Shared Skies: Public Trust, Trade-offs and the Future of BVLOS Drone Integration in the UK

Overall, there are mixed perceptions of BVLOS drone use in the UK and unsurprisingly attitudes vary by use case. Whilst there is in places a cautious optimism around emerging drone uses in the UK, this tends to be where the wider public benefits are more tangible or drones are seen as serving a specific social or public sector need. This optimism is more evident for use cases where publics see societal benefits e.g. support for emergency services, more convenient access to services for those in rural areas, and supporting environmental monitoring. For some use cases this picture is less clear cut. For instance, whilst commercial delivery drones are seen as the least socially beneficial use case overall in our surveys, when we examine this across regions/locations, they are more likely to be seen as responding to a need and therefore are perceived as being more socially beneficial in rural, semi-rural, or remote areas. On the other hand, there are also important regional or location-contingent differences in terms of support for urban commercial drone deliveries – with support for this use case being highest in London. Understandably, not only is public support use-case specific, but location- and community- specific. However, whilst seeing some potential benefits, our survey respondents have identified a number of potential drawbacks and our qualitative research participants have been engaged in nuanced conversations around the trade-offs between potential benefits, social need and drawbacks.

UK publics’ primary top-level concerns focus on cyber security, the potential for drones to be used in criminal activity, impacts on wildlife, privacy, and various aspects of safety (in air and on-ground). Notably, noise has consistently not been the top concern across our qualitative and quantitative data collection. A further, and arguably more fundamental, finding is that publics do not evaluate drone use cases in isolation. When asked to reason about medical, police and commercial delivery drone use together, as parts of a single emerging system, support does not simply accumulate from the most popular use cases outward. Instead, a meaningful proportion of the public who recognise clear benefits in specific applications nonetheless judge that the overall balance of benefits and drawbacks is unfavourable once the full system is considered, and association with less trusted or less clearly necessary applications – such as some commercial delivery uses that were viewed as more frivolous – can actively undermine support for more beneficial ones, including medical and emergency use. This finding directly challenges assumptions underpinning much current “drones for good” communication, and indicates that public trust must be built and maintained at the level of the system as a whole, not secured use case by use case.

Taken together, our findings describe a public that is broadly supportive, engaged and discerning, rather than simply optimistic or resistant – public support is real, and for some uses cases strong, but conditional on transparency, proportionality, genuine accountability, cross-sector coordination, and meaningful involvement in how these systems are designed and deployed. On this basis, we set out five recommendations in Section 5 below:

Establish transparent and accountable oversight structures, closing current gaps between regulators and creating genuine mechanisms for citizen input and establishing new oversight mechanisms where existing bodies were not designed to cover the range of concerns, issues or risks that emerging drone systems and services present.
Communicate honestly about the full balance of benefits, risks and drawbacks as a system, rather than relying on a generalised “drones for good” narrative.
Deliver early and meaningful public engagement that feeds into real decisions at both local and national levels.
Ensure communication and engagement is sensitive to local and demographic context, without treating any community or group as homogeneous.
Invest in continued, independent research to track attitudes and inform policy as BVLOS operations scale up.

The window to act on these recommendations is open now, while operations are scaling, but will narrow as BVLOS drone use becomes routine.