Nuclear Safeguards Bill (First sitting)

Lord Harrington of Watford Excerpts

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

[The Chair]

Q I welcome our first witness, Dr Mina Golshan, who represents the Office for Nuclear Regulation. Dr Golshan, thank you very much for coming. Perhaps you can kick off our considerations with a brief statement about who you are, what you do and what you think about the Bill.

Dr Golshan: Thank you for that introduction. I am director and deputy chief inspector at the Office for Nuclear Regulation. My main responsibilities are Sellafield, decommissioning fuel and waste, but I am also senior responsible owner for ONR’s work in relation to establishing a state system of nuclear materials accounting and control.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Richard Harrington)]

Q Dr Golshan, thank you for appearing today. I know that you are a regular at these things. From your point of view, how critical are safeguards in underpinning the UK nuclear industry?

Dr Golshan: Establishing a domestic safeguards regime, now that the policy decision has been made that the UK will be leaving the Euratom treaty, is fundamental to the industry in the UK. It is the cornerstone of establishing nuclear co-operation agreements. It is essential for the industry to operate. Without a domestic safeguards regime in the UK that works in line with the International Atomic Energy Agency requirements, the industry simply will not be able to operate.

[Paul Blomfield]

Q I want to ask you about the Office for Nuclear Regulation’s capacity to take on the additional responsibilities implicit in the Bill, given your current staffing levels and the large number of people employed by Euratom to fulfil these roles.

Dr Golshan: Perhaps I should start by saying that, given our membership of Euratom, it has not been necessary for the UK and ONR to build capacity and resilience in this area. Now that we are in a different position, we have started to recruit. The first phase of recruitment is complete. We successfully recruited four individuals, three of whom have already started with us. An area of shortage for us was subject matter expertise. That was a worry for me, but I am pleased to say that we will hopefully be in a position to rectify that by the middle of this month.

Broadly, we need to continue with our recruitment if we are to staff ourselves in order to deliver the new safeguards function. In the first instance we need an additional 10 to 12 inspectors, which will bring us to a level that allows the UK to fulfil its international obligations, but we have already heard from the Secretary of State that the intention is to put in place a regime that is equivalent to Euratom. That will require ONR to recruit further and will mean around 20 additional inspectors. We know that we are dealing with a limited pool of expertise, and our success so far, although encouraging, is by no means the end of the story.

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[The Chair]

I welcome the next panel to give evidence, and—without meaning any disrespect to the other two gentlemen—I particularly welcome back our former colleague, Tom Greatrex. Good to see you back here. You probably remember the tough time that you gave me at various times—you are going to get a tough time, too. Welcome to the other members of the panel, from Prospect Law. We have until 11.25 am, which is a reasonable time; but we will have to stop at 11.25 even if we are speaking, so I will try to wrap up a little bit before. First, I ask the three witnesses to introduce yourselves and, if you wish, to give a brief introduction to your thoughts on the Bill.

Rupert Cowan: I am Rupert Cowan, with Prospect Law. My background is advising, as a lawyer, the nuclear industry, providers of services, operators and generators. I am a very worried lawyer at the moment, having seen the Second Reading debate, and I am concerned that, despite the obvious excellent progress that ONR is making towards introducing a safeguards regime, that regime on its own will not enable the industry to continue to operate without interruption.

Jonathan Leech: I am also a lawyer specialising in nuclear law and regulation, working with industry. In terms of my initial views on the Bill, as far as it goes it is, of course, merely an enabling power. One thing I did want to lay out, though, is that it is emphatically not a contingency. Unless we have a radical change in direction of travel now, we will need it; it is not something that can be set aside. I am sure we will come back to discuss that in further detail. I also have some views on the scope of the powers that the Bill confers. But the real task will lie in the secondary legislation, how that is implemented, and how that relates to the nuclear co-operation agreements that we will need before any exit from Euratom, if we are not to disrupt the industry.

Tom Greatrex: Tom Greatrex. I am not a lawyer; I am the chief executive of the Nuclear Industry Association, which is the trade body for the UK civil nuclear industry, representing 260-plus companies across the supply chain. The industry concern is very similar to that just expressed by my two colleagues—namely, that the Bill does one small part of a whole range of things that need to be done to ensure there is not disruption as a process of leaving Euratom. I am, similarly, intrigued by the ministerial comments in the Second Reading debate, particularly around this being a contingency, because that is something different from what we have been discussing to date. My overall concern is that we need to do a whole range of different things, not just what is in the Bill, to ensure that we have a position that avoids any disruption to activity in the civil nuclear industry.

