Credit: Negative Space

Parliamentary committees have complained that ministers have “refused to answer” questions about the source of funding for the government’s £400m buyout of satellite firm OneWeb.

The 2020 acquisition saw the government partner with Indian telecoms firm Bharti to jointly acquire the London-based company for about £$1bn. The value for money of the deal, which came several months after the firm filed for bankruptcy, was questioned by civil servants, with ministers required to issue a ministerial direction formally overriding such concerns and rubber-stamping the buyout.

In a letter sent this week to chief security to the Treasury John Glen, parliament’s business select committee said that “it has proven very difficult to get information from government on this transaction” since it took place three years ago.

Such opacity is attributed “primarily [to] the involvement of Downing Street” in the acquisition, according to the missive, signed by committee chair Darren Jones.

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“This includes the committee’s attempts to get a clear answer on the source of the funds for the purchase of OneWeb,” he added. “Whilst the funding was, for accounting purposes, funnelled through BEIS accounts, the only answer the committee has had in response to questions about the source of the funds was that they came from a ‘general reserve’. There has been some suggestion that funding was allocated from a specific national security-related budget, for example, but the government has either refused to answer our questions or has merely replied with its ‘general reserve’ answer. This scrutiny process has therefore been inadequate and I would ask for better cooperation in future.”

This increased cooperation should begin by Glen answering the committee’s request for detail on government’s “procedures… for urgent investment decisions where full value-for-money assessments cannot be undertaken within a required timeframe” – as was the case with the OneWeb deal.

Copying in Meg Hillier, chair of spending watchdog the Public Accounts Committee, Jones also asked for information on whether the Treasury is “satisfied that those procedures and any subsequent monitoring are sufficient to safeguard the use of public money and whether the Treasury will now undertake a retrospective value for money assessment of the OneWeb transaction and publish the outcomes of that assessment”.

Glen is asked to respond to the heads of both committees by 15 May.

The acquisition of OneWeb came in light of government seeking post-Brexit options to ensure that the UK continues to have access satellite navigation and positioning systems. Following the country’s exit from the European Union, the UK has been shut out of the secure parts of the EU’s Galileo satnav network – which are designed for use by the emergency services and the military. The UK had already spent about £1.2bn on supporting the development of the Galileo at the time it was effectively booted out of the programme.