The UK’s National Audit Office (NAO) has called on the government to address “a number of issues” that could undermine the UK’s ability to prepare for and respond effectively to a severe space weather emergency.
A severe space weather event could cause disruption to manned and unmanned aviation, satellite services and power.
Following its audit, the NAO said that the government has boosted the UK’s resilience to severe space weather by strengthening its forecasting capability and testing how it would respond to an event – but ongoing issues such as an incomplete cross-government understanding of how sectors plan to respond to an emergency need to be resolved.
In 2025-26, around GBP 6.7 million was invested in the Met Office Space Weather Operations Centre, and to date it has committed around GBP 300 million to the European Space Agency’s Vigil space weather mission.
However, the NAO found that limitations in scientific understanding and departmental planning, such as how short disruptions to global navigation satellite systems would affect transport mean that the government does not yet fully understand the full range of possible impacts. “As a consequence, the potential economic impact of a severe space weather event is also uncertain but in 2022 was estimated to be GBP 9 billion,” the NAO said.
The watchdog points out that forecasting continues to be complex, with the forecasting window ranging from no notice to 96 hours depending on the type of space weather, and the resilience of the UK’s space weather monitoring capability remains vulnerable.
“Roles and responsibilities for managing the risk remain unclear, accountabilities could be stronger, and the government has not set out clear outcomes for what it is looking to achieve,” the NAO said. “The Met Office has worked collaboratively with some sectors, for example the electricity sector, to develop specialist forecasts. But other sectors continue to find the technical information difficult to interpret and there is more to do to make forecasting information useful for government officials and industry.”
In February 2026, the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology commissioned updated response plans from departments, building on previous government work to create and gather information on response plans. The government has begun testing these plans, but the NAO found it has yet to run a full simulation exercise involving local responders. “Other government departments have carried out exercises, but there is no systematic learning from these,” the NAO said.
The audit also found that the Met Office has undertaken work to raise public awareness of space weather, and the government has an outline communications plan that it plans to revise and expand. But the NAO said it has not yet developed pre-agreed messages for the public in the event of an emergency, and recommended that the government do more to engage local responders and businesses to ensure its whole-of-society response is effective.
The NAO therefore calls on the government to:
- define what outcomes it is seeking and tests plans against a range of plausible scenarios when designing its new severe space weather preparedness strategy;
- work with the Met Office to decide what long-term forecasting capability and what level of resilience the UK requires; and
- develop a more detailed and precise whole-of-society approach, including a communications plan for UK businesses and citizens in the event of an emergency.
For more information
UK resilience to space weather report at the National Audit Office
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