Nuclear Safeguards Bill (First sitting)

Paul Blomfield Excerpts

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

[Trudy Harrison (Copeland) (Con)]

My husband, father and brother work at Sellafield, as well as many other family members.

[Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)]

I am a member of Unite.

Examination of Witness

Dr Mina Golshan gave evidence.

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[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.

[The Chair]

Dr Golshan, can I ask you to speak up slightly, because this is a very large room and we are having trouble hearing you. I am getting older—you know how it is.

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[Ben Bradley (Mansfield) (Con)]

Q Can you tell us a bit about the ONR’s track record of delivering new regulation previously? Do you feel that you have the right relationships within the industry to deliver this new programme?

Dr Golshan: It is fair to say that this is unprecedented territory for us as far as the size of the job is concerned. In the past we have not had to establish a new function from afresh to this extent, but we have got experience of setting out and working with officials from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy—and previously the Department for Energy and Climate Change—to bring forward new regulation.

We are working closely with officials at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and we have engaged with the industry—I have had a number of meetings with the industry. We are explaining what we are doing, how far we have gone down this route and what there is left to do. We are working with all our stakeholders to make a success of this.

[Paul Blomfield]

Q May I follow up on your earlier answer, Dr Golshan? You have been clear and helpful. From what I understood, you said that you were recruiting an additional 10 to 12 inspectors now, with the potential of a further 20. Is that the whole size of the establishment you might be looking for? I might be wrong, but I understand that Euratom employs about 40 people on nuclear safeguarding in relation to UK establishments.

Dr Golshan: Let me break it into two bits. Our intention is to start recruiting in the new year for the additional 10 to 12 people we will require. The reason is that we were waiting for the Second Reading of the Bill to give us some certainty in relation to the people we are going to take on permanently. That process will start. In relation to your next question, on Euratom’s numbers, for its own purposes, Euratom carries out activities in the UK that, as a state delivering an equivalent regime, we would not need to deliver. The order of 20 to 25 is not far from what we need to staff ourselves to deliver this function.

[Paul Blomfield]

Q This is a sector with which most of us are—with some exceptions—relatively unfamiliar.

[The Chair]

Mr Blomfield, could you speak up? Not all of us can hear you.

[Paul Blomfield]

Can you give us a little more understanding of the talent pool from which you are drawing, the recruitment opportunities and the training needs there might be to fulfil the skills needs you anticipate?

Dr Golshan: As I mentioned at the beginning, although these do not seem like large numbers, we are dealing with a limited talent pool here: the expertise is unique. As I said, the UK as a whole has not had to focus on developing resilience in this area, so we are limited in what and who we can recruit.

The next step, if we are getting the right expertise in these people, is to turn them into regulators and inspectors. That means that our training function—training materials and expertise in training these individuals—needs to develop. We have started that process, but it is a long road and I am not going to sit here and pretend that it is all going to be a smooth run.

[Paul Blomfield]

Q Could you give us a sense of the length of that road? How long will it take you to get from A to B?

Dr Golshan: Our aim, currently, is to have a system in place that enables the UK to fulfil its international obligations by March 2019, which is when we intend to leave Euratom. I have been very clear in the past—I will repeat it here—that we will not be able to replicate Euratom standards on day one. That is unrealistic, and given the scale of what needs to be put in place, I fear that if we go that way, the best will become the enemy of the good. So it is important that we focus our efforts on delivering a regime that enables the UK to meet its international obligations.

[Mary Robinson (Cheadle) (Con)]

Q Now that the Bill has been introduced, what in your view is the main priority in developing a new nuclear safeguards regime for the UK?

Dr Golshan: There are a number of aspects. The first one is to ensure that the secondary legislation is in place at the right time, because that provides us with the mechanisms to exercise our powers. The Bill itself is an enabling part—it gives us the fundamental powers—and the secondary legislation gives us the mechanisms to deliver. Secondary legislation will also give us some certainty in relation to what guidance and standards we need to develop to make this happen.

For us, we need to have an IT system; a safeguards information management system. It is a live system that enables us to get data from our licensees, to process those data and to put them into a reporting format that the IAEA currently receives from Euratom. We are working on that; it is at proof of concept stage at the moment. Once we have established that we are able to do it, we will need to move into a phase that determines whether we are going to do it in-house, tender it out, or have a combination of the two.

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[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.

[The Chair]

We will discuss that in this room when we are considering subsequent Bills, no doubt.