Nuclear Safeguards Bill

Lord Hunt of Kings Heath Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 7th February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, in one sense the Minister was right when he described this as a technical Bill. Something of the sort is clearly needed. However, it is of course highly regrettable that he has had to bring the Bill to your Lordships’ House as a consequence of what can be described only as the perverse decision to leave Euratom. My noble friend Lord Lea was right to press that point. Euratom predates the EU and comes under a separate legal treaty. The issue might be the ECJ, but it has never made a ruling in respect of any matter relating to Euratom. And Euratom works well—so well that the Government have decided that we are going to leave Euratom only to set up our own new regulator to meet Euratom standards. You could not make it up.

A number of key concerns have come from this debate. The first is that, although the Government are intending to meet Euratom standards, on their own admission they cannot do this by March 2019. That then leads to the ONR. I hold it in high respect but I am concerned about its capacity, funding and governance—the point about the independence of the ONR in the future is very important—as well as the question of time. When one thinks of the scale of the task, one has to ask whether it has the time, capacity and funding to do the job that is required, alongside the establishment of the new regulatory function. The international bilateral agreements—the NCAs—that have to be negotiated in a matter of months are also a cause for some concern.

The second area of concern is around the transition. It is not clear to me exactly what the Government are aiming for and what the fallback position will be. If the fallback plan is to say that by March 2019 we can guarantee only IAEA standards, that will certainly be unacceptable, and I think that the House will wish to amend the Bill to make sure that that cannot happen.

Many noble Lords have commented on the narrowness of the Bill. Clearly the Euratom decision goes much wider in three areas in particular. One is medical isotopes. Another is the international supply chain, which applies as much to new nuclear as it does to the decommissioning of our old stock, with all that that implies. As a former Minister for Energy who has visited Sellafield on a number of occasions, I am only too well aware of the challenges there.

There are also questions about responsibility for setting standards. If in the future that is not done by Euratom, will it be done by the UK Government? It is one thing to say that we are going to aspire to meet current Euratom standards, but life moves on and standards will evolve. The question of which standards we will meet in the future is a very important one. Are we going to set our own standards within the sphere of the IAEA, or are we going to follow Euratom standards without having any influence over them? Those are the things that we want to know. The Official Opposition do not support leaving Euratom. Failing that, we believe that there must be an equivalence, and that that equivalence must be in place by March 2019.

Looking at some of the questions in more detail, perhaps I may ask the noble Lord about the transition. First, the impression that I got from his opening remarks is that he sees this issue as being fully a part of the transition that we are negotiating with the EU, and therefore that Euratom matters cannot be considered as a separate point. The noble Baroness asked whether Article 50 could be suspended in relation to Euratom. From what the Minister said, my impression is that that is not possible because this is simply a part of the more general discussions. It would be good to know whether my assumption is right.

Secondly, what does “close association” mean? There has been a lot of discussion here and in the other place about whether, certainly during the transition period but beyond it as well, we could subcontract back the Euratom staff to continue doing what they do while, I imagine, being duly accountable to Euratom and to the ONR. That would seem to be a straightforward way of doing it. Or, could we be an associate member? What does close association mean? We are right to ask what that entails.

That brings us to what the Government seek to do. We all read the evidence given in the Public Bill Committee from the ONR itself and I pay tribute to the work that it has done, but I understand from what was said that it recruited four new people and reckoned it needed another 10 or 12 in order to make IAEA standards by 2019 and another 20 following that to meet Euratom standards. So there are two questions. If another 20 are needed over what was thought could be achieved by 2019, what is the difference in real terms between Euratom standards and IAEA standards? In other words, what is the impact of having fewer inspections of less intensity? If the Government say, “Actually, there is very little difference at all”, I would ask them why they are sticking to Euratom standards. If, actually, this is significant, it is clearly unacceptable that we allow the Bill to go through without having some guarantee that in March 2019 we will abide by Euratom standards.

On finance, a number of noble Lords expressed concern, particularly my noble friend Lord O’Neill, about the cuts to the ONR budget and whether that will impact on its capacity to carry out these new roles. I also think that there is an issue that the industry has raised. Who will pay the cost of the new regime? At the moment, it is paid out of the UK contributions to EU budgets. I suspect that the Government have in mind to make industry pay the cost in the future. We ought to know.

On current activities, on the whole issue of the international supply chain and on the question of decommissioning, clearly, as my noble friends Lord O’Neill and Lord Judd said, maintaining public confidence is crucial. As someone who very much supports the industry, who works to bring new nuclear back to the UK, it is vitally important to make sure that there are no hiccups in the international supply chain because we need the support of people, companies and goods and services from other countries. It is also important in relation to decommissioning.

A number of noble Lords mentioned research. It is clearly important. We get a lot of money through Euratom to invest in our research projects. We have a great deal of collaboration. The Government have to set out a strategy about how to ensure that we do not lose that collaboration and investment in the future.

I do not need to say very much about radioisotopes because a number of noble Lords, especially the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, went into that in great detail. I am grateful to the Minister for focusing on this, but in his opening remarks he said that he hoped that we would be reassured, because he recognised concerns, and he talked about customs arrangements being able to minimise any impact. The problem we have is that a significant part of the Conservative Party in the other place do not want customs arrangements as far as I can see. Lord knows what they want. They seem to want to take this country down to economic ruin, but the fact is that no one sitting here today could have any reassurance that the noble Lord is right about those customs arrangements. The most likely outcome at the moment is that we will walk away from those talks. What guarantees can be made about those custom arrangements? The point that noble Lords made about continuing access to the Euratom observatory was very important.

Finally, rather remarkably, I do not think that Henry VIII powers have had much of an outing here, although, as the noble Lord knows, there are a lot of regulations in the Bill, and one or two Henry VIII ones at that. Of course I understand that there does need to be some flexibility in this area, but there might be a case for looking at whether we can constrain the use of the Henry VIII powers. There is also the suggestion of a sunset clause, and I warm to the suggestion by the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, of reviews and annual reports, which might be another way of dealing with those issues.

Overall, this is a highly interesting technical Bill. Whether two days in Committee will be enough, I rather doubt. We are looking to seriously change the Bill to provide reassurance that, in March 2019, we will continue to have Euratom standards.