King’s Speech

Lord Ravensdale Excerpts

Thursday 18th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ravensdale (CB)]

My Lords, like others, I very much welcome the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, to their roles. I very much enjoyed working with them both in the last Parliaments and look forward to continuing to do so. First, I declare my interests. I am a chief engineer working for AtkinsRéalis in the energy sector, a director of Peers for the Planet and co-chair of Legislators for Nuclear.

In the gracious Speech and in the Minister’s opening remarks, I was very pleased to see the level of ambition from the new Government in the energy sector and the targets in place, particularly the 2030 target for decarbonisation of the electricity grid. It is really important, going forward, to have these ambitious targets to work towards, but there are obviously risks involved. The number one risk that is flashing up red on the dashboard in terms of delivery of all the required infrastructure is with our planning system. I know the Government get this, and I was very pleased to see the planning and infrastructure Bill in the gracious Speech. In fact, I met the National Energy System Operator earlier today, and its work on the spatial strategic energy plan will also be central to derisking this. However, we have seen a number of issues with our infrastructure projects coming through the system, and I shall give noble Lords a few examples.

In my sector—the nuclear sector—the environmental assessments for the Hinkley Point C reactor ran to around 20,000 pages and those for Sizewell C to around 44,000 pages. That is a stack of paper around 5 metres high—the height of a double-decker bus. As a broader example, the planning application for the lower Thames crossing, which was mentioned earlier, ran to 359,000 pages. If you put all that documentation end to end, it would be around 61 miles, about five times the length of the crossing itself. That is just one metric, but it clearly illustrates that we have issues with our planning system that we need to resolve to get Britain building. This is important not just for the energy system but, more broadly, to get economic growth going again in this country.

In the last Parliament, we made some important progress on the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act with an amendment I put forward on town and country planning, which was supported by both current Ministers on the Front Bench. We got a great concession from the Government, but we spent part of the last Session thinking about what more we could do for large infrastructure projects. We have a number of proposals following our consultation with industry, which I hope the Minister will be interested in.

One issue in the nuclear industry is that when, for example, the environmental regulators look at infra- structure, their concern is with the environmental considerations for the piece of land on which the asset is situated. They do not take the broader societal benefits to net zero and energy security into account. We need a way of framing this and putting a net-zero duty on the Environment Agency and the other statutory consultees in the process for these large infrastructure projects. We believe that could be a very good way of balancing local environmental considerations with the broader benefits that large infrastructure projects bring. This was supported in the last Session by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, when she brought forward an amendment proposing a net-zero duty for Ofgem. We should embed this more broadly across the regulators. I would very much welcome further discussions on that.

The habitats regulations have been highlighted as a specific area of concern. At Hinkley Point C, an infamous acoustic fish deterrent system was put forward to prevent the problem of fish stocks in the cooling water intakes for the plant. It led to millions of pounds of spend and years of delay. We need a more sensible regime for these compensatory events in terms of impact on the environment. In the Energy Act 2023, the previous Government took powers to modify the habitats regulations for offshore projects and oil and gas so that there could be a more sensible regime where compensatory measures are pooled rather than considered as individual cases. Considering the impact that those regulations have had, looking at a minor amendment to that Act to give the Government more powers to look at the habitats regulations and speed these projects through the system would be very sensible.

The noble Baroness, Lady Bloomfield, laid out an excellent pitch for the nuclear industry, which I will not repeat. In his opening remarks, the Minister made some great points about the impact of the war in Ukraine on our energy security. We have made really good progress there in the last few years, but our nuclear industry is still dependent on Russia for nuclear fuel in some of our reactor fleet. We clearly need to address this urgently from the perspectives of national security and energy security. The Government need to look at legislating to ban Russian nuclear fuel in the near term.

It is important to note that our allies, such as the United States, which are much more exposed to Russian nuclear fuel have taken the step of legislating to ban. That would also benefit our domestic industries by bringing up our own domestic nuclear fuel supply chain. I very much welcome the opportunity to meet the Ministers to discuss these issues in the context of the forthcoming legislation, and I look forward to working with them both in the coming Session.