Clause 19
Energy Bill
11:30 am
Charles Hendry (Shadow Minister, Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform; Wealden, Conservative)
I beg to move amendment No. 12, in clause 19, page 10, line 27, at end insert—
‘(i) provision about obligations of a licence holder to advise the Secretary of State of any accidents, near accidents or leakages relating to the facility.’.
This clause sets out the terms and conditions that can be attached to a licence, and they are mostly sensible, nuts-and-bolts things. However there is nothing here about the rules relating to an accident. The Bill sets out an inspection regime, but an inspector will presumably make visits either at a given time or unannounced, but that will not necessarily coincide with something untoward happening at the facility. This amendment puts the onus, indeed a legal requirement, on the operator to advise if there have been accidents or near-accidents. We recognise that there could be legal difficulty in defining a near-accident, but it is right to be concerned about things that go wrong even if they did not actually result in a formal accident. They might indicate poor working practices that should be investigated.
We all recognise that we are entering uncharted waters with this technology and will be on a learning curve for many years to come. We do not know from whence the risks to the public or environmental safety might come, so we do need to take adequate precautions. Safety, of course, comes with experience and from learning from mistakes—where things have gone wrong, what steps have been put in place to make sure they do not happen again? Lessons learned in this way are so fundamental that they are, of course, the way we make sure that we make adequate precaution for the future.
It would be naive to think we could build in every conceivable safety element from the outset, so we need a precautionary approach in which the onus is on the operator to advise of accidents and near-accidents. Operators will be very concerned about safety, but in the early years of such technology, they will also be concerned about driving costs down, and cost reductions must not be allowed to win over safety. Similarly with leaks, the technology for identifying leaks is in its infancy. Mechanisms to identify leaks can be put in place, but it should be the responsibility of the operator to report any leaks that take place so that they can be fully investigated.