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Nuclear Industry

I take that information as being completely genuine. The reality is that it will not make a blind bit of difference, because whoever is elected as the new President of the French Republic will be avowedly nuclear. They will be nuclear not only for the generation of power; sadly, I think that the force de frappe will remain in place. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk, I voted against the renewal of Trident. I think that the two issues are completely separate. It does immeasurable damage to the argument in favour of nuclear power that it is always linked to nuclear weaponry. I would hope that we could convince other countries that the two issues are separate; perhaps we could do more to lay that ghost to rest. The French have a much clearer strategy than we do. They are committed to the amount that they can produce with their nuclear component. The nuclear issue is not talked about much in political circles. As the hon. Member for Cambridge (David Howarth) said, there is some inevitable resentment towards nuclear power, but it is a given. They will continue with that approach, which has allowed them to secure their energy future. France remains the only country in Europe that can say that; the rest of Europe, let alone the wider world, is at least partly dependent on imported supplies, and increasingly so. I do not want to delay Westminster Hall too long, but I would like to make a couple of other points, one of which is parochial as it relates to Berkeley in my constituency. I shall come to that in a minute. The building of a consensus is largely dependent on convincing people that we have an answer to the waste issue. The report of the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management was interesting; I will say nothing more defamatory than that. It resulted from the issue having been in the long grass for so many years, and although it brought it out of the long grass, it did not give it the full-frontal publicity that it needs. We have to convince people that we have an answer, because it is difficult to believe that we can go for a new build when there is legacy waste to be dealt with. The issue is controversial; although the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Copeland may provide the main answer, those of us who still have legacy waste in our constituencies have to think through the debate about what is stored where, rather than what is moved about. That needs to be explored fully and quickly so that we get some answers, as they will have a huge impact on where a new build might take place. I have always argued—some people will know that I do so to obsession—that any chance of the industry having any credibility will depend on the footprint falling across the country. I am not in favour of coming up with a number for the new nuclear stations that we need, but I have always thought it a terrible mistake to believe that the answer to the nuclear industry is, ““Stuff it in Sellafield.? Some people may think that that would take the problem away for them, but the problem cannot be escaped from. A number of sites need to be explored properly. That is a good thing that came out of the CoRWM report. In talking about the waste solution, it alluded to the fact that we need to consider the issue comprehensively. I argue that we need to look at a number of sites where we could situate new nuclear build. We have to be open with people and we have to give them incentives, which is of course the way the French are able to keep local populations sweet. Let me move on to the local situation. This is where we get into some difficulties. Because the industry has been treading water, certainly for the past five years—some of us argue that it has been doing so for much longer—we have seen yet another major restructuring of the industry. The hon. Member for Mid-Worcestershire (Peter Luff) did not make much of the role of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. That is important because the NDA owns the sites where the new build is likely to be, although it is not in any way able to deliver anything on the sites. It is merely a holding body that will make decisions about who might be capable of delivering on the sites. It is a nice notion that we have those checks and balances. It has some attraction, although, to return to what the hon. Member for Grantham and Stamford said, