New estimates for the UK’s regional space workforce

Introduction

How many people work in the Scottish space sector? A quick look at the UK Space Agency’s most recent Size & Health report provides the answer: 6,404, or about 12% of the UK space workforce. 1

That’s surprising given that Scotland only makes up about 8% of the UK population. 2 Perhaps Scotland is punching above its weight?

Let’s look at some other estimates: about 8% of all space offices are based in Scotland, the proportion of Scottish respondents to the 2024 Space Census was 7% 3, about 10% of people in the Space Enterprise Community are based in Scotland, 4 the same for members of UKSEDS. 5 All closer to Scotland’s share of the population than to its supposed share of the space workforce.

Taking the number of space offices (also in Size & Health), we can estimate the average number of people working at an office in each region. London and Scotland stand out as having particularly large offices. London is always an outlier, but why would Scotland be?

The answer lies in our definition of the space sector. It’s a thorny question. What even is the space workforce? Should we only include ‘pure space’ companies building satellites, or also include users of satellite data?

The UK Space Agency (UKSA) uses a broad definition of the space workforce that encompasses about 52,000 people. That number includes direct-to-home broadcasting (DTH), the bit of the sector that provides satellite television directly to the public. This includes those working in customer service roles, for example in Sky’s call centres.

Size & Health estimates that about 40% of the UK’s space workforce, or about 21,000 people, work in DTH. It dominates the sector’s economic stats, and as a consumer-focused segment performs very differently to the rest of the industry. As a result national figures are often talked about in DTH and non-DTH contexts. The regional figures however are not broken down in this way.

To investigate the mystery of Scotland, we reached out to UKSA and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT). They kindly provided us with Size & Health 2023’s regional employment breakdown excluding Sky employees. All of Sky’s employment is counted in Size & Health as DTH, and it makes up about 96% of the total DTH employment, so we’re going to use Sky and DTH interchangeably in the rest of this article.

Splitting out DTH significantly changes our understanding of the sector. The DTH workforce is not spread out evenly across the country: it makes up around 60% of the space workforce of London, Scotland, the North East, and Yorkshire, about 20% in Wales, the Midlands, and the South West, and hardly anything in Northern Ireland, the East, and South East.

Sky employs over 4,400 people in Scotland. When we exclude them, Scotland's share of the space workforce halves from 12% to 6%. London’s share also shrinks substantially from 33% to 19%, while the East and South East grow.

Returning to the employees per site figure, excluding DTH employees brings London and Scotland back in line with the rest of the country, and reduces the total variance by about half.

Why does this matter?

The UK is deeply unequal. London and the South receive far more investment and enjoy higher wages and higher standards of living than the rest of the country. Scotland’s success in space was an indication that some of the ‘levelling up’ agenda might have been achieved. These new statistics suggest otherwise and show there is still a lot of work to be done.

UKSA and DSIT have been collecting Size & Health data since 1991, but have not previously published this regional DTH breakdown despite its importance. We are grateful to them for sharing this data with us, but it should be published every year.

And another thing

In addition to being oddly sized, Scotland’s space sector did a strange thing between Size & Health 2022 and 2023. It shrank, and by a lot. It fell by 25% from 8,568 to 6,404. Why? No explanation is provided. For comparison, this about 1.5 times larger than the 16% drop in Silicon Valley’s workforce between 2001 and 2002 in the aftermath of the dot-com crash. 6 In other words, this is a massive change and we should expect to have seen dozens of headlines about enormous layoffs at Scottish space companies. In July 2020, The Herald reported “a spate of redundancy and job severance scheme consultations effecting [sic] more than 1,000 [aerospace industry] workers”, 7 or less than half of the number that supposedly left the space sector alone.

Size & Health also reported that the space workforce in the East Midlands grew by 78%, in Northern Ireland by 135%, and in Wales by 169%, dramatic changes about which Size & Health is similarly silent. Even Harwell Space Cluster, which claims to be “Europe’s most concentrated cluster of […] fast growth space start-ups” reported an annual growth rate in employment of a mere 16% in 2019. 8 Even Space Forge’s meteoric growth can’t explain Wales gaining a thousand new space employees in a year.

These enormous regional swings have very little basis in reality, and we believe they are driven by sampling problems and changes to methodology.

Skills and workforce challenges are a major barrier to the growth of the sector, so it is vital to have clear, useful, and consistent definitions of what we mean by the space workforce. This is one of the recommendations in our Space Skills Roadmap 2030. Size & Health is considered to be authoritative, and is the benchmark against which most other space sector statistics are measured. It is widely quoted and informs government policy. Right now it gives a misleading picture of regional space employment, and that means activities and investments may end up being focused on the wrong places.

The good news is that the UK Space Agency is currently conducting a review of Size & Health to improve the quality of its numbers and make it more valuable to the industry. They will be reaching out to the sector to seek views later this year.

There is a silver lining for Scotland. Together Spire, Clyde Space, and Alba Orbital, all based in Glasgow, manufactured 71 satellites in the last three years. 9 That’s more than any country in Europe, bar Russia at 157. Of those, 115 were manufactured in Moscow, population 13.1 million, giving Moscow a satellites per 100,000 people score of 0.9, about the same as California. Glasgow on the other hand has a mere 630,000 people, allowing it to trounce its Russian rivals with a score of 11.3 satellites per 100,000 people.

So no, Scotland doesn’t have proportionally more space people than anywhere else in the UK, but it does produce a hell of a lot more satellites per head than anywhere else.