Nuclear Energy (Financing) Bill

Debate between Richard Graham and John Redwood

Report stage & 3rd reading
Monday 10th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[John Redwood]

rose—

[Richard Graham]

I will give way to my hon. Friend the Member for Workington (Mark Jenkinson) first and then to my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham.

--- Later in debate ---

[Richard Graham]

We may be straying a bit from the subject and scope, Mr Deputy Speaker, so I will try to come back to the road of virtue as quickly as I can, but the hon. Member raises interesting points about what structure of ownership is required to develop nuclear power stations effectively. To be honest, it was his party that decided to sell—to privatise—British Energy. I think it is too late to try to row back on that and recreate that situation, unless he is proposing an interesting new Anglo-French argument over nationalising EDF Energy in the UK. We have to accept that things have moved on, and we must focus on the amendments proposed today.

[John Redwood]

The burden of the argument with the SNP, my hon. Friend and the rest of us is, as I understand it, transparency over the costs and terms of putative contracts. If those are to be private sector contracts, there are issues about commercial confidentiality, but if there is to be a lot of state exposure, there needs to be a very clear definition of its limits and what it will be, and I am sure that is what the Minister has in mind. Does my hon. Friend agree that we expect to see a very clear and honest statement of any state liabilities, but that commercial private contracts are not as appropriate for that kind of transparency?

[Richard Graham]

Yes, that is a very good way of defining the difference between the confidentiality of commercial agreements and the state’s obligation to be transparent in what is clearly a model that has elements of both. There is an element of hybrid in it, as Members have alluded to.

To bring my contribution to a close fairly swiftly, fundamentally we need to get on, as other colleagues have said, with the business of building more nuclear capacity as quickly as possible. The Bill is an opportunity to move that forward fast, with the safeguards offered by the Government within it, and to get on with a new way of funding through the regulated asset base mechanism. It will provide cheaper costs of financing and ultimately bring down the costs to consumers. Clearly, the Labour party is supporting us today in principle, and perhaps the hon. Member for Southampton, Test will give his support to the Bill from the Opposition Front Bench. The SNP is not supporting it.

From the Government Benches, I want to reiterate my support as the MP for Gloucester for what the nuclear operational headquarters in Barnwood has successfully achieved for a very long period, and I hope that the Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Chelsea and Fulham (Greg Hands), will accept an invite to visit Gloucester to look at the operational headquarters and what it is doing and to discuss ways to ensure that that expertise can be used most effectively in the development of nuclear capacity in the future, as well as now.

I am afraid none of the amendments will have my support. I have mentioned that amendment 2 is ironic and inappropriate, and I think all the SNP amendments are designed to try to ensure as far as possible that today’s Bill does not go any further. Bearing in mind that we are celebrating the 46-year role of nuclear in providing electricity to every home in Scotland, that seems rather ironic and, frankly, a bit disappointing. Thank you for calling me, Mr Deputy Speaker. I very much hope the Bill goes through.

Public Services

Debate between Richard Graham and John Redwood

Wednesday 16th October 2019 Commons Chamber

[John Redwood]

I agree with my hon. Friend, who has lots of expertise from his distinguished military career. There is a lot of talent in the armed forces. My right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) said that such measures were taken to try to get personnel into teaching from that important resource, and we could spread that more widely.

I look forward to progress in particular with the county lines issue, with illegal settlements and with casual violence on the streets, which even comes sometimes to my constituency and is not welcome. More and better-resourced policing would be extremely good.

I also want to see progress in the health service. I am pleased that substantial sums of money have been allocated, under both the immediately retiring Government and the new Government. That is doubly welcome. I urge Ministers to do serious work with organisations such as those in my area on what the priorities for that money should be, because it is important that these large sums are spent intelligently. The priorities for patients are clear: we need more GPs, to provide better coverage of services; and we need better access to GP services, with better systems, so that people can make timely appointments, and enough GPs to offer advice and consultations. We certainly need more money for the large hospital in Reading, which my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead and I share with the Reading MPs, where various works need to be done, and recruitment is needed where there are shortages of trained staff.

[Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend was saying earlier how important the additional resources going into education funding are. Does he agree that one of this Government’s great achievements is the fair funding settlement, which provides for counties to be properly funded?

Neighbourhood Planning Bill

Debate between Richard Graham and John Redwood

Ping Pong: House of Commons
Tuesday 28th March 2017 Commons Chamber

[John Redwood]

Yes, it can, with the right mixture. Some offices may need to be transformed into homes and a broader retail offer, with a higher proportion of coffee shops, restaurants and so on, may need to be made. If more people are living in flats or smaller properties that they can afford in the town centre, they may well then make more use of the town in the evening, and the range of services and the life of the town is thus extended beyond the traditional shopping hours during the day. I am sure the Minister understands all that. I hope he will see how he can develop other ways to ensure that our planning system for commercial property is sufficiently flexible to allow residential use where that is the best answer and to ensure flexible use patterns in the commercial property that we have, as massive change will be needed.

The planning system of course has to protect the things that the community legitimately wants to protect, so we do not want non-conforming uses in certain areas and we certainly do not want bad or noisy neighbours, who may be regulated by planning or by other general laws on nuisance. Within that, we need maximum flexibility so that commercial owners and managers can adapt or change the use of their premises, or swap them for a more appropriate property for their use. If the planning system can facilitate that, it will greatly improve our flexibility as an economy, meaning that we can modernise more rapidly and move on to a more productive world, which is the main feature of the Chancellor’s policies for our economy.

[Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)]

First, may I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests as a shareholder of a small family business which for the past 40 years has included a single pub? Today, there has been a huge amount of agreement on the appropriateness of the Government’s amendments to Lords amendment 22, and I pay tribute to a lot of people who have been involved in that process. I pay particular tribute to the hon. Member for Leeds North West (Greg Mulholland), who is also, in effect, the Member for CAMRA in this House. I know how seriously he takes his duties in that respect. He rightly highlighted English Tourism Week, but even more importantly this weekend we have the Gloucester beer festival. It runs from 31 March to 1 April, which, appropriately, some may say, happens to be my wedding anniversary, and takes place in the historic setting of Blackfriars, the world’s best-preserved Dominican priory. So I invite all Members to come to Gloucester this weekend, as there will be 100 beers, 30 ciders and perries, and an unbelievable atmosphere, in a great and noble old setting.

That deals with the preamble, so I come on to what I really want to say. I seek to strike a slightly different note, mild caution, and ask the Minister whether he has thought carefully about the possible unintended consequences of his amendment—I am sure he has. It would be a cruel irony if, in trying to protect pubs, this addition to the Bill triggered sales of pubs by small owners and increased the stranglehold on pubs of the large pubcos and very large brewers.

The Minister will know that there is a long history of unintended consequences in the brewing and pub sector. If we go back in time, we find that this House legislated against individual brewers owning more than 2,000 pubs, which inadvertently created large pubcos. The wheel has now almost come full circle, with Heineken proposing to buy back 2,000 pubs from a pubco. So there are times when, by trying to manage too finely what happens to our pubs, we end up with unintended consequences.

My concern, which I have also heard expressed by one or two small owners of pubs in my constituency, is that this sort of change could threaten the covenant with the banks that finance them. Lenders may lend more willingly on the understanding that in the unfortunate event of the pub failing there will always be value in the buildings for other uses, as that then underpins the security on which they lend to small owners. As in our pub, it is the small owners of pubs who tend to develop their own brewhouse and produce the real ale that CAMRA is all about. On the whole, the large pubcos and large brewers, who have their own entirely tied arrangements, are not going to produce the creative, small beers and the brewhouses which have regenerated this whole sector so effectively over the past 10 or 15 years.

Therefore, my question to the Minister is: has he thought carefully about the possible unintended consequences? Has he had any discussions with some of the individual owners of pubs or with their bankers and lenders? Will he reassure us that he believes that these changes are a compromise that do give enough flexibility to retain the support of those who lend to small owners of pubs and to provide that variety—what the hon. Member for Leeds North West was calling the “community pubs”? That is hard to define, but it is often when a pub is family-owned.