Nuclear Energy (Financing) Bill

Lord Whitty Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 21st February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, I broadly support the principle of this Bill and the mechanism proposed, but with some reservations and with the need to put this decision and decisions on nuclear policy in general in a wider context. I have long been a supporter of nuclear power, ever since, as a very young man, I worked at Harwell and was infected by the evangelical commitment of scientists to that alternative energy source. I did not entirely buy it, even then. I never really thought we were going to get completely free electricity; nor did I believe our colleagues down the road at Culham that fusion technology was only five years around the corner. Nevertheless, I think—much more so now than all that time ago, because we now need rapidly to move to a carbon-free energy system—that we do need nuclear power.

The problem has been that despite the investment in research and in earlier generations of nuclear power, for 30 years successive Governments have shied away from key decisions. The noble Lord, Lord Howell, mentioned examples during his time. There was a piece of evidence produced for us in a briefing for this debate that rather chilled me because it said the best time for nuclear investment is 20 years ago. That shook me, because 20 years ago, the Labour Government decided not to proceed with a new nuclear plant, just as their predecessors had. I was a junior Minister at Defra at the time and was party to that decision. It was taken largely because of the cost, which was then envisaged as being entirely on the taxpayer—whereas this puts the cost on the consumer and on business—but also because the enormous success of North Sea gas meant that we were going to have relatively cheap power for a long time and we did not need to take a decision at that time. The position of that Government was that we did not absolutely oppose nuclear power and that there would be new stations. We did not completely adopt the more extreme green agenda, although we did take it into account. We left it on the table, as it were.

We also made a number of provisos. I remember saying in the course of making that decision that while we may have not needed nuclear power at that time, we might eventually, and that even if the UK did not need nuclear power, the world would. So, we had to ensure that we retained the UK’s capability in industry and research, which was at that point—to use a phrase that is current now—still world leading. It had already been run down fairly substantially but we had a strong nuclear capability. The other provisos were that we needed to continue to identify potential nuclear sites, which we have started to do, continue to find options for dealing with nuclear waste, which the noble Lord, Lord Teverson referred to, and reduce the eventual cost of decommissioning, which has distorted our energy cost programme and the Government’s contribution to it over the last few years. These were important caveats but regrettably successive Governments ignored those caveats.

The research and operational expertise have been run down and dispersed, and we are almost entirely dependent on overseas technology, whether it is French, Japanese, Korean or, indeed, Chinese. Not enough new sites have been identified, and the public in those areas have not been fully consulted. Decommissioning costs of the AGRs, and now the Magnox, have soared, and we are still not clear on waste disposal. Instead of cost considerations reducing the upfront cost of nuclear projects, which is now met entirely by private capital, those costs have continued to escalate with the delays in the various schemes here and elsewhere in the world. Some of this is a worldwide issue, and some of it reflects non-decisions by previous Governments, as I say. But whatever form of finance that we adopt now has to be accompanied by addressing those other dimensions.

The Bill does not sufficiently protect consumers or small businesses. Interestingly, the impact assessment says that there will be no cost to small business. That is not true; there will be costs, and, particularly in the current climate, we will have to explain the fact that we are asking consumers and businesses to meet costs the benefits of which they will not see for many years.

So I am in favour of the Bill, but it needs to be extended and the Government need to surround it with some broader commitments. For example, if we are to have big nuclear sites such as Sizewell, we ought to require them to meet other objectives, such as attaching to such sites major provision for the production of hydrogen. There are other possibilities: CCS and storage. Some equivalent of Section 106, as was, needs to be applied to any nuclear projects, because other aspects of energy provision need to be addressed as we approve the provisions within the Bill.