Lord Judd
Main Page: Lord Judd (Labour - Life peer)
Lord Judd
My Lords, clearly the demands of climate change mean that this issue has to be promoted to a top priority in government consideration and action. We have got to stop dithering and get on with it. If we are going to get on with it, there are several points which have to be addressed. The first is why we are not deliberating our energy policy more seriously than we do with a real drive for energy conservation. Are we just fatalist about the level of energy consumption and therefore trying to meet it, or do we have a policy on energy conservation, and how is that being pursued and resourced? Talking about further education, higher education and skills, how much effort is going into producing the people who can be expert and relevant in this field?
Next comes the issue of real cost. That has been well illustrated in what has been said already. We have to look at the long-term costs. We have to be very certain. I do not believe that there can be any total certainty, but we have to be as certain as we can be about what those real costs will be and stop shadow boxing. In that context, the real costs of the alternatives have to be evaluated. What is the competitive advantage? There are special dimensions to this, and it would be foolish to overlook them. There is safety, of course, and there is also security in an age of international terrorism and the rest. What we need to be clear about in these extra costs is exactly where the responsibility lies. From the outset, we have to be clear about what the taxpayer may be expected to fork out in the future and what the industry itself is expected to meet. There are some huge issues in that sphere, but we have to be clear about them. We cannot just drift into another example, like the banks, of de facto welfare capitalism in which when something goes wrong, taxpayers are expected to fill the bottomless pit with their taxes.
The noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, referred to waste. I simply say that I think it is irresponsible to move into the next generation of nuclear energy before we have demonstrated what we are going to do with the existing stock. This has immense implications for future generations for hundreds of years ahead. I cannot understand why in Britain we do not have a costed, carefully researched list of suitable sites for the storage of nuclear waste across the country as a whole—suitable geologically as well as on security grounds. Of course, voluntarism in this area matters, but voluntarism should come into operation in the context of what is clearly the best place and what are clearly the less good places in which this waste should be stored. I simply do not understand why that is not being done and I believe that it should be done as a matter of urgency.