European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Lord Vaizey of Didcot and Dominic Grieve

Committee: 7th sitting: House of Commons
Wednesday 13th December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Vaizey]

I bow to my right hon. and learned Friend’s wisdom and experience on that point. I am a consensus merchant and simply thought there might be a way forward, but I totally understand that votes might have to be exercised tonight in order to stiffen the Government’s backbone to provide a solution. But nevertheless it has always been the case proposed by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield that the Government will have an opportunity on Report potentially to alter his amendment.

[Mr Grieve]

If they can justify it.

[Mr Vaizey]

If they can justify it, of course.

The second part of my remarks, which will be as brief as possible because so much time has been taken up, is about amendment 300, standing in my name, which has the largest number of signatories of any amendment to this Bill. I am astonished that only four of them are Conservatives, but I think that reflects the standing in which I am held in my own party; I could not even persuade the leader of the rebel alliance, my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield, to sign my Euratom amendment, and I really do not want my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset to talk about bad law when he comes to look at it.

The point of the amendment is simply to put the issue of Euratom under parliamentary scrutiny, and I note the comments made by the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford) in her excellent speech about the importance of Euratom in our medical life, and her own real experience at the chalkface in her extraordinary work. So Euratom is not an esoteric issue; it affects us all. It has been debated in the House before and I shall not spend a lot of time talking about how extraordinarily successful our nuclear industry is. My own personal interest comes from the fact that although Culham is not in my constituency, many of my constituents work there, and it depends on Euratom. I thank the Government for last week’s announcement of £86 million of investment in Culham for two new centres of excellence for the testing of components and for fuel storage; that is a real vote of confidence in Culham.

The point, of course, about Euratom is that nobody voted to leave it. Euratom was not in the European Union Referendum Act 2015, and was not on the ballot; it falls under a separate treaty. So the British people did not have a chance to have a referendum on our membership of Euratom.

The reason we are leaving Euratom is technical. Legal advice, which we have not seen, deems Euratom to be inextricably linked to the European Union and therefore an article 50 notice would be defective if it did not include Euratom. However, the mood of the Government and, I think, the House is that we are leaving Euratom on a technicality, not because we object to being governed by Euratom. There is no mood among the general population to leave Euratom as far as I am aware, and I think that only one hon. Member has managed to stand up and say that there is a plausible reason to leave it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Grieve]

I see the Solicitor General nodding. However, the fact that it might have legal implications does not mean that it is not a very desirable objective.

[Mr Vaizey]

The implications of leaving Euratom, some of which have already been identified by the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire, also extend to our nuclear industry, which provides 20% of this country’s energy. At the moment, we simply cannot move nuclear material around unless we are members of Euratom. So when we leave Euratom, we will have to have, in effect, a Euratom-style arrangement to allow us to move goods around. “Goods” can mean a variety of things. We imagine highly radioactive canisters being moved in special trains at the dead of night, but the movement of goods also involves mundane things such as heat pumps, motors, spares and other components, all of which, because they are part of the civil nuclear ecosystem, have to be moved under the terms of these treaties.

Euratom covers not only objects but the freedom of movement of people. We depend on our membership of Euratom for a nuclear power industry, for our medical industry—isotopes have been mentioned—and for the Joint European Torus at Culham, where Britain has done extraordinarily well. Huge advantages have been made in robotics and other sciences, and there are £500 million-worth of contracts already in ITER, the successor to Culham, thanks to the expertise we have built up here.

Let me make it clear that, throughout this process of our technical move to leave Euratom, Ministers have been absolutely brilliant in engaging with me and other hon. Members who share my concerns and have similar interests. They have bent over backwards to do what they can to accommodate our concerns. Looking forward, we need Ministers to give us clarity on a number of issues. We need nuclear co-operation agreements with other countries—the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan and possibly the European Union as well—and they need to be in place by March 2019. These agreements can be complex, and they can depend on the legislation in other legislatures. For example, the US Congress would have to pass a new nuclear co-operation agreement with us. We will also need a new safeguards regime, and this will come in through the Nuclear Safeguards Bill as a contingency, although I understand that the Government might want Euratom to continue to cover the safeguarding role.