New Nuclear Power

Debate between Simon Hughes and David Mowat

Thursday 7th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Simon Hughes]

The hon. Gentleman is being mischievous. He and I are on the same side in this argument, so he should love and care for his friends, and not seek to be rude. Indeed, the Welsh Labour party was desperately pleased that the new boundaries did not go through, so let us have a little less of the attack on us.

We have our position that we negotiated in the coalition agreement; that is fine and we will deliver on it. However, my job and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham is to hold my right hon. Friend the Minister, the Department and the Government to account. That is why we need to nail what is currently going on and stop—either in the Energy Bill, which is in Committee and will be coming back here, or elsewhere—any mechanism whereby power is given to Ministers to do deals with companies such as EDF that could produce the sort of hidden subsidy mentioned by the hon. Member for Newport West.

The hon. Gentleman referred to Professor Tom Burke, who is a friend and constituent of mine, and I had a long and up-to-date conversation with him on this issue only this weekend. I am clear that the figures cited by the hon. Gentleman are the figures we are talking about. The reality is that if the strike price is £100 per megawatt and there is a 30-year contract life, that would be a subsidy of £1 billion a year above today’s wholesale price for electricity. That would be £30 billion to EDF from Britain’s householders and businesses—the very people we are trying to protect from high energy bills. If the whole of the 16 GW nuclear energy currently planned by the Government were financed on similar terms, that figure would be £150 billion by 2050.

Somebody asked—I cannot remember who it was; I think it was my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham —whether there had ever been any suggestion of such a large amount of money going through without scrutiny. The answer, as you will know as well as anybody, Mr Deputy Speaker, is that in this place we have often authorised huge amounts of expenditure with no debate. Indeed, when my right hon. Friend the Minister was a spokesman on Treasury matters for the Liberal Democrats he used to complain that we would spend lots of time debating taxation, but almost no time debating spend. Consolidated Fund Bills relating to billions of pounds of expenditure would go through with no debate at all. We are trying to say that we should stop and check now because we believe there is a danger of a really big subsidy being agreed under the table, as it were, in terms of parliamentary transparency, that we cannot then pull out of or unscramble.

[David Mowat]

We have established that this technology is more expensive than coal, but it is not more expensive than other carbon-free types of technology. In the view of the right hon. Gentleman, is the price for carbon a subsidy? He seems to be implying that it is.