New Nuclear Power

Debate between David Morris and Martin Horwood

Thursday 7th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Martin Horwood]

The signatories to the motion have included the Public Accounts Committee in it, but the hon. Lady makes a good case for perhaps extending that level of scrutiny to her own Committee. Of course because there is commercial sensitivity about some of these negotiations, it would be possible for those Committees to meet in private, as other Committees of this House do when dealing with sensitive subjects.

As I was saying, like RWE and E.ON before it, Centrica has decided that it is not going to touch these new nuclear plans with a bargepole—and it is not hard to see why. I do not know of a nuclear power station anywhere in the world that has been completed on time, on budget and without public subsidy. The new third-generation pressurised water reactors planned for the UK—sometimes called European pressurised reactors or EPRs—are already in deep trouble elsewhere. The Olkiluoto plant in Finland was begun in 2005 and should have gone on line in 2009. The latest estimate is that it will not be generating power before 2015, at least six years late. The first cost estimate was €3.7 billion, but now that has risen to €8 billion. Construction in Flamanville in France began in 2007. The Flamanville facility is now four years late and counting, while the costs have escalated even further and faster than those in Finland, from an original guess of €3.3 billion, according to Le Monde, to the €8.5 billion announced just in December. One French commentator said that this latest announcement undermined the credibility of EPRs as a technology export, and Centrica was obviously listening.

Will anyone take Centrica’s place? EDF is apparently talking to partners it has worked with in China, but I would just warn the Secretary of State that, according to the recent Nuclear Materials Security Index report, China ranks 29th among the group of 32 nuclear nations on nuclear security and materials transparency. Given wider security—

[David Morris (Morecambe and Lunesdale) (Con)]

rose—

[Martin Horwood]

I am sorry but I cannot give way because of the time limit.

Given wider security and international relations concerns, it would seem to be worth thinking twice, just as the Americans have recently done, about allowing Chinese companies to take a major stake in any strategically important British energy supply projects.

Hitachi stepped in to replace E.ON and RWE on the other projected new nuclear plants, but Hitachi has only taken an option on UK new build. Its proposed advanced boiling water reactor design is still perhaps some four years from regulatory approval and Hitachi, too, is waiting on the strike price negotiations.

More and more research is questioning the cost-effectiveness of nuclear. The Energy Fair group of energy consultants and academics has stripped out all subsidies and says that the real cost of nuclear power is at least £200 per MWh, which is much more than the cost of offshore wind power at £140 per MWh or that of onshore wind power at less than £90 MWh. If EDF has done similar sums—there have been rumours in the industry of asks as high as £165 per MWh for the strike price—that raises the extraordinary possibility that nuclear power, a mature and not very competitive industry started in 1956, might be asking for a strike price comparable with or even higher than that of the newly emerging wind industry. Frustratingly, even Parliament does not know whether that is the case.

Finally, I come to the rather obvious point that nuclear is a fossil-fuel technology. If the worldwide investment in nuclear continues in China and elsewhere, despite all these risks, the price of uranium also will inevitably rise, making nuclear here even more uneconomic. Nuclear sceptics may have a very unlikely ally in this debate. The Treasury’s levy control framework, which caps the costs that can be added to consumers’ bills, currently specifies a figure of £2.6 billion a year. Tom Burke, writing in The Guardian, cites estimates that the cap would have to rise to £12.5 billion or more to provide 16 GW of nuclear power by 2025. As he says:

“Anyone who thinks that the Treasury will agree to a levy cap this large is dreaming.”

The risk, of course, is that support for nuclear will therefore squeeze out possible support for renewables.

Let me remind hon. Members on both sides of the House that the coalition agreement in May 2010 promised

“the replacement of existing nuclear power stations provided... that they receive no public subsidy.”

Agreed coalition policy was restated by the former Secretary of State in the annual energy statement a few months later:

“new nuclear can go ahead so long as there is no public subsidy.”—[Official Report, 27 July 2010; Vol. 514, c. 868.]

He did not say, “no unfair subsidy” or, “no unjustified subsidy”; he said, “no subsidy whatsoever”.

Liberal Democrats and Greens have long opposed nuclear power. But Conservative Members, with their strong commitment to sound finance and their horror of unjustified subsidies, should be alarmed too, even if they reject Électricité de France’s accusation of jingoism against the hon. Member for Bracknell (Dr Lee), who dared to question the cost-efficiency of adding our own subsidy to that of the French taxpayer. And Labour MPs should remember the mantra that their Government maintained throughout many long hours of debate on their last Energy Bill, which I remember because I was a shadow environment spokesperson; again, the line was, “No public subsidy”.

The request in this motion is modest. It seeks not the instant abandonment—

Illegal Music Downloading

Debate between David Morris and Martin Horwood

Tuesday 13th December 2011 Commons Chamber

[David Morris]

I thank my hon. Friend for that information, and for the educational measures that he has introduced through his “Rock the House” campaign, which is gaining support across the nation and making Members of Parliament engage with the youth of today.