[Richard Harrington]

Q I am very happy to ask this question of any of the witnesses, but it is particularly addressed to you, Tom. You have all made comments at different stages about, in effect, your own case, Tom—that you hope the decision to leave Euratom can be reversed. I am aware of the different points made; but may we for the moment leave aside these hypothetical points? I am not entering into their validity or otherwise for the purpose of this question. Do you believe it is necessary for Parliament to pass this Nuclear Safeguards Bill?

Tom Greatrex: If we are to have a domestic safeguarding arrangement and system, we will need to have the power conveyed to the ONR to undertake that role. I have described the Bill before as being a necessary legislative step. It is; but obviously, a whole range of other steps need to come after that, which are contingent upon it. That is where the majority of the concern lies.

Rupert Cowan: May I add to that? Emphatically yes, it is necessary to pass a Bill that puts in place a domestic safeguards regime. The Bill is a step towards achieving that. But what needs not to be lost is that the terms of that Bill, and the secondary legislation that it creates the opportunity to provide, must also be in terms that do not prevent those that we currently have nuclear co-operation agreements with courtesy of Euratom, continuing to co-operate with us. There is a very substantial concern among those that want to be our friends and continue to co-operate with us, and those that may not—who, for slightly more opaque reasons, do not want to make it easy to continue to co-operate with us—that the Bill, as it stands, will not allow a safeguards regime that is neutral in its application to the commercial parties that are participating in the industry. We have given you a note; if you read the end of it you will see that, although we are not entitled to, we are suggesting a possible amendment that you might consider to achieve that neutrality. It is in paragraph 4.

[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.

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[The Chair]

I am keen to move on. Minister.

[Richard Harrington]

Q Thank you, Mr Cowan, Mr Leech and Tom, for your support for the Bill. Everything you have said is the reason why we are introducing the Bill, and I thank you very much for your support for it. I have read your opinions and amendments and have taken them into consideration. Thank you very much for the work that you have done. Please do not think that the evidence that you have given is taken lightly, but I must underpin that by confirming your answer to a previous question, which was that you do support the Bill. I accept fully the reasons why you do.

Rupert Cowan: We support the Bill completely. We suggest the amendments for the reasons described.

[Paul Blomfield]

Q I want to explore the concerns about the gap between the existing safeguarding regime and that envisaged by the Bill. Dr Golshan said that the new regime that she was seeking to establish would not replicate the functions undertaken by Euratom in relation to safeguarding. I am also conscious that the NIA’s evidence talked about the importance of leaving without any gap, but that you were worried about the gaps provided. I wonder whether you could elaborate on that a little more, Tom.

Tom Greatrex: As the ONR said earlier this morning, it will not be possible to replicate the safeguarding regime on day one. If the Government have said that they intend to replicate the standards that we currently have as a member of Euratom, there is obviously a concern that we will not be in the position where we will be meeting the same standards at the point at which we leave Euratom. That is the crucial point about the need for a transitional arrangement or parallel working—there are different ways of describing what is broadly the same thing—which is to avoid that gap.

If you do not have the correct arrangements in place, as you have heard from others on the panel, the series of other arrangements that are effectively contingent on the safeguarding regime will not be able to be in place. That is why it affects absolutely everything to do with the functioning of the industry as it currently functions and has functioned for the past 40 years or more.

We can take a practical example. Because of the international nature of the nuclear industry, the Sizewell reactor currently generating power in Suffolk is based on Westinghouse technology. That technology is therefore US technology. Because of the legal requirement to have a nuclear co-operation agreement in place, there are very real—these are not scare stories—and legitimate concerns that even the ability to exchange information between the operators of the site, EDF and where the technology originates from will potentially be illegal at the point when we come out of Euratom, if we do not have successor arrangements in place or a period of time to enable the transition to be finalised and for the new regime to be put in the place.

It is not about being against the Bill. The Bill does the first step, but there are many more subsequent steps that have to be taken. The ability to do that in a very limited timeframe is the cause of the majority of the concern.