Nuclear Energy (Financing) Bill

Debate between Viscount Hanworth and Lord Oates

Report stage
Thursday 24th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Oates (LD)]

My Lords, I shall speak to all the amendments in this group. They deal with value for money for the taxpayer and for bill payers, the impact on consumer bills of the regulated asset base charge, and the final amendment relates to excluding those on universal credit and other legacy benefits from such impacts.

Amendment 1 requires that the Secretary of State is of the opinion that designating a nuclear company will result in value for money, as evidenced by the publication of the value-for-money assessment. In this sense, it is about both value for money and transparency, which we will also touch on in later groups. We want to know not just that such a designation will result in value for money but on what basis that decision has been arrived at. We know from the history of the nuclear industry that promises about costs have rarely been kept and that finances have been opaque, to say the least. If there was one advantage of energy sector privatisation, it was that the costs which had previously been fairly buried in the accounts of the Central Electricity Generating Board became much clearer. That is a significant part of the reason why nuclear power ceased to be attractive, because it was clear that it did not offer value for money either for the taxpayer or for the consumer.

As my noble friend Lord Foster said when he spoke to this amendment in Committee, the Government have said already that they are going to conduct a value-for-money assessment. All we are asking is that that assessment is published as part of the process of the Minister being clear that it is his position that the designation would represent value for money. In Committee, the Minister notably failed to give any such commitment that the value-for-money assessment would be published, so I ask him to tell the House directly in his response whether the Government will publish that assessment. If he does, he will satisfy many of our concerns on this matter. If he does not, he will simply confirm our belief that the result of the Bill will be that the public are going to be landed with eye-wateringly expensive power generation which does not offer value for money and for which they will be forced to pay on their bills in advance.

Amendments 3 and 10 deal with the impact on consumer bills. Amendment 3 requires the Secretary of State to be of the opinion that designating a nuclear power company will not have a significant and material impact on consumer bills and to lay a report before Parliament setting out the reasons and evidence for that opinion. Again, this is about both the protection of the consumer and transparency over decision-making.

Amendment 10 seeks to exclude recipients of universal credit and legacy benefits from the regulated asset base charge, and I am grateful for the support of the noble Lord, Lord McNicol of West Kilbride, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, on this amendment. It would guarantee in law that the most financially vulnerable in our country do not see an additional increase in their energy bills to finance the exorbitant costs of nuclear power generation. The most indefensible part of the Bill is that the cost of nuclear generation and the way the RAB charges work would have a disproportionate impact on those who are already struggling to pay their bills. With the energy price cap already set to increase by 54% and with further increases very possible, indeed likely, in the autumn, this is no time to place further burdens on those least able to meet them, as the Bill does. On the Liberal Democrat Benches, we believe that we have an absolute duty to protect those least able to meet these costs at such a difficult time.

As finance expert Martin Lewis has said, the financial strain on families is already the worst he has known. He describes the increase in energy bills as a

“fiscal punch in the face”,

and adds:

“I am out of tools to help people now … It’s not something money management can fix … we need political intervention.”


But what we have in this Bill is political intervention to make the situation worse. Reports from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation have added that the case for support

“to help people on the lowest incomes could not be clearer”—

so why are we doing the opposite? As we all know, the number of people in fuel poverty is increasing at alarming rates; it is estimated that it will have tripled in the space of two years.

Citizens Advice finds that 55% of universal credit claimants are already going without basic essentials. The Government are proposing to increase benefits by just 3.1% at a time when inflation is forecast to peak at 8% to 9%. Many, including the CBI, believe that peak may be sustained over a significant period. This Bill would exacerbate the problem even further. Amendment 10 would at the very least make sure that the most financially vulnerable people in our country are not forced to bear further costs on their energy bills as a result of this unfair policy.

[Viscount Hanworth (Lab)]

My Lords, I wish to speak to Amendment 1. The noble Lord, Lord Howell, disposed of the previous version of this amendment most effectively in an eloquent speech in Committee, yet the Liberal Democrats persist in asking for an unequivocal value-for-money assessment of any project to build a new nuclear power station. It is not clear on what basis such an assessment should be made.

