Memorandum submitted by the Royal Aeronautical
Society (UKSA 06)
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
1. The Royal Aeronautical Society recognises
the potential benefits to be gained from the establishment of
an effective UK Space Agency but considers that there is limited
evidence of progress towards that goal. The Agency's original
high level mission of ensuring that the whole of Britain's return
on space investments exceeds the sum of the parts must now also
encompass the need to make near and medium term economic growth
the cornerstone of its activities. The private sector is central
to achieving both of those objectives, but to date, on the basis
of what limited information has been made public, the Society
sees little evidence of an improvement in the engagement of the
new Agency with the private sector.
INTRODUCTION
2. The Royal Aeronautical Society (RAeS)
is the world's only professional body dedicated to the entire
aerospace community. Established in 1866, the Society has 17,000
members in over 100 countries (including 3,500 classified as young
members), and is a leader and provider of foresight within the
aerospace community. Space is one of a number of specific areas
of interest within the Society, with a formal Specialist Space
Group.
3. The following evidence below draws heavily
on the response submitted by the RAeS to the government consultation
on the establishment of a UK space agency in 2009, which we attach
as an Annex.[20]
What progress has been made in setting up the
UK Space Agency?
4. The fundamental objective of establishing
the Space Agency was to coordinate the space activities of the
British public sector in such a way that "the whole exceeded
the sum of the parts". Although the UK Space Agency has been
established in name and an Acting Chief Executive appointed, there
is little evidence of progress towards achieving that fundamental
objective. A "Space Leadership Council" has been established
co-chaired by the Minister and industry, which should help to
provide direction to the UK Space Agency. That Council met for
the first time in July and so has not yet had time to demonstrate
its ability to move the Space Agency forward.
5. The Society would certainly have expected
to see progress in recruiting the senior officials for the new
Agency. For example we expected that the position of Agency Chief
Executive (CE) would be advertised widely so that the very best
candidate would be appointed. However, so far there has been no
evidence of this process getting underway and one concern is that
the Acting CE would automatically become the CE without any attempt
to recruit more widely.
6. Another area where the Society would
also have expected to see progress is in the transfer of responsibility
from the BNSC partner organisations to the new Agency. There has
been little said publicly about this process but anecdotal evidence
suggests that the arrangements are complex. For example, the Science
and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) has transferred some
but by no means all of its space activities to the new Agency.
An example of STFC space activities not transferred to the Agency
is the 200-strong Space Department of the Rutherford Appleton
Laboratories. The Society is, for example, not aware to what extent
responsibility for funding or procurement decisions has been transferred
to the new Agency from the BNSC partners -two areas which are
often difficult to concert.
7. The private sector was not a formal partner
in BNSC even though it provided a significant part of British
funding of European Space Agency (ESA) programmes—about
30% in 2009. The Society considers that in some of the scientific
disciplines relevant to space, such as telecommunications, defence
and transport, industry acts as a virtual Research Council. In
those areas it is the leader in much "blue skies" research
and is the possessor of much of the science capability in the
UK, a situation largely a consequence of the privatisation of
bodies such as BT and QinetiQ without a corresponding adjustment
in the scope of the Research Councils. For these reasons, the
Society considers it essential that the private sector has a deep
and rich relationship with the new Agency. So far, this does not
appear to be happening. The Advisory Boards that provided an interface
between BNSC and industry, and which in any case were generally
ineffective, have been largely disbanded and have not been replaced.
8. Procurement is an important engine for
innovation, and one of the key roles of the Agency is to ensure
coherence in procurement decisions across all programmes. In the
BNSC model each partner set procurement decisions and priorities
independently, so that any cross-fertilisation is a matter of
chance rather than a conscious objective. For example, industry
identified the potential for common technology in the European
Galileo, GMES and ExoMars programmes. However, each programme
was led by a different Department, none of which accepted common
technology as a priority. Economies of scale and opportunities
for creating world-leading capabilities were thus missed. The
new Agency needs to have sufficient authority to negotiate priorities
across the interests of Departments, but again the Society has
yet to see evidence that this is the case.
How does the UK Space Agency work with other bodies
(national and international) on space issues?
