Making the Market - How Clever Procurement Can Beat Pledges

The UK space sector has a disclosure problem. Awareness has improved, values are shifting, and in some areas the technical means to report are in place. Yet across much of the sector, and particularly among privately listed companies, meaningful public disclosure remains the exception, and there are some simple ways to change that.

The foundational frameworks are developing and the organisational capability to report meaningfully on sustainability, safety and environmental performance already exist across a significant part of the sector. The missing carrot is the commercial incentive to make that information public.

The Space Leaderboard assesses sustainability reporting and disclosure across the international space sector and found that approximately 78% of publicly listed space companies disclose to some meaningful standard. Among privately listed companies however, that figure falls to approximately 6%. A 72-point gap, in a sector that is growing rapidly, launching at increasing cadence, and operating infrastructure that underpins critical national infrastructure across positioning, navigation, timing, communications and Earth observation.

The standard responses to this kind of gap are awareness campaigns, voluntary pledges and sector-wide commitments. They exist and have their place. Whilst they arguably nudge culture over time, they do not move the majority at the rate of change needed in space. A majority shift occurs when the commercial case starts to shift first.

UK government procurement is one of the most direct levers available for shifting that case, and it does not require primary legislation to use it. The mechanism is straightforward and we have been bleating about it for a little while now.

When government departments, agencies and grant-awarding bodies assess bids and applications from space sector organisations, they typically ask about sustainability plans such as end-of-life plans, or debris mitigation plans; environmental policy or statement of environmental harms and mitigations; and/or decarbonisation strategies as part of the award criteria. This is already happening in some form or another, across a range of procurement frameworks. The adjustment being proposed here is modest and simple yet represents consequential upgrade.

• First, require that the documents submitted in response to those criteria are not produced for the procurement alone. A sustainability plan that lives in a submission portal and is never seen again does not change how an organisation operates or how the entire sector is perceived. The requirement should be that the same document, or a substantively equivalent public version, is hosted on the organisation's own website with a persistent and discoverable link.

  
  

• Second, award additional marks for public discoverability. This means documentation that is discoverable through a standard search, manually navigable and accessible from the homepage, and clearly dated and maintained. The difference between a document that technically exists and one that is genuinely accessible is non-trivial and the scoring criteria really ought to reflect it.

• Third, make discoverability a governance check through the life of the contract. A quarterly or annual review meeting with confirmation that the documentation remains live, current and accessible creates a maintenance obligation.  It helps to prevent the scenario whereby a document is produced for the application for award purpose and is allowed to quietly lapse. It also creates a record of organisational commitment over time rather than a snapshot at the point of a bid.

A common objection raised against public disclosure is it creates competitive risk. Organisations worry that making their sustainability performance visible exposes weaknesses that competitors can exploit or that customers will penalise. That concern is somewhat understandable, but it is not well supported by the evidence.

Organisations that disclose most extensively are not observably suffering for it. They are winning contracts, attracting investment and operating competitively. The commonly stated concern that disclosure creates competitive disadvantage does not appear to materialise in practice for those who have tested it. Smaller organisations are not disclosing, but neither are they observably gaining commercial ground over those that do. The competitive advantage of opacity, if it ever existed, is not visible right now. 

The space sector has historically preferred to remain behind the camera rather than become the subject of it. Procurement scoring could change the incentive without waiting for the culture to change first. Mariana Mazzucato speaks of governments making and shaping markets, not just fixing them. Well, let’s get creative.

The broader benefit of this approach is the demonstration effect it creates over time. If the organisations winning UK government contracts are visibly those with publicly discoverable sustainability documentation, and if those organisations are not suffering for it, the perception that disclosure is commercially risky weakens from the evidence of the market itself. It feels to us that this could represent a more durable shift than any awareness campaign or voluntary pledge.  

The UK Sustainability Reporting Standard means that some change is likely from April 2027, but it’ll come with a terrestrial focus and only trap the largest organisations. Government does not need to mandate disclosure across the whole space sector at once. It needs to make disclosure the commercially rational choice for organisations competing for its own contracts. Applying the Mazzucato make and shape markets logic here, the procurement lever is a deliberate act of market design, creating the conditions in which transparency becomes the default rather than the exception. The rest follows, and it follows in the shape that works for everyone who depends on space remaining a resource worth having.

#SpaceSustainability #SpaceLeadership #SpaceGrowth

Graphic Design by Victoria Beall