They may be inspired by the expectation that an assessment conducted according to commercial accountancy would cast doubt on the economic benefits of building new nuclear power stations. It has been pointed out to them that such a valuation would entail the commercial cost of capital funds, which are available from the financial sector only at an exorbitant rate of interest. It is precisely for the purpose of overcoming this impediment that the financial device of a regulated asset base, which is what this Bill advocates, has been devised.

Commercial accountancy—if that is what the Liberal Democrats have in mind—would be a most inappropriate means of assessing the value of investment in social and economic infrastructure that would provide us with a carbon-free source of electricity for the long term. Not only will this electricity be making a vital contribution to our climate change agenda but it will serve to sustain our industries in the absence of fossil fuels. Surely the Liberal Democrats should support such objectives.

The Liberal Democrats have been enjoined to tell us how they envisage that we might satisfy these objectives in the absence of the secure and reliable supply of electricity that would be provided by nuclear power stations. They have failed to do so. They have failed to tell us how the problems of the insecurity and intermittence of the supply of electricity could be addressed if it were dependent on the wind, the sun and imports from abroad. We must assume, in the absence of any declaration from them, that this is what they envisage. The truth is that they have failed to address the logistics of the energy supply in a meaningful way.

The value of renewable sources of power must be assessed not only on the costs of what they are able to produce but on the costs of what they fail to produce. At times when this power is not available, other sources must be found. In the absence of a baseload of electricity, they are liable to become exorbitantly expensive when there is a dearth in power. Wind and solar power will not satisfy the demand for a greatly increased supply of electricity, which must arise if our industries and our transport are to relinquish fossil fuels. The renewable sources of power would serve to satisfy the demands only of a wholly deindustrialised and socially immiserated version of the United Kingdom.

Nuclear Energy (Financing) Bill

Debate between Viscount Hanworth and Lord Oates

2nd reading
Monday 21st February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Oates (LD)]

I am grateful to the noble Baroness. I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord West, is very familiar with Portsmouth and that he will take the opportunity to visit such projects.

As we know, electrical use is highly cyclical, both in terms of daily peaks and troughs and annual swings. Therefore, we have to show much greater urgency about how we use smart pricing to reposition demand rather than simply piling on more production to meet peak load. We also have to invest in energy storage and integrate it into grid planning through batteries, green hydrogen production, pumped hydro, compressed gas storage and other solutions.

Finally, nuclear power generation produces high-level nuclear waste which is deadly for longer than any human civilisation has ever survived. It is notable how few noble Lords who contributed as nuclear proponents to this debate addressed that fundamental issue.

The Minister was keen to tell us, as other noble Lords were, how the UK was the first country in the world to begin a civil nuclear programme, yet decades after that and after promising that a solution to this problem is just around the corner, the Government and industry have still failed to supply one. It is our contention that, quite apart from the other powerful arguments against nuclear, it is morally unjustifiable to build new nuclear stations until we first have a geological disposal facility in operation for the long term to deal with the existing high-level waste we have produced. That is key.

In our view, the case for new nuclear generation projects falls down at every hurdle. They cannot contribute to our 2035 electricity decarbonisation target, they cannot effectively complement renewables, and they cannot even clean up the mess they have already created. So laden are these projects with risk, so staggeringly unable are they to keep to time or budget, and so eye-wateringly expensive is the electricity they generate that the only way to finance them is by passing the risks and costs to consumers and taxpayers who are given no choice over whether to accept them.

It is hard to improve such a fundamentally flawed project, but in Committee we will do our best to bring forward amendments to deal with the specific flaws in the Bill that I identified earlier. We look forward to working with noble Lords across all parties in the House to at least make the best of a bad job.

[Viscount Hanworth (Lab)]

Before the noble Lord sits down, may I ask him to clarify how he proposes that we should accommodate the variability of wind and solar power, which I believe are the sources of power that he prefers or proposes?

[Lord Oates (LD)]

If the noble Viscount had listened to my speech, I set out a range of areas in which we need to completely rethink our energy system, including significant investment in energy storage that we can bring online, demand repositioning and demand reduction. Those are the solutions, but I am happy to discuss them further with the noble Viscount outside the Chamber.