Business Durham is the economic development Company for County Durham whose purpose is to encourage and stimulate business throughout the County and encourage investment, which in turn means generating meaningful work for Durham people.
Business Durham has been given an award of £50,000 by the UK Space Agency to assist local Companies to sell their skills and abilities to create opportunities through Space Research. There are a number of extremely high tech firms congregating in the North East, because of the work force and the excellent communications links with the rest of the UK and the wider world. The North East Technology Park (NETPark) to become an ‘incubator’ zone in which the high end businesses can develop. Those businesses will in turn generate revenue from Space activities that will benefit the community and economy of the North East, and of the UK as a whole. This inward revenue award will be used to stimulate exports of technology and is seed money to encourage greater initiatives to be brought forward by those firms.
It is said that the United Kingdom space industry could be worth somewhere in the region of £11 billion per year and the North East is keen to be a part of it, thanks to the North East Satellite Applications Centre of Excellence being at NETPark.
Simon Goon, Business Durham’s managing director, said: “This is a fantastic investment to help support the North East’s smaller businesses as they tap into the flourishing UK space sector – an industry which is going to be worth £40bn by 2030.
“We can help businesses explore the huge potential of this global sector and elevate their ideas to the next level.”
Colin Baldwin, UK Space Gateway Program Manager at the UK Space Agency, said: “North England, the Midlands and North Wales all have the potential to make a significant contribution to our thriving space sector.
UK Space Agency awards Business Durham
“There are opportunities for a range of companies developing innovative products that can match the needs of the space industry. The incubators at Glyndwr, Sci-Tech Daresbury and Business Durham will build upon the growing interests in space and the role it can play to support other sectors within their local areas.”
Good news has been like hen’s teeth in the North East, however, following the demise of our ‘black smoke’ industries the North East has shown remarkable resilience in building a huge amount of high caliber businesses, attracting Global industries due to the excellence of our work force, and producing the goods – excellent ones that have raised our profile around the World. The Space research and development could have no better home and this award and the subsequent investment is a fair reward and is most welcome.
