Overview
- Science minister Patrick Vallance announced the package at the Royal Institute of Navigation’s PNT Leadership Seminar on 19 November.
- Funding is allocated as £71m for a national eLoran programme, £68m for the National Timing Centre, £13m for GNSS interference monitoring, and £3m for space-based time transfer R&D.
- The eLoran programme will deliver terrestrial positioning, navigation, and timing across land, air, and sea that is independent of satellites and resistant to jamming or spoofing.
- The National Physical Laboratory will expand the National Timing Centre to create the UK’s first nationally distributed time infrastructure to support resilient telecoms, finance, and advanced communications.
- Interference monitoring and time-transfer research will provide early warning of GNSS threats and develop timing independent of GPS or other GNSS, with the government citing £1.4bn in estimated losses from a 24-hour outage.