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

To ask Her Majesty's Government, further to the statement by Lord Callanan on 8 July (HL Deb, col 1119) that OneWeb “has many applications that the UK can leverage, including defence applications” and the Written Answer by Baroness Goldie on 14 July (HL6644) which stated that “the investment in OneWeb is not a Defence matter”, whether OneWeb has any current defence applications; if so  what those applications are; and if not, when they became aware that OneWeb could not be applied to defence matters.

The current OneWeb offering does not include any defence specific applications. The investment in OneWeb is not a defence matter. Moving forward, OneWeb’s capabilities around its second-generation satellite offering will be reviewed in the context of the UK’s evolving civil and military space requirements.