Security of Supply

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 4:47 pm on 12 January 2006.

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Photo of Quentin Davies Quentin Davies Conservative, Grantham and Stamford 4:47, 12 January 2006

I cannot as I am trying not to go into extra time.

Against that background, I do not think that energy saving is enough. Of course, we all want to go in for energy saving, but we have to recognise that demand for energy will be increasing at the very time when some of our power stations, particularly the nuclear ones, have to be decommissioned. We must replace those sources of energy with new ones. We must also provide for new energy in future. Simply to talk about energy saving, as the Liberal party does, is a complete abdication. It is a cop-out, not a responsible policy line.

Nor do I believe that renewables can be the answer. After all, all we have had so far from renewables has been wind. There has been no progress on ambitious ideas about mobilising tidal energy. Wind is very expensive. Subsidies disguise the additional economic cost, and wind is available on average for only 30 per cent. of the time. It is not a baseload source of energy, and although it is fine if it provides 4 per cent. or even 10 per cent. of energy—a few percentage points would be very desirable—it eventually becomes impractical, because we would need so much back-up capacity that the fixed costs of the back-up for when there is no wind, which is on average roughly 70 per cent. of the time, become excessive. That is not a solution.

The only solution is that supported by colleagues and me. I very much endorse what my right hon. Friend Mr. Jack said, and what he has also said on many occasions. We need to go, ambitiously and bravely, for a major programme of building new nuclear generators. In other words, we need to do, 20 years later than they did, what the French have so successfully done. I should like us to commit ourselves in the next few years to building, say, 10 new EPR stations, or perhaps dual reactor stations. Ten of those with 3 GW to 4 GW each would produce in 25 or 30 years time about half our current energy needs.

If we are to move down that road, Parliament will have to take some decisions. We shall have to make a decision on a licensing regime. The nuclear inspectorate of the Health and Safety Executive has gone to sleep over the past few years so far as licensing new models is concerned, even though new stations have been built in France, Finland and elsewhere. The inspectorate has done no work on that, and there will be enormous delay in getting it into gear. We should go for an EU regulation and licensing regime, which would enable us to leverage on the experience of the French and the Finns.

We have to do something about the planning regime. We cannot possibly have the absolute fiasco of the Sizewell B inquiry, which I think lasted six years. From my experience in Northern Ireland, I can see what happens when we put a lot of lawyers in a room and pay them large amounts of money daily, as in the Saville inquiry. It all goes on for years and years and years.

If we are going to do what I suggest, it will have to be done by private Bill procedure. Of course, private Bills can be prayed against, and Parliament can hear the evidence. We would never have built a railway system in the 19th century if it had not been for private Bills. I think we have to get back to that. I remember in my first Parliament supporting the private Bill on Felixstowe dock and harbour. We would never have had the Felixstowe dock without adopting that procedure, and what a success that has been.

Then there is the climate change levy. We should not give a bonus to existing stations, which are making a reasonable amount of money and are rapidly depreciating. But for new nuclear build, we should exonerate energy produced by those stations from the levy. There is no real logic about applying the climate change levy to nuclear energy, which produces no carbon at all and does not affect the environment. We should remove that anomaly.

Finally, we need to do something about limiting regulatory risk. The state—be it in London, Brussels or Vienna—is in a broad sense responsible for regulation, and if we are to get private sector capital investment in building new nuclear power stations, investors must be sure of the rules of the game on, for example, fuel treatment, recycling and decommissioning. They must be sure that the rules will not suddenly be arbitrarily changed. If the rules are changed, it is reasonable to require the state that changes them to meet the associated economic costs.

Investors in the energy industry and others are looking at an average oil price of $50 a barrel, and that offers a viable reason for revisiting the nuclear programme. As I said, two of our EU partners, Finland and France, have made that analysis already. France is gaining immense benefits—some of the figures were quoted earlier in the debate—from the very brave decisions that it took in the 1970s. That is the way forward for us too, and I hope that the Government, and my colleagues on the Opposition Front Bench, have the courage to say as much over the coming months. We need to make a decision without delay.