Today websites such as Spotify give a legal alternative to illegal downloading, but how do we ensure that people go to those sites rather than illegal ones? That raises serious questions and problems.

[Martin Horwood (Cheltenham) (LD)]

The hon. Gentleman was understanding about the fact that most young people who initially indulged in the activity were not criminals. However, does he believe that the fact that the BPI has from time to time acted in such a heavy-handed way with young people—sometimes even with their families, who had almost no connection with the downloading—has somewhat undermined its public support for very real concerns?

[David Morris]

I thank my hon. Friend for that comment. The BPI’s response may have been knee-jerk at the time, but as I have tried to set out, no real legal alternative is coming through quickly enough.

Search engines are understandably full of illegal sites. That is not the fault of the search engine providers; their spiders trawl the internet and automatically add new sites. Most of us in the House have already experienced that, because our websites are largely ignored until, after a few weeks or months, automated systems at the search engine level find them. Suddenly people start to visit our sites, so those sites are added to search engines without anyone at the search engine ever having looked at them in the first place.

Everyone accepts that creating search engines by any method other than automation is more or less impossible. That means that we then have to ask search engines to remove pages that sell or trade in illegal material. Google allows anyone who has had their copyright infringed to send it up to 10,000 pages a day to be removed. Groups such as the PRS regularly use this service, and say that Google has removed offending pages within four hours. That in itself—I can say in response to my hon. Friend the Member for Hove (Mike Weatherley)—is a step in the right direction by the PRS. The service is pretty impressive given the number of pages that have been removed, but it is also laborious for both parties. There is no obvious way to streamline the process, although I understand that discussions are now ongoing. And while the page is on the search engines it is very hard to know the difference between legitimate and illegitimate sites. Seventy-five per cent. of consumers admit to being confused.

Clearly, better education of young people is needed. I am chairman of the all-party group on media literacy. The aim of media literacy is to go into schools and teach young people how to function in this modern-day media environment, where claims made by advertisers and websites may be false. A group called Media Smart goes into schools with that aim and does a marvellous job, the BPI has a scheme called the Music Matters badge to educate consumers, and there are other schemes. However, a full programme on media literacy has not been rolled out, and is we must address that, as the internet is now so integral to modern life. The PRS suggests that we initiate a traffic light system whereby pages are rated green or red depending on whether they are legitimate. That scheme has some merit and could be considered at an industry level.

However, the fear shared across the industry is that legitimate sites will be wrongly accused of being illegal, so that perfectly legal sites are taken off search engines. Flagging sites as red could even open up search engines to legal action. We need to strike a balance between protecting search engines from this litigation and ensuring that they are not cavalier about taking down sites with no evidence. We must target sites that are built only to trade in unlawfully obtained music and are repeat high-volume offenders. The Internet Service Providers Association points out that it is hard to make companies the judge and the jury, as they may not have the expertise to arbitrate on such matters.

We must also ensure that advertisers do not place adverts on websites that trade in illegal content. All too often the offending sites are given an air of legitimacy by syndicated adverts from mainstream companies. Again, this is hard to combat, but advertisers must continue in this work. The Digital Economy Act 2010 empowers Ofcom to force internet service providers to reduce speeds for persistent offenders, and it may even suspend their accounts for short periods. Failure to comply with Ofcom leaves ISPs open to a fine of up to £250,000. The key point is that no one is expecting vast swathes of people to fall foul of these threats to reduce speeds or suspend accounts. Those are a last resort for use against those who refuse to use legitimate sites, the take-up of which is now growing. Through all those means—the development of legitimate sites, the action of search engines to remove illegitimate ones, and a limited threat of action for those breaking the law—we can start to build an environment in which people are encouraged to do the right thing.

The wider issue is the role played by free content. When I was in the music industry the country was awash with free content. Free-to-air television programmes such as “Top of the Pops” promoted artists but also allowed consumers to listen to music free. Much to the amusement of my colleagues, YouTube still has footage of me with a big mullet on “Top of the Pops” in the 1980s. Similarly, radio has offered free content for many years. Today “The X Factor” has developed into a free-to-air business model that relies on phone voting revenue in addition to advertising.

Allowing limited free content is the right thing to do because it promotes artists. YouTube does that very well because people can watch the music video, along with adverts, but it is not easy to download that video or record music from it. It is not impossible to record off YouTube, but the website itself does not offer that option. That again nudges people into doing the right thing. Watching a music video on YouTube generally ensures that artists and labels are paid properly for their work. YouTube is listed along with hundreds of other legitimate sites on Pro-Music. That project is an effort by the industry to help consumers to make the right choices, and I hope that more people will log on to the site. It does not promote any one site, but it helps to ensure that consumers can make the right choices.

The music industry, search engines and ISPs were taken by surprise by the download phenomenon. As my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood) said, knee-jerk reactions occurred, but companies are now coming together to help people make better choices. I do not believe that we will ever stop illegal downloading completely—after all, in my day some people were determined to tape songs off the radio and “Top of the Pops”. Dare I say it, I can remember doing that myself in my teenage years.