Nuclear Safeguards Bill

Lord Carlile of Berriew Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Thursday 22nd February 2018 Lords Chamber

I do not want to go in to bat like Ken Barrington or Geoff Boycott on the wording of this amendment, but I do want to know what the Government’s intentions are. On that basis, I beg to move.

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

My Lords, I would like to speak to Amendments 14 and 15 tabled in my name, and in particular to the proposed new clause set out in Amendment 14. I would never insult the Minister by accusing him of being overly sensitive; nevertheless, he will have realised that there is a great deal of genuine concern about what is going to be delivered in relation to Euratom on 29 March 2019. I support what the noble Lord, Lord Warner, just said, which was in the same vein.

My suggested new clause would require the Government to answer certain criteria by that date. The criteria are set out clearly and they have been shown, in the debates on this Bill and on the withdrawal Bill yesterday, to be the ones that cause concern around the House and which the Minister has heard repeated time and again. In debating terms, this has basically been a one-horse race in relation to concern about Euratom.

Yesterday—and I will not repeat them—I cited some answers that had helpfully been supplied by the Minister to questions raised by the Society for Radiological Protection and by me as a result of that society’s representations. What was clear from those answers was that the Government do not know what will be delivered or when. This afternoon, I will cite another piece of evidence that draws the same conclusions. On 12 February, just over a week ago, there was a meeting between 10 officials—nine from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, one from Public Health England and the two senior relevant officers of the Society for Radiological Protection. I have in my hand a record of that meeting, which I feel sure is accurate.

In that meeting, there was what was described as a “Euratom exit update”. One of the officials, who was clearly a senior and responsible official—it is invidious to name officials, so I will not name him or her—noted that the Nuclear Safeguards Bill is currently going through the House of Lords. The official noted that,

“at current there has been minimal industry engagement, due to the short timescales to pass the bill. However”—

the official—

“did note that the bill is a skeleton, and more detailed consultation with industry and professional bodies would take place as the regulations are developed”.

All I am asking for, in my new clause suggested in Amendment 14, is the key to the skeleton or the cupboard where the skeleton is kept.

The official noted that,

“discussions are going well internationally”,

which is very welcome,

“with progress being made on bi-lateral agreements with the US, Australia, Canada and Japan”.

We would certainly like to know more about that. The official then explained—and this is very important—that,

“as part of the EU exit process they”—

the 10 officials—

“are unable to pursue agreements with the various EU countries”—

I think “pursue” means seek—

“till the exit process is complete”.

If that is right, it is extremely worrying. I am sure that the Minister can be supplied with a copy of the minutes of that meeting.

It was also noted that,

“there have been wider EU civil nuclear issues around legal ownership of fissile material and radioactive waste”.

Contained in that single sentence is a host of problems that will have to be unravelled in great detail if there is to be proper nuclear safeguarding.

Having read those notes, with the welcome support of the noble Lord, Lord Fox, I tabled Amendment 14. It requires the Secretary of State to publish a report setting out the answers to all these questions before 29 March 2019. It requires the making of,

“regulations providing for the implementation of any agreements covered”,

by the clause and a statutory instrument which should be approved by each House of Parliament.

There is an evidence base for the kind of quality assurance that any responsible Government would demand of any contractor to which they were letting a contract. As a Parliament, we are entitled to demand, respectfully but necessarily, a similar level of quality control for the Government before we lose the legislative opportunities available to us and throw this enormously important issue to the wolves—or to a skeleton.

[Lord Teverson]

My Lords, I will speak to my Amendment 9. One of the things I have tried to do in this amendment—I could not do it completely satisfactorily because of where we are in the Bill—is to ask what are the key things we need in place before it is safe and practical for us to leave Euratom and the system we have. There were three specific areas that we needed to cross that finishing line before we entered out into this brave new world. They are listed and they are very clear.

The first is that we should have an agreement from the International Atomic Energy Agency that our safeguarding procedures and the body that we are talking about in the Bill are approved. We need that; without it, we are unable to move forward. Secondly, because we are one of the few nuclear weapon states in the world, we need a voluntary offer agreement with the IAEA that relates to our new status outside Euratom. Thirdly and very practically—we have had a description of the difficulties around this—we need active nuclear co-operation agreements that have been confirmed or agreed by the other side. Whether we can get grandfathering rights on them is very difficult in some instances—the one with the United States has been particularly highlighted in that degree—but we also need to have those in place for those nations where we have active nuclear trading of the type of products listed in the schedules of the Euratom treaty and under the international agreements of the IAEA.

The difficulty in drafting this amendment was that if we do not have these in place, what do we do? My solution to that was very simple: that we should seek temporarily—as the Minister said, we have already gone through the process of agreeing withdrawal from Euratom, rightly or wrongly—to withdraw the notice under Article 106a until we have those three areas of agreement in place and we can be certain that we can go ahead. It is my opinion that we can do that ourselves unilaterally. More certainly we would need to get the agreement of the 27 other member states. That would clearly be the right answer, in that we would continue to be a member until we had those in place.

I was unable to put that in the amendment because it was out of the scope of the Bill, apparently, so I have looked to move on. What we would have to do here is, effectively, to have a transition period. On that, I come back to my question to the Minister that I raised in the first grouping of amendments: do we know that there will be a transition period with Euratom, the negotiation on which, as I see it, is going ahead and will have to be agreed or not on 22 March—it is only a month away—and that we can indeed somehow satisfactorily subcontract all these responsibilities to Euratom and to the international agencies should one of these vital areas go wrong? That is an entirely reasonable question for which I would expect us to have a workable strategy to avoid that cliff edge, if that should happen for all sorts of reasons that, quite clearly, are not totally in the Government’s control. From that point of view we need contingency and to understand the route map if those three areas are not fulfilled. I look forward to the Minister’s response on them.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton]

I thank both noble Lords for their interventions. I will make a little progress because I think I will be able to make them both a little happier—although I am fairly sure that I will not get all the way.

I recognise the importance of providing Parliament with clarity on our future relationship with Euratom. The Written Ministerial Statement of 11 January includes a commitment to provide quarterly updates on progress.

I turn now to Amendment 9, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, which would require the Secretary of State to seek a transition period in the event that the UK is unable to secure new international agreements with the IAEA and nuclear co-operation agreements—or NCAs—with key third parties by 1 March 2019. I will address NCAs first. It may be helpful for me to set out that the UK does not itself have any requirement for NCAs to be in place for trade in nuclear-related items to continue—but some of our key trading partners do. In the US it is a legal requirement; in Japan, Canada and Australia it is a very strong policy commitment. That is why those four NCAs are our priority. It is quite right to stress how important this is: an NCA must be in place before such trade with these countries can take place. Each of these four countries recognises the importance of putting in place bilateral NCAs to ensure uninterrupted co-operation and trade in the civil nuclear sector, following the UK’s withdrawal from Euratom.

There are also a number of countries, in addition to the four priority ones, with which we wish to discuss our ongoing nuclear co-operation to ensure that appropriate arrangements are in place to allow continuity of trade. But in those cases—

[Lord Carlile of Berriew]

I am grateful to the Minister for giving way. I suspect that she is now on paragraph 15, but she is not answering this debate, which is about whether Her Majesty’s Government are prepared to provide specified information to Parliament on certain criteria. What she is telling us would all be very interesting if we had not heard it many times before, but it is a dissertation on the roles of different organisations. Can we please have an answer to this debate? It is 4.32 pm on a Thursday and I would have thought that it could be answered in a few paragraphs—maybe numbers 47 to 50.

[Lord Teverson]

I was happy with the answer that the Minister was giving about NCAs.