Clause 6 - Designated responsibilities
Energy Bill [Lords]
10:45 am
Mr Norman Baker (Shadow Secretary of State for the Environment, Environment, Food & Rural Affairs; Lewes, Liberal Democrat)
The Minister has told us about transparency and independence, so let us try him on the question of the NDA not generating excessive waste. I was interested in the Government's White Paper, which promised an annual report on the rationale for keeping open nuclear facilities, but that seems to have mysteriously vanished between the publication of the White Paper and the Bill. We are
used to party manifestos having policies of storm quality, which become heavy rain on reaching a White Paper and light drizzle in a Bill. That is what we have in this case—a welcome suggestion has disappeared in the mysterious period between the production of the White Paper and the Bill.
The matter is at the heart of the NDA's function. I naively thought that the NDA is there to help to deal with the environmental mess that the nuclear industry has created over many years and that its function is to decommission facilities and ensure that decommissioning is dealt with safely and sensibly, consistent with the good use of taxpayers' money. That seems to be the functions of the NDA put simply.
However, that is not what the Bill says, and I want to know why. For example, clause 6 says:
''The principal function of the NDA shall be to have responsibility for securing —
. . . the operation, pending the commencement of their decommissioning, of designated nuclear installations''.
The phrase that I am keen for the Minister to explore is
''pending the commencement of their decommissioning''.
Under the system, when a nuclear operator decides that its facility is to close—or, for whatever reason, the Government decide that it should be closed—the facility should become redundant and be handed over to the NDA to be dealt with. It is odd if something that has been handed over to the NDA can continue operating indefinitely, which is how I read clause 6. That is reiterated in clause 13(2), which says that the powers of the NDA include, in particular, the
''power to operate electricity generating stations''.
Why is no limit being put on the time for which the NDA would have that responsibility? Why is there not an annual reporting mechanism, as the White Paper proposed?
Does the Minister accept that the Bill as drafted would, in theory, enable the NDA to continue to generate electricity from those nuclear stations indefinitely? I am not sure that I can imagine the circumstances in which that would arise; nevertheless the Bill would muddy the waters between the NDA's finances and those of the nuclear industry, which generates electricity and waste. It also leads to an odd situation in which the NDA, which is responsible for dealing with our waste mountain, would, rather perversely, end up having to generate its own waste because it would be operating stations that produced waste.
As I understand it, clause 6 allows BNFL's ageing loss-making Magnox reactors to be operated by the NDA, apparently without time scale. It also gives the NDA power to operate the two reprocessing plants at Sellafield. We will come on to reprocessing as an aside in the next group of amendments, but suffice it to say that it would be very curious for a body designed to deal with nuclear waste to be the primary production method of that waste. That is the effect of clause 6 as I see it. Why do we not have a time limit on the operation that the NDA would be able to set for
stations that come under its control? That is the primary question that I hope the Minister will address in responding to the amendments.