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Nuclear Industry

Mr. Cook, I recognise that. Felixstowe harbour was merely an example, if I may say so, of a successful way of getting a controversial and very necessary infrastructural project built through the planning system. I was making an analogy. I am sorry to be described as rambling and will try to avoid giving any grounds at all for being accused of that in future. The Government need to do something urgently about the nuclear installations inspectorate. My hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Worcestershire knows more about what is going on there than I do. I would love to know—perhaps we will hear something from the Government—what the staff of the nuclear installations inspectorate have been doing. Have they just been taking salaries for a number of years and doing nothing at all, have they been working on and evaluating new types of nuclear power station, or have they been doing some third thing? I do not know what they have been doing, but it seems to me that their job involves being in a position at any time to license new types of power station. Sadly, the inspectorate has not had anything to do for many years. I shall not find it easy to accept that it now has a huge backlog to catch up on, and that it will take many years before it can get its act together and approve a new nuclear power station in this country. The least that it should be able to do is leverage all the work that has been done by equivalent inspectorates in other countries. The Finnish example is a good one. I do not know exactly what procedures the Finns followed but, knowing Finland to some extent, I am sure that they were extremely thorough. They have good inspectors, and they have done a good piece of work in evaluating their power station, the European pressurised water reactor, which will come on stream in, I believe, 2009, which is fairly soon. As somebody said earlier, there may be experience of the operation of that type of station to draw on before we take irrevocable decisions here—perhaps not very much experience because, as I said, I want to ensure that we start breaking the sod and building the first of the new pressurised water reactors as soon as possible.