Research and analysis

Report: The economic impact on the UK of a disruption to GNSS

The report assesses the benefits of GNSS to a wide range of sectors of the UK economy and assesses the economic impact various levels of disruption to GNSS.

Documents

The economic impact on the UK of a disruption to GNSS (pdf)

Request an accessible format.
If you use assistive technology (such as a screen reader) and need a version of this document in a more accessible format, please email [email protected]. Please tell us what format you need. It will help us if you say what assistive technology you use.

Details

This report is an update of a publication produced in 2017 examining the benefits of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) to the UK economy, the impact of a loss of GNSS for a 7 day period, the impact of a loss of GNSS for 24 hours and two more localised disruptions to GNSS. 

The report examines seven priority sectors: Agriculture, Aviation, Emergency Services, Finance, Maritime, Rail, and Road, as well as providing a more general update of all other sectors covered in the previous study. The impact on these sectors was considered to have changed significantly since 2017, as there is greater use of GNSS in those sectors and, in some cases, better data available to estimate impacts. 

The benefits of GNSS to the UK economy were estimated to be £13.62 billion per annum.  

The impact of a loss of GNSS for 7-days was estimated to be £7.64 billion and economic impact of a loss for 24 hours was estimated to be £1.42 billion. 

The sectors that accounted for the greatest proportion of the impact were Emergency Services, Maritime and Road Transport, which between them account for 87.6% of the losses from a 7-day outage.

Updates to this page

Published 18 October 2023

Sign up for emails or print this page