Nuclear Safeguards Bill (First sitting)

Alex Norris Excerpts

Committee Debate: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 31st October 2017 Public Bill Committees

[Trudy Harrison]

Q Thank you for coming here this morning, Dr Golshan. I understand that the ONR currently has the responsibility for safety and security at the Civil Nuclear Constabulary. I am keen to understand how the relationship would work with safeguards.

Dr Golshan: May I start by saying that we do not have the responsibility for CNC; we regulate civil nuclear security. We currently have a safeguards function, as set out in the Energy Act 2013, but it is not a regulatory function. The main purpose of that function is to facilitate the work of the International Atomic Energy Agency and Euratom in the UK, among other things. The Bill will give us the powers, on a par with safety and security, to regulate nuclear safeguards on civil nuclear sites.

[Alex Norris (Nottingham North) (Lab/Co-op)]

Q Dr Golshan, you have mentioned the sort of headcount you will need for inspectors. What is your current total establishment, and by how much do you think you will need to grow?

Dr Golshan: We have a small project team that helps us deliver this function. I have a project manager and a project lead, and we have interactions with our human resources department and our IT department, which in itself is a small group. We need to grow this project team in the first instance to enable the project to deliver and go forward. All in all, we have five key people in the project team—project manager, delivery lead, policy lead, myself and a subject matter expert—and the team overall has links with the HR department and so on, as I described. We will need to grow this project team to help us deliver when we come to 29 March 2019, and we are in the process of doing so.

[Ben Bradley (Mansfield) (Con)]

Q Can you tell us a bit about the ONR’s track record of delivering new regulation previously? Do you feel that you have the right relationships within the industry to deliver this new programme?

Dr Golshan: It is fair to say that this is unprecedented territory for us as far as the size of the job is concerned. In the past we have not had to establish a new function from afresh to this extent, but we have got experience of setting out and working with officials from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy—and previously the Department for Energy and Climate Change—to bring forward new regulation.

We are working closely with officials at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and we have engaged with the industry—I have had a number of meetings with the industry. We are explaining what we are doing, how far we have gone down this route and what there is left to do. We are working with all our stakeholders to make a success of this.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Chair]

Q Perhaps you could expand on what that proposal is.

Jonathan Leech: Obviously, the Government’s stated intent appears to be to replicate, as far as possible, the current safeguarding regulatory regime that we have in place with Euratom. In a sense, all we should be looking for in the Bill, as a piece of enabling legislation, is to see wording that allows that to happen. Our concern around the way that power is expressed is that it appears currently to be written more from the perspective of the IAEA voluntary offer safeguarding agreement text than the Euratom treaty text. You might argue it is a fairly subtle distinction, but if we are seeking to replicate what we have, I would suggest that a good place to start is the high-level requirements of the treaty, which talk in terms of not diverting from declared use, and those at least should be considered as an additional scope that would be brought within the power, rather than purely focusing on material being diverted from civil activities. Hence the wording that we have proposed in the note is rooted in the treaty and would not take anything away from current scope, but would merely ensure that it is within the power to replicate.

[Alex Norris]

Q This is probably a question to Rupert or Jonathan. You said that you watched the Second Reading with interest. You will have heard in that session that if we leave the EU, which we will, we will by definition have to leave Euratom. If Parliament was your client, would that be the guidance you would give it—that one decision necessitates the other?

Jonathan Leech: No.

Rupert Cowan: Absolutely not.

Jonathan Leech: There are obviously links between the two. There are statements in the treaty that article 50 does apply to the Euratom treaty, but there are sound legal arguments available that it is not an automatic consequence and in fact you have to follow a separate but similar process to exit Euratom. In a sense we have moved beyond that, to the extent that the withdrawal notice makes express reference to Euratom, so to the extent that there are two separate processes, we have already triggered both of them. That has maybe put us in a more difficult position in negotiating a potential extension period or remainder within Euratom, which would alleviate a lot of the concerns around the current two-year timetable, which creates some serious problems for the industry. The advice would be that you do not have to accept this and it may not be in your interests to do so.

Rupert Cowan: I would add, the Minister has made statements—

[The Chair]

Briefly, as we are starting to get outside the scope of the Bill.

Rupert Cowan: Fair enough.