Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, pursuant to the Answer of 26 May 2016 to Question 37788, what estimate he has made of the overall cost to the public purse in the last Parliament of his Department's work on the consideration of the potential site for a UK spaceport.

The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) was commissioned to research and produce the 2014 Government Spaceplan Review of commercial spaceplane certification and operations. In addition to identifying key criteria for UK spaceports, and identifying potential locations based on these, the Spaceplane Review also set out the potential for horizontal spaceplane operations from the UK and provided prospective businesses with the detailed groundwork for making commercial spaceflight operations in the UK a reality. This work is now providing the basis for the legislative measures that will be brought forward in the Modern Transport Bill to enable a broad commercial space market to develop in the UK. The Department for Transport contributed approximately £223,000 to this Review and the CAA’s subsequent work. The Department also incurred estimated costs of £86,000 in support of the 2014 Spaceplane Review and consulting on the review’s key criteria and conclusions on spaceport location, the outcome of which was published in March 2015 https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/spaceport-locations-and-criteria.