Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask Her Majesty's Government whether they would be willing to accept the jurisdiction of the Court of Justice of the EU over civil nuclear co-operation during any transitional period after the UK leaves the EU.

The way in which the UK envisages a transition or implementation period operating was set out in my Rt Hon Friend the Prime Minister’s Florence speech. The priority is to get the right arrangements for our relationship with the EU in the long term and we want to get there in a smooth and orderly way, with minimum disruption.

That is why we want swift agreement on an implementation period, based on the existing structure of rules and regulations, so that there is one set of changes for businesses and people. That may mean that we start off with the Court of Justice of the EU (ECJ) still governing the rules we are part of for that period, but the Government is also clear that if we can bring forward a new dispute resolution mechanism at an earlier stage we will do so.

In the recent BEIS Select Committee enquiry into the impact of leaving the EU on the nuclear sector, my department noted that it had been unable to find any ECJ cases on Euratom that involved the UK. I would like to take the opportunity to correct this, as two or three such cases have been identified.