It is not one or two individuals
Each month of delay is salary for the entire workforce plus the cost of maintaining idle manufacturing and launch infrastructure. RocketLab charge $7.5M for 200kg to SSO. A startup without RocketLab's reliability record is not going to sell at that price. It would not take many months to exceed the launch cost of one small satellite in a ride share.
In real life, small rockets are a tiny niche. The most common launches are for constellations where you need to put a pile of satellites on a big rocket to divide the price down. The next step down are the ride shares to sun synchronous orbit (SSO). SpaceX launch two or three per year carrying over 100 satellites at a price selected to take launches away from every small rocket provider. There are national launches eg China will only launch on a Chinese rocket, India will only launch on an Indian rocket. All of NASA and DoD will go on US rockets. The bigger satellites going to GTO will take a Falcon 9 (or the DoD will pay through the nose to keep ULA in business). There are the occasional oddities that can ride share with Starlink. That pretty much leaves a dozen or so small satellites per year going to an unusual orbit that cannot take a ride share to SSO.
Launch companies with a hope of staying in business are developing a medium sized reusable constellation launcher. Even that has a big risk: Starship's target launch price is what you would currently pay for a RocketLab Electron (we are years from Starship launch cost going under its target price). 1000x the payload mass for the same price is going to remove the mass constraint that contributes much of the cost of a satellite. When a 'small' satellite has a mass 1000kg to eliminate the cost of mass optimisation small launch vehicles will only be used for a couple of national prestige launches per year.
I am not going to take launch license issues that seriously until I see a business plan that will compete in the foreseeable future. These days it is rare to find one that can compete in the current market. I think Virgin Orbit (not to be confused with Virgin Galactic) is on a path through bankruptcy intended separate the assets and IP from existing debt.
If the UK (or the EU) wanted a competitive launch industry it would have to fund a pile of small launch payloads to be launched on UK (EU) rockets just like NASA and the DoD do in the US.