Queen’s Speech

Lord Teverson Excerpts

Wednesday 28th June 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, one of the good things about general elections for those of us who are politically active, which would be the majority of people in this House, is that you get to places that you do not get to on other occasions. Although I spent most of the general election in Cornwall, where I live—not very successfully, as those opposite me will have noticed—I had one sortie out to Oxfordshire. I went to the constituency of Oxford West and Abingdon —a seat which I am delighted to say that my now honourable friend Layla Moran won. That was not due to me, but I had a very interesting meeting in Abingdon.

The meeting was made up of people who worked at the Culham research centre in Oxfordshire, which is one of the hearts of Euratom. I shall concentrate on that area during my five minutes. It was a mixed meeting. There were a number of non-UK EU citizens there—highly qualified scientists, mainly young—but it was predominantly UK citizens who worked there. They were—not distraught perhaps, but deeply sad that something to which they were completely dedicated, typically for scientists, was being undermined by a decision that they could not understand and which seemed completely political.

Why had that decision taken place? Euratom is not a part of the European Union, so the referendum did not include it. Yet they saw a Government who had somehow been gung-ho in saying, “If we are to throw out the baby of the European Union in a hard Brexit, then we’ll get out of the Euratom bathwater as well”. The scientists saw their very important world—the world of frontier nuclear science, which we see as important to us as a nation—as something that will potentially be destroyed.

I would like to ask the Government about some key areas, because this is not just some peripheral European organisation; it is central to a number of things that we can do in our economy and in science in the future. First, if we have no nuclear safeguarding authority to replace Euratom, which does all that work for the International Atomic Energy Agency and therefore for us, we will not be able to trade a lot of nuclear fuels internationally. In fact, if the United States traded with us it would actually be a criminal offence unless Congress enabled a new relationship with our safeguarding authority. I am pleased to see from the gracious Speech that a nuclear safeguarding Bill is coming along, but I remind the Government that just writing the legislation does not actually get us there. I would be very interested to understand what conversations we have had with the International Atomic Energy Agency to pave our way to that legislation becoming effective.

We will also be very dependent on Euratom as it continues. We have a project, which I think is the biggest in the world, called Hinkley C. We also have a number of nuclear power stations that will be decommissioned during the 2020s. We are completely reliant on French technology, and to a degree on French money, to ensure that happens. Will we have a nuclear co-operation agreement with Euratom?

Euratom itself has agreements with nine other countries that enable us to trade with them. The most important of those, in terms of fissile materials and all such areas, are Kazakhstan, the United States, Australia and Japan. Again, how are we to replace those agreements if we are not part of the European Union and cannot undertake agreements until we have withdrawn from it and agreed a withdrawal agreement from Euratom?

Then there are the perhaps more boring but important issues about the ownership of fissile material that is owned by Euratom. Are we resolving that? Are we starting to talk to Euratom about how we divide those property rights and the fissile materials that will be left within the UK when we leave? We also need procedures for export and import to make those nuclear co-operation agreements work. What will happen with those?

The other area I want to concentrate on, in my last few seconds, is that of research and development. In one of the briefings I received recently, I read that the Government had made an offer on the Culham JET research programme, which finishes at the end of next year, I believe. What will happen with being able to continue that? It is absolutely key to our future in this area, yet, as I read it, the Government seem to have said, “Well, Europe and Euratom can stay there”—very big of us—“and we will continue to take a fair share of the costs of that operation”. That offer seems to me to be eminently refusable—are we going to up our game on this?

If we do not resolve these issues, it could mean that our nuclear power stations can no longer operate, that we lose key staff in a really important area of scientific research and development, and that hospitals are unable to import—as they have to—isotopes that are required in certain medical procedures. All of that is real. It is not just about a cliff edge, it is about international rules that will make it a criminal offence or impossible for jurisdictions to trade with us. On that basis, I ask the Government to give this their complete concentration, and to make sure that we avoid this very different cliff edge and that our nuclear industry can move forward with confidence rather than the hesitation that it has at the moment.