Nuclear Sector Deal

Luke Pollard Excerpts

Wednesday 11th July 2018 Westminster Hall

[Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)]

I thank the hon. Member for Copeland (Trudy Harrison) for securing this important debate. Nuclear jobs are good jobs, and are often located in cities and towns where good jobs in other sectors are rare. I welcome the nuclear sector deal. I believe in a mixed energy policy with a greater focus on renewables and carbon-minimising generation from nuclear.

I am a fan of new nuclear, but my constituency is home not to civil nuclear jobs but to defence jobs. Our dockyard is the sole nuclear repair and refuelling facility for the Royal Navy. Nuclear jobs are in demand, and recruiters for civil nuclear regularly try to poach the highly skilled people from our dockyard and the Royal Navy. It is right that they do so, as Devonport’s nuclear workers are among the best in the business. I pay tribute to their work, which is often overlooked but is appreciated by all those who value the contribution of our submarine service—the bombers and the hunter-killers—to our nation’s security.

Nuclear jobs are not in the heart of the capital like financial services jobs. They are in the regions—the north-west and the south-west—and rightly so. Although I do not always agree with the high strike price for new civil nuclear, there is no doubt in my mind that civil nuclear has a bright future. However, I will confine my remarks to defence nuclear, about which there is a bit more uncertainty in my part of the world.

Military nuclear matters. I welcome the, albeit brief, mention in the nuclear sector deal of greater co-operation between civil and defence nuclear. I believe we need to do much more to enhance collaboration and co-operation between those two sectors—not just in research, but in jobs, skills, training and, importantly, decommissioning. The civil nuclear decommissioning programme rightly enjoys cross-party support. The taxpayer has unlimited liability to clean up the nation’s civil nuclear legacy and the sites contaminated by our country’s exploration of civil nuclear and its mastery of nuclear energy. It is right that new nuclear has decommissioning costs built into it.

Although there has been progress on the civil side of nuclear decommissioning, that has not been the case with defence nuclear. Hon. Members may not know that the UK still has every single nuclear submarine we have ever had. It is time that the legacy of old submarines was dealt with. Devonport dockyard in my constituency has 13 laid-up nuclear submarines awaiting recycling. Rosyth in Scotland has seven, and there are more to come. In Devonport, the oldest sub in storage is HMS Valiant. She is 54 years old, and was launched in 1963 at the height of the cold war. Many have been stored for decades, including HMS Conqueror, which famously sank the Belgrano in the Falklands war.

As a proud janner and a Plymouth lad, I have grown up knowing about those subs, but far too many people do not know about them. “Don’t they just go away?” was how one person responded when I told them about the old subs. Well, no, they do not. Those nuclear submarines get stored because the UK has no funded programme to recycle them. Eight in Devonport still have nuclear fuel rods and have not been defueled yet.

Those old nuclear submarines pose no risk to local communities. It is worth stating that because, all too frequently in nuclear debates, there is a question about safety. There is no risk to our local communities, but we cannot ask Plymouth and Rosyth to look after those submarines indefinitely without a plan.

To make matters worse, time is running out. In the next five years, three more Trafalgar-class submarines will need to be stored somewhere, as they are being replaced by the Astute class, which is being built in Barrow. A decade later, the four Vanguard-class nuclear submarines—the Trident subs—will need to be stored when they are taken out of service and replaced by the new Dreadnought-class submarines. There is a pilot project under way to dismantle HMS Swiftsure—the submarine my old man served on—but after much delay the programme has been paused. Progress is not being made at the pace we need if we are to deal with the rest of the submarines.

The reason why I am taking us on this detour into military nuclear, rather than civil nuclear, which is the focus of the nuclear deal, is to make the case for greater collaboration between the defence and civil nuclear sectors. The workforce moves between the two sectors, as does the science of decommissioning, but at the moment the Government still deal with them in two distinct silos. There is efficiency in collaborating, but Ministers from all Governments—including my own in the past—have kept the two sectors apart. I say to the Minister that it is time for this generation of politicians and Ministers to grasp this issue and change it.

The need to deal with the nuclear legacy of our nation’s old nuclear submarines unites all parties. That is why I have launched a cross-party campaign with the hon. Members for Copeland and for Dunfermline and West Fife (Douglas Chapman) to deal with our nation’s military nuclear legacy. We sent a joint letter to the Prime Minister and other party leaders asking them to commit to fund a proper programme of recycling the UK’s legacy and retired Royal Navy submarines. Successive Governments have refused to act, but that is not an option anymore.

Recycling old submarines is not cost-free, and given the Ministry of Defence’s current battle with the Treasury, there seem to be more pressing priorities for the limited funding. We cannot wait any longer, so I am looking to Ministers in the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, in particular, and the civil side to help us solve this urgent problem. We need a clear timetable for funding and dismantling, and a recycling programme. We believe that, to achieve that, we can beg, steal and borrow the principles from the civil nuclear decommissioning and waste management programme. We have called for a political consensus to recycle those old submarines and use the principles of civil nuclear decommissioning—especially the principles used by the civil Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, which should be allocated additional funding so that its work includes nuclear submarines.

The taxpayer is rightly paying to clean up old nuclear power stations around the nation, but at the moment the same funding streams and principles—the unlimited liability, set out in law—have not been extended to old nuclear submarines, and they need to be. Civil nuclear power is built in metres of foundations, and defence nuclear power is built in floating hulls, but fundamentally the principles are the same. As well as being the right thing to do, expanding the civil nuclear clean-up budget to include nuclear submarines can turn an economic problem into an economic asset. The programme of work would create new jobs in Plymouth, Rosyth, Capenhurst and west Cumbria.

Above all, this is in the national interest. Plymouth and Rosyth cannot be asked to store old nuclear submarines indefinitely. That is why we need a properly funded plan, using the same principles as civil nuclear clean-up. The submarines must be recycled safely, sustainably and securely. I think the public are genuinely surprised and concerned to hear about the existence of these submarines. I invite hon. Members to look on Google Maps at the west side of Plymouth. They will see the submarines lined up alongside each other. When they see them there, they will realise that we have to do something about them. Not knowing about them has meant that we have been able to ignore them, but we cannot ignore them any longer.

There is only one mention of submarines in the nuclear sector deal, which I appreciate was written to look in particular at the civil nuclear side. That mention was of the equipment qualification, and while I agree with the thrust of it that greater expertise and applicability, as well as agile companies in our nuclear sector, will enhance British competitiveness, there is a market at home for nuclear decommissioning work, even before we look for new markets abroad.

The Minister has agreed to meet me and the hon. Members for Copeland and for Dunfermline and West Fife to discuss this topic, and I think that there is a positive way forward. We need to acknowledge that nuclear submarines exist and need to be dealt with; there is an existing structure of principles and of funding; and, importantly, there is a cross-party basis for any future agreement about the recycling of the submarines. I ask the Minister and his officials to look carefully at how the work can be extended so that that legacy can be dealt with once and for all.