Contribution
My hon. Friend makes an important point. The UK Government have committed to investing in defence and in advances in tech defence. As we develop defence, investing in space is utterly critical and central to that. It is a matter of some regret that Scottish companies that invest in military matters are not funded by the Scottish National Investment Bank or Scottish Enterprise, because they have the view that we should not invest in defence, even though it will create jobs and is important for defending the north of Scotland, which is where my mother came from and which is now very important for defence.
I am an MP for Glasgow, which has a rich history of innovation and an incredibly promising cluster of space expertise. My seat has the fantastic University of Strathclyde. I recently met Professor Malcolm Macdonald from the university, who is the director of the centre for signal and image processing and the applied space technology laboratory. He outlined to me with great enthusiasm and knowledge the amount of innovation in the space sector in Glasgow and across the United Kingdom. This is a critical industry that we must invest in and for which we must create the conditions of investment. Around 52,000 people work in the space sector across the UK, so this is a big opportunity.
Let me turn to talk about precisely what the Bill does, albeit with four words: it seeks to limit space operators’ liability. I emphasise that spaceflight activities are heavily regulated by the UK Civil Aviation Authority for safety. There is day-to-day scrutiny of their safety from an expert safety regulator—the CAA is one of the best regulators in the world—so we are concerned with small risks that are reduced to the very minimum extent possible by a very strong regulatory regime. One of the reasons why our family of nations has a great advantage in space is that because we are right at the end of Europe, we have a great place to launch, because we do not launch over big urban areas. If we go right up to Shetland, there is nothing for hundreds of miles.
There are treaties under international space law, and the UK Government have a long-standing legal liability for damage caused by UK spaceflight-related operations. Despite the space safety regime, there is a residual risk that things go wrong and the UK Government face claims. The UK Government can make claims against operators, which take place under section 36 of the 2018 Act. That is quite proper. Operators have to assume and bear risk, and the Government need to ensure that operators can pay out on claims made against them—as we are quite rightly adopting a cross-party spirit today, I commend the previous Government on their work on space law—which is why the regime under the 2018 Act makes provisions for space operators to put in place compulsory insurance.
The businesses have to insure themselves and are regulated by a very competent regulator. The question is: what happens if a claim exceeds the amount of insurance that can be put in place on a sensible basis? That is really what we are addressing here. The current legislation does not require the Civil Aviation Authority or the Government to include a cap in the licence; it makes it optional. Section 12(2) of the 2018 Act provides:
“An operator licence may specify a limit on the amount of the licensee's liability under section 36 in respect of the activities authorised by the licence.”
The critical thing that my Bill will do is quite simply to swap “may” for “must”, and as a consequence the word “any” in section 36 is changed to “the”. That is consistent with long-standing Government policy that the liability should be limited—there is a clear, documented policy that it is limited.
However, the problem with documented policies as opposed to statute—as a recovering lawyer, I go back to my legal career here—is that Government policies are ultimately much easier to change than statutes. We can have a claim for legitimate expectations and a breach of those, but that is a very difficult class of claim to run, and there has not been a huge number of successful cases of that sort in the courts. It is a difficult area of public law.
Business quite properly says, “You could change this policy and expose our existing investments to additional risk.” Business could also fairly go and look elsewhere for investment. Investors will not invest in the same way in the face of a lack of statutory protection, so the critical thing the Bill does is to include a statutory protection. It requires the Government to cap the liability and encourages people to invest, and that puts us on a par with our principal competitor nations for space investment. So, four words to the Bill, with two swapped, but it is absolutely critical for the future of an industry that could be brilliant for the United Kingdom and all our constituents for years to come.