The National Space Strategy And The Role Of The UK Space Agency

24th July 2024

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) considers space to be a critical component to meeting wider government goals, including levelling up and becoming a science and technology superpower.

A UK Space Agency (UKSA) commissioned report estimates that the total UK space industry income was £17.5 billion in 2020-21. The space sector also directly provided an estimated 48,800 jobs while supporting an additional 78,000 jobs across the supply chain in 2020-21.

In September 2021, DSIT and the Ministry of Defence (MoD) jointly published the government's National Space Strategy. It set an ambition to make the UK one of the world's most innovative and attractive space economies.

DSIT has been responsible for coordinating civil space policy and UKSA has been the government's key delivery agency, responsible for developing and delivering UK civil space programmes across the UK space sector and with international space institutions.

Scope of the report
This report examines whether DSIT and UKSA are set to secure value for money from their work overseeing and delivering the National Space Strategy.

It covers:

whether DSIT has clearly defined its objectives for the civil space sector in the Strategy and is effectively overseeing and coordinating its delivery
UKSA's role and progress in delivering the Strategy, and the extent to which it has the required capacity and capability
whether there are appropriate mechanisms to monitor progress against the Strategy and evaluate outcomes
Conclusion
The government did well to draw its many different interests and activities in this very diverse sector into a single vision in its 2021 national Strategy, which set high ambitions and helped galvanise the sector's interest.

DSIT recognised that the original Strategy was broad and that it did not know how much it would cost to deliver. However, it did not produce the implementation plan that it had originally planned to, and three years later DSIT and UKSA are still in the early stages of identifying and developing the plans and capabilities needed to deliver the Strategy's ambitions.

The government substantially increased the scale of UKSA's funding and changed its delivery responsibilities in 2021, but DSIT did not provide clarity on the aims, outcomes or priorities for what UKSA was supposed to deliver and by when, or ensure that UKSA had the capability or capacity to deliver it.

UKSA was proactive in working to align its activities with the Strategy and identifying a need to make changes to its organisational structure and governance but did not have sufficient planning, monitoring or evaluation arrangements or capabilities in place. As a result, its funding allocation processes had some weaknesses, some of its projects are behind schedule, and it does not have a complete view of whether it is on course to deliver the government’s ambitions.

UKSA has recognised many of these weaknesses and has been putting in place arrangements to remedy them, including a revised approach to allocating funding, and improved monitoring and evaluation processes.

UKSA has recently seen notable improvements in its Civil Service People Survey results. Similarly, it expects to report improved performance against its planned milestones and to meet its financial target of not having a material underspend for 2023-24.

However, UKSA recognises that it has more to do. The sector is developing at a fast pace, and in planning for the future the government will need to balance the need to provide certainty with the need to be flexible and responsive to new opportunities.

If UKSA is able to address these issues and DSIT provides the required clarity on the aims and outcomes of the Strategy, then they will be much better placed to secure value for money from the government’s multi-billion pound investments in the sector and achieve the government’s ambitions for the UK in space.

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Summary
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