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Radioactive Waste Management Report

My hon. Friend speaks on this issue with considerable expertise, and I completely agree with him—I want that openness and transparency as much as he and the Opposition do. What is going on should be transparent to me, as Secretary of State, but also to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, to the House and to the wider public. If anything has been made clear by the 30-plus years of what CoRWM calls failure, it is that a secretive approach—sometimes described as ““decide, announce, defend””, although it often became ““decide, announce, defend, abandon””—does not work. We must have full openness at every stage, and public confidence is critical. I appreciate that my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, North-West (John Robertson) wants to look at the details, and I said in my statement that a detailed response to all of CoRWM’s recommendations has been made available to the House. It contains more detail than I was able to supply in my statement. If my hon. Friend reads that, he will see that the Government are committed to transparency and to independent and rigorous scrutiny and intervention by the statutory regulators, which are the only bodies with statutory responsibility in these matters at the moment. Although Nirex has played an important role in advising the industry, it does not have any statutory powers. The independent regulators are the only bodies with statutory powers, either under the current system or in the future. I believe that that is the right approach, and the existence of an additional oversight committee made up of scientists and lay people means that we have an important double lock on these matters.