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Nuclear Industry

The Trade and Industry Committee produced its fourth report of the 2005-06 Session, ““New nuclear? Examining the Issues? on 10 July 2006, the day before the Government published the conclusions of their energy review consultation, ““The Energy Challenge?. I express my gratitude to the Committee’s staff, especially Rob Cope, the Committee’s then very new specialist, and to the whole Committee for its extraordinary efforts in getting the report published before the Government brought forward their statement on the energy review. Meeting the deadline was a considerable challenge to the Committee and I am grateful to everyone involved for the parts that they played. Before I turn to the substance of the debate, I make two parliamentary points. First, I am sorry that the House has not had proper notice of the debate, and I attach considerable importance to that. For reasons that I do not understand, the Leader of the House failed to mention forthcoming Westminster Hall debates in his business statement on the Thursday before the recess, which meant that the Table Office and House authorities were not aware of the subject of this debate. When I returned to the House after Easter on Monday, I was alarmed to find that today’s subject was still not on the Order Paper. I went to the Table Office, which was, as always, very obliging and helpful. It did some research and found that this debate was to go ahead and the information appeared on the Order Paper for the first time on Tuesday of this week. This is an exceptionally important subject for the country and for many Members of Parliament, who will be sorry that they did not know about the debate. I am sorry to see a relatively small number of my colleagues here, but no blame attaches to them because they did not know that the debate was happening—that goes for my colleagues on both sides of the House and on both sides of the argument. Secondly, and perhaps more flippantly, I am delighted to see the former Energy Minister in his place to reply to the debate. He was an excellent Energy Minister by any standards, and I have considerable personal regard for him. However, it worries me that the Minister routinely responsible for energy policy is not in this place but in another place, because it puts a considerable burden on the Minister for Science and Innovation when the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry is not available to answer debates and questions. Given the huge importance of energy policy to the future of the country, it would be better to have a Minister for Energy answerable regularly to the House of Commons as we used to have before the ennoblement of the current Minister. I feel for the Minister for Science and Innovation—he has many ancillary responsibilities, such as that for skills, on top of his science duties, as I found when he came before my committee recently. Perhaps we ought to tag him to give us an idea of the extra responsibilities he undertakes on top of those to do with the science and innovation. That way, we could see where he is when not doing the job he is described as doing in the directory of ministerial responsibilities.