Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what investment the UK Space Agency plans to make to mitigate the effect of atmospheric events and space weather on space debris.

The Department will publish a new space weather strategy later this year, which will set out a five-year road map for how we intend to boost resilience and build on existing UK strengths and capacity in preparing for and mitigating space weather impacts.

This Government understands that good management of risk is essential for contingency planning, increasing the likelihood that the services we rely on day-to-day remain available for citizens.

In November 2019, the UK Government committed £80m to the European Space Agency Space Safety programme, of which £10m was targeted towards Space weather and debris mitigation development activities, including improving the modelling of how routine and extreme variations in space weather affect space debris.

In addition, this year the UK Space Agency invested a further £1m into projects related to space debris detection and tracking.

Future investment in this area within our National and European Space Agency programmes is subject to the spending review settlement.

The UK is a world leader in space weather forecasting and the Met Office Space Weather Operations Centre provides forecasts and warnings of space weather on a 24/7 basis. The UK Space Agency works with the Met Office to ensure the continuity of space weather observational data.