9. Some aspects of the interaction between
the UK Space Agency and other UK bodies were discussed in paragraphs
6 and 7 above, but here are many other interactions that should
be clarified and rationalised. This includes the work of the units
that deal with telecommunications and broadcasting in the Business
Innovation & Skills and the Culture Media & Sport Departments.
In general the Society considers that in order to make the whole
greater than the sum of the parts, the UKSA needs authority (a)
to deal with funding proposals that span the interests of multiple
Departments, and (b) to cover interests that fall between Departments.
10. So far there appears to have been little
or no change in the arrangements by which Britain interfaces with
international space bodies. The Ministry of Defence continues
to manage the interface to Eumetsat (weather satellites) and the
EU Satellite Centre (processing surveillance satellite imagery).
The Department for Transport continues to lead the interface to
the European Commission on satellite navigation. The responsibility
for leading the international interface on space aspects of climate
change is shared across Departments such as Energy & Climate
Change and Environment. The new UK Space Agency leads the interface
to ESA although it is not yet clear if it will control decisions
about future funding of ESA.
Is the UK Space Agency more effective at coordinating
space policy than its predecessor, the British National Space
Centre?
11. The UK Space Agency has significantly
fewer staff than BNSC had about five years ago. For this reason
alone, the new Agency is less able to coordinate policy in some
areas. One example is "space security" where the lead
in setting UK policy seems to be in the hands of the Home Office,
assisted by significant unfunded support from industry. Coordination
is required in this area because the interests of several other
Departments are involved including the Ministry of Defence, the
Foreign & Commonwealth Office and the Department for Transport.
What should the UK Space Agency's priorities be
for the next five years?
12. The UK Space Agency has a set of short-term
priorities related to the establishment of its own constitution
and structure, plus longer term priorities related to achieving
its fundamental objective of making the "whole exceed the
sum of the parts". As a general rule the Society urges the
Agency to place the promotion of short and medium term economic
growth at the top of its agenda, applying this criterion in every
major decision. The range of decisions that could be influenced
by this "economic growth" criterion includes the programmes
in which it invests, the technology it sponsors, the studies it
commissions, the suppliers it selects, the internal structure
it establishes, the staff it chooses and the publicity it undertakes.
13. Notwithstanding the obvious need to emphasise
short and medium term economic growth, the Agency should devote
a proportion of its resources to seeking synergy in future activities,
since that is the raison d'etre of its creation. Seed corn funding
of technology, science and mission concepts, benefit assessments
and demonstrators will allow the Agency to identify opportunities
for investment by its partners at home and abroad, and to tap
into the wealth of expertise in UK industry and academia.
14. As concerns the Agency's constitution
and structure, a top short-term priority is to ensure transparency
and accountability in all its affairs, both financial and otherwise.
One of the lessons learned in recent years is that accountability
can be helped by the abstraction of the role of the public sector
to a level higher than before, for example leaving the private
sector to finance, develop and own the assets, delivering a service
as was done in the case of MoD's £3 billion Skynet 5 telecommunications
system. There are opportunities to apply this principle in the
new Agency's own programmes as they emerge and in the ESA programmes
which it helps fund.
Is the UK Space Agency adequately funded?
15. One of the main weaknesses of BNSC was
that it had access to little or no discretionary funds of its
own. This precluded BNSC from developing business cases for future
investment and from demonstrating or prototyping novel concepts
to attract partners. The individual BNSC partners had such funds
at least in principle, so the issue is whether authority for spending
those funds is transferred to the new Agency. There is no evidence
that such a transfer has happened.
16. Another weakness of BNSC was the inability
to achieve economies of scale through synergy between programmes
of different partners (see paragraphs 8 and 13). Ensuring that
the new Agency has the authority to exploit the potential synergies
is more important than the specific level of funding for individual
programmes.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
17. As explained in our submission to the
2009 government consultation leading to the setting up of the
UK Space Agency, the Society believes that a strong and effective
Space Agency can provide important benefits. The May 2010 General
Election and the subsequent change of government inevitably slowed
the transition from BNSC to the new Agency. In particular, the
Agency has not yet demonstrated its commitment to make near and
medium term economic growth the cornerstone of its activities.
The Society therefore welcomes the Science and Technology Committee's
Inquiry as an opportunity to gauge the progress being achieved,
and to influence the direction being taken.
Royal Aeronautical Society
August 2010
20 Not printed. Back
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