European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service

Earl of Courtown Excerpts

Thursday 12th June 2025 Grand Committee

[The Earl of Courtown (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, for securing this important debate on the Government’s plans to reinstate the UK’s membership of EGNOS. We are committed to, and will work with the Government on, upholding the best safety standards for aircraft, pilots and passengers.

As the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, and my noble friend Lord Davies of Gower said, EGNOS uses a set of geostationary satellites and a network of ground stations to increase the accuracy of GPS. These signals are acquired by ground stations deployed around Europe and are gathered and processed through a central computing system. It is at this stage that differential corrections and integrity messages are calculated and broadcast back to users across Europe via a set of three geostationary satellites. We recognise that EGNOS improves the accuracy of global navigation satellite systems’ positioning information while also providing a crucial integrity message that allows users to get an extremely reliable guarantee on its residual positioning errors, both horizontally and vertically.

As my noble friend said, we have been made aware of the strong opinion of the head of the UK branch of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association about the importance of the UK remaining part of EGNOS to improve safety and resilience for pilots and passengers in the UK. While there is no doubt about the accuracy benefits of EGNOS and its safety-critical functions, it is essential to determine whether the benefits can justify the funding requests made by the European Union. In government, we sought to continue access to EGNOS services through the UK-EU trade negotiations but did not reach an agreement due to significant financial demands from the EU to secure services. The cost to taxpayers would have been £30 million per annum, a cost that the Government at that time could not justify.

While no decision was made to rejoin the EGNOS programme, we recognised that steps needed to be taken on satellite augmentation. This can be demonstrated through a commitment made in DSIT’s government policy framework for greater position, navigation and timing resilience to a UK precise point positioning satellite-based augmentation system and projects carried out in 2024 that defined a future system and architecture options and trials.

While the current Government have been conducting a wide range of negotiations with the EU, no decisions or details have been set out regarding the UK rejoining EGNOS. The Government recognise the importance of PNT technologies for the UK’s security and prosperity and are implementing the government policy framework for greater PNT resilience.

I have a couple of questions for the Minister. As the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, mentioned, following discussions with the EU, do the Government have an updated figure for the cost of the UK rejoining EGNOS? Given the financial cost of rejoining it, have they discussed with the aviation sector whether it could cover this cost? With moves towards more sustainable aviation routes, do the Government recognise that EGNOS could improve fuel economy and landing and take-off in the aviation sector? Finally, can the Minister confirm whether the benefits of EGNOS could also be used to improve the integrity of location and the efficiency of our rail sector? I look forward greatly to his response.