Clause 60
Energy Bill
6:15 pm
Malcolm Wicks (Minister of State (Energy), Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform; Croydon North, Labour)
That is an important line of questioning, and I hope that I more than touched on some of it in my opening speech.
Operators will be released at the discretion of the Secretary of State. That essentially means that he may or may not release them. He is likely to release them when he is confident that the liabilities can be met by another organisation. If he is not confident about that, they will not be released.
The Government must be notified in good time before a change in ownership or control of the station. The Secretary of State must approve the revisions to the funded decommissioning programme. The Secretary of State would not expect to release the former owner or controller from their obligations unless and until satisfied that the arrangements under the new owner or controller are adequate. Breaching the obligation to notify the Secretary of State of the change or to submit the relevant parts of the funded decommissioning programme for approval will amount to a criminal offence.
Although the hon. Member for Northavon and myself must not keep drawing comparisons with pensions, it strikes me that there is an interesting comparison to be drawn in this matter. The Pensions Act 2004, which he and I discussed a few years ago, set up the pension regulator and the Pension Protection Fund, and it is interesting that pension liabilities are now, properly, part of the equation in company takeovers and possible mergers. One can well imagine that, when a company seeks to take over another company, nuclear liabilities will be on the balance sheet in the negotiations and in the discussion. That is perfectly proper.