It is impossible to move ahead, as we do not yet know what we are bidding for. It is difficult even to quantify, in terms of jobs both locally and further afield, until we know the operational criteria. We need them as a matter of urgency. The uncertainty impacts locally, as caravan sites in the area tell me their customers are reluctant to commit to new contracts until a definite decision is made about the future one way or another.

I spoke to a student at my local sixth-form college, Coleg Meirion-Dwyfor, who happens to live in the next village to Llanbedr. He told me that his fellow students think this is a cloud cuckoo project that will never happen. How could it ever happen in somewhere like Meirionnydd? But then I could see a flash of hope and a realisation that yes, this could happen, this could happen here and I could be part of it. Like Buzz Lightyear, we can turn falling with style into infinity and beyond.