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

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what estimate he has made of the (a) cost to the public purse and (b) time-scale for setting up a British Global Navigation Satellite System.

The UK Space Agency is leading a cross-Government taskforce, working with engineering and space experts in the UK, to rapidly develop plans for a British Global Navigation Satellite System with the aim of launching our own system from the mid-2020s onwards. Value for money will be a key consideration of this taskforce.

In the long term, we believe that such a system could be operated for around the same annual cost as the UK’s current contribution to the EU’s Galileo programme.