Alan Whitehead
Main Page: Alan Whitehead (Labour - Southampton, Test)Westminster Hall is an alternative Chamber for MPs to hold debates, named after the adjoining Westminster Hall.
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John Robertson
The hon. Gentleman makes a fair point, which he has made many times. It has been said on many occasions that no subsidy will be given. Indirect subsidy is a different thing; it would be about what was happening with the carbon price in European markets and so on. We can never say never about anything, but the Labour Government said that they would not give any subsidy, and that it was down to the companies to cover the cost of not only building plants but dismantling them at the end of their life cycle. I hope that that answers the hon. Gentleman’s question.
When the loan to Forgemasters was announced in March, it was clear that it would make the plant one of two in the world—the point that my hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich East (Mr Watson) made—able to make large forgings for the nuclear energy industry. Apart from creating employment opportunities and highly skilled jobs, it would lead to international order opportunities for the product. Those of us who have been involved in nuclear energy know that a number of nuclear stations are being planned all over the world. It does not come as a surprise to me, although it will to some, to hear that even Sweden is jumping on the bandwagon. As we speak, people all over the world are tackling the issues of security of supply and the need for a base load that includes nuclear. On that basis, it is essential that the Government look again at the decision. We need world leaders, and the Sheffield plant, with the investment, would have an opportunity second to none.
I do not feel the need to rehearse the concern about climate change and emissions targets; we have expressed it many times. However, I seek assurances from the Government about their intent. It is vital that we hear at first hand what position Ministers at the Department of Energy and Climate Change and the Prime Minister will take not just on climate change but on nuclear power. I have some concerns about their policy on new build. The Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change has long been completely and unequivocally opposed to nuclear build. He has said:
“No private sector investor has built a nuclear power station anywhere in the world without lashings of government subsidy since Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. The World Bank refuses to lend on nuclear projects because of the long history of overruns.
Our message is clear, No to nuclear, as it is not a short cut, but a dead end. Yes to energy saving, yes to renewables, and yes to a sustainable energy future.”
That view—that nuclear power is not the answer to future energy needs—is the view, of course, of the Secretary of State.
On Friday 12 May 2006, the Secretary of State said, responding to an affirmation by the then Secretary of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for South Shields (David Miliband), that the Government were considering a new generation of nuclear power stations:
“While Mr Miliband’s acknowledgment of the scale of the climate change challenge is welcome, his comments on nuclear power are worrying.”
He went on to say:
“Not only does nuclear cause a great threat to the environment through the large amounts of waste produced, but it is also economically unviable.
The Government intends to use private investment to fulfil our future energy needs. However, since the Chernobyl disaster, no nuclear power station has been built anywhere in the world without huge amounts of government subsidy.”
That is the point that the hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes) was making earlier. Such statements cause problems for those of us who want a balanced energy policy, because it is the Secretary of State making them, and one would expect him to be writing the policy.
I want to quote Melanie Phillips of the Daily Mail, although it is not a paper that I quote very often, and is not known to be a friend of mine—
John Robertson
As my hon. Friend says, I shall do so just this once. The Secretary of State’s former colleague at The Guardian highlighted the dilemma of the coalition when she wrote:
“Or look at the farce about to play out in the energy ministry. To stave off Britain’s looming power crisis, the Tories are committed to building more nuclear power stations.
Yet the new Lib Dem Energy Secretary Chris Huhne is viscerally hostile to nuclear energy. So to stop the lights from going out in Britain, Mr Cameron has apparently given the Tory junior energy minister Charles Hendry responsibility for civil nuclear power.”
I have great respect for the Minister. We both served on the Select Committee on Energy and Climate Change, as did several other hon. Members who are here—I thought I was at a Select Committee meeting when I came into the Chamber. I think I can say that the Minister and I have been singing from the same hymn sheet for some years, even if that did upset the Front Benchers of our respective parties. Melanie Phillips continued:
“But with Mr Huhne so opposed, is it not all too likely that Mr Hendry’s boss will find ways of kicking the nuclear power station programme into the long grass—thus provoking a possible nuclear explosion in the energy department?”
No pun intended.
I know that I should not believe everything that I read in the Daily Mail, or other media, for that matter, but will the Minister give this House an assurance that nuclear new build will go ahead, that the Secretary of State has changed his stance, and that the Secretary of State’s complete dismissal of the building of any new nuclear power stations has been sacrificed for his present position?
Dr Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test) (Lab)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North West (John Robertson) on securing this debate. It is, of course, a debate about Government policy on new nuclear; we are not talking about the overall advisability of going down the nuclear route. My view remains that nuclear power is not renewable. We have no nuclear fuel in or around the UK and I have my views on that subject. However, Government policy on new nuclear is the important issue that we need to concentrate on right now.
In that context, the Minister has an enormous responsibility on his shoulders. I, too, have a great regard for him and for his skills in tackling these matters. However, he will need at least the skill of those responsible for putting in and removing the nuclear cores from Three Mile Island to keep the coalition on track as far as its policy is concerned, because although the provisional wing of the coalition is in for this debate, the official wing is apparently locked into Government policy on nuclear, in respect of the decisions that will need to be made as far as the Department of Energy and Climate Change is concerned.
Of course, we have clarity about what those decisions will consist of—indeed, we had that clarity in a speech that the Minister made to the Nuclear Industry Forum very recently. In that speech, he stated:
“We will keep the fast-track process for major infrastructure, but planning decisions will be made by Ministers thereby ensuring democratic accountability”.
There is a national policy statement on nuclear. Incidentally, the new Government are going to take that statement apart and put it together again, which I think will ensure further delays in the process. Among all the national policy statements that have come out, the statement on nuclear is unique in that it is site-specific. We have already heard mention this morning of the inclusion or exclusion in that statement of a particular site at Dungeness; in total, 10 sites have been identified in the statement.
If that is to happen as far as those sites are concerned, the decision taken by the Minister will mean that he will have to frank each of those sites and so will, among other things, give an enormous use value to those people who are then commissioned to develop them. The Minister will have to take a positive decision; he cannot remove himself from it.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Hartlepool (Mr Wright) mentioned, we will therefore have the spectacle of an agreement that appears to suggest that the Liberal Democrats can maintain their opposition to nuclear power while permitting the Government to bring forward the national planning statement for ratification. But that same Minister, in agreeing to that national planning statement, will specifically have to frank those sites, thereby allowing those particular nuclear stations to be developed.
Dr Whitehead
I was just going to reflect on that issue very briefly. As the Minister mentioned in his recent speech to the Nuclear Industry Forum, these decisions will come before Parliament. Presumably, therefore, the Minister who has made the decisions will be in the position of abstaining during votes on them. That will be an interesting piece of choreography, if the policy is to go ahead.
In his recent speech to the Nuclear Industry Forum, the Minister also emphasised that there will be no cost to the public purse as a result of the new nuclear programme. We need a little more clarification of what that actually means. In the past, one of the reasons why potential builders of nuclear power stations said that they might go ahead with nuclear build was that their clear underlying view was that they really did not believe that the new proposals would present no cost to the public purse.
It is one thing to say that there should be a floor price for carbon—that would not be a cost to the public purse, but generic assistance for all forms of low-carbon energy—but there is also the question of subsidising or giving guarantees of last resort on insurance, waste and storage, and of giving assistance on how all that works. Those are subsidies. If the Government are saying out of one side of their mouth that there will be no subsidies but out of the other side that, actually, there will be subsidies in several areas, that may be the way forward that they wish to assume as far as their policy is concerned. However, if they really do mean that there will be no subsidy from the public purse, there will also be no timetable for the build of new nuclear.
That is the crucial issue that we need to face in respect of future policy. If there is no subsidy at all from the public purse, a company may come forward and build a new nuclear power station, two or three companies may come forward and build two or three new nuclear power stations, or perhaps no one will come forward to build a new nuclear power station. We cannot easily afford that uncertainty, given our energy supply situation.
The previous Government’s timetable for the arrival of the first new nuclear power station was 2017-18. My hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North West mentioned that potential date today. Interestingly, a policy document issued in 2007 by the then Department of Trade and Industry, “New nuclear power generation in the UK: Cost benefit analysis”, gave a different date—the early 2020s—for the arrival of the first new nuclear power station. Indeed, several industry analysts and others suggest that a realistic date is more likely to be in the mid-2020s.
That is important because, by that date, some 8 GW of coal-fired power stations, 3 GW of oil-fired power stations and 7 GW of nuclear power stations will have gone out of commission—for various reasons, including the large combustion plant directive, the age of the plant and the difficulty of maintaining or extending the life of nuclear power stations. That capacity will definitely be out of the system, so the question is what we do in the meantime to replace it. If no nuclear power stations are likely to come on stream until the mid-2020s, it will have to be replaced by other means.
Damian Collins
Does the hon. Gentleman share my regret that the previous Government did not get into the timetabling much sooner? We should have developed the process much earlier.
Dr Whitehead
Personally, that is not a source of regret to me, but there certainly is an argument that, because of the long-term scale of the planning, if one were to develop a range of new nuclear power stations to replace power stations as they ran down, replacement should be on that basis: as they run down. However, successive Governments have not taken that view on nuclear power; it was not only the previous Government for whom it was not an issue. However, we are in a position where like-for-like renewal would mean an enormous fleet of new power stations coming on stream at an early stage.
If that does not happen, base-load power, which is so important for our energy economy, is likely to be replaced by other means such as carbon capture and storage-fitted coal-fired power stations or—the Committee on Climate Change recently wrote to the Government to emphasise this—CCS-fitted gas-fired power stations. That would then be a new generation of base load, on the back of which new nuclear power would have to compete.
If new nuclear power has not been planned in any way, it will have to compete with that new form of base load, and whether it can compete on price for its power will be entirely determined by whether there is a subsidy for new nuclear power or whether there is some form of carbon pricing that enables nuclear power, at the point at which it comes in, to compete effectively against other forms of power. The time scale is crucial as far as new nuclear power is concerned.
That is the central issue for this country’s future energy policy. The challenge that we face is to keep the lights on, to replace an enormous amount of generating capacity—not just base-load, but other forms as well—and to ensure that that generating capacity is low carbon for the low-carbon economy that we must move towards. Above all, that needs planning. Planning is needed to ensure that that happens over a period of time.
For the new Government to announce a policy that says, in essence, that there will be no planning as far as new energy supplies are concerned seems perverse, given the imperatives ahead of us. Whether we plan to have a fleet of CCS-fitted power generators, large-scale renewables—wind, wave and tide, and large deep-sea wind arrays—or a new generation of nuclear reactors to provide energy, we have to ensure that there is planning at some stage.
I am concerned that the new Government’s announcements in their early days about how they will manage the energy economy, and what they are doing in respect of national policy statements, the Infrastructure Planning Commission and nuclear power, appear to be moving away from ensuring that we plan our energy economy so that we can keep the lights on for the next 50 years.