Space Debris

Lord Harris of Haringey Excerpts

Tuesday 18th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Leong (Lab)]

I thank the noble Baroness for that. We should be very proud of the spaceport up in the Shetland Islands. The Government are investing in that project and I hope we will be making an announcement soon on when we can launch a satellite from there. His Majesty the King is very interested in this whole area of space: he announced the Astra Carta initiative in June 2023 and is bringing stakeholders together to look at how to create a more sustainable space for everybody.

[Lord Harris of Haringey (Lab)]

My Lords, I refer to my interest as chair of the National Preparedness Commission. Most of our infrastructure relies on signals from space—timing signals for the finance sector, positioning signals, and so on. They can be interfered with in a variety of ways, including by space debris, but they are vulnerable to being hacked and spoofed and all sorts of things. Will the Minister tell us what arrangements are being made to ensure that our critical national infrastructure is prepared for the circumstances in which those signals are seriously disrupted for a significant period? What is our plan B in the event of that disruption?

[Lord Leong (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend for that point. As it stands, DSIT is playing a major role in developing UK space surveillance. This covers debris and satellites. Through the space clusters and the infra- structure fund, we are backing new ground-based observatories and analytics platforms. We are also co-ordinating with the UK Space Agency, academia and the defence sector to integrate civil and military space surveillance assets into a national capability, thereby reducing dependence on foreign data and supporting strategic autonomy.