Clause 41
Energy Bill
10:30 am
Martin Horwood (Shadow Minister (Environment), Environment, Food & Rural Affairs; Cheltenham, Liberal Democrat)
I am intrigued by that—I will have to check previous manifestos. I have never been in favour of nuclear power and have never been a member of a party that has. I think that the hon. Gentleman might be playing with words on the subject of state control in that, given that one has the industry, it might be a good idea to have it under state control. Liberal Democrat policy is not the subject of the clause and I will not give way further to the hon. Gentleman on that point.
We must conclude that we are talking about a vast part of Government expenditure. The Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform’s website has some core statistics about the Department:
“We employ around 2,500 staff, plus 4,000 in our executive agencies. Our annual budget is just over £3 billion. Half of this is spent on nuclear decommissioning; the rest on a range of issues from trade promotion to energy security supply”.
I think that Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform is a bit of a mouthful and perhaps the Department ought to be more accurately described as the Department for nuclear subsidy, since that is what it is providing from the largest part of its budget.