House of Lords | Hansard | UK Strategy Towards the Arctic (International Relations and Defence Committee Report)

My Lords, I have a personal reason for engaging in this debate. When I was a Member of the other place, it was my constituent, Commander Eddie Grenfell, who served on the Arctic convoys, who led the campaign for the Arctic Star, which he then received in 2013. Some 20,000 veterans have now received the Arctic Star, and that campaign was a reminder of the heroism of our Armed Forces in those treacherous waters.

My second reason for intervening in this debate involves wearing my hat as chair of the UK Space Agency. I hope to persuade noble Lords that space is a crucial domain for thinking about defence and security. The Arctic theatre is a vivid example of that, as I will briefly explain.

Traditionally, satellites were great big objects, 30,000 kilometres away, in geostationary orbit, always looking at the same part of the globe, with very little coverage of the polar regions because they were receding from view—but that did not matter because not much was happening there. Now we are moving to low-earth orbit constellations of much smaller satellites, a few hundred kilometres up, most of them in a polar orbit, with the earth revolving underneath them. That means that the data they collect and transmit is collected most efficiently in the Arctic regions. That is where the density of satellite coverage for LEO constellations is greatest. That is why Svalbard is now one of the most active centres for the collection of satellite data anywhere in the world and an intense scene of strategic competition. Those satellites collect earth observation data. They are also probably the best single fallback we have if we lose the cable transmission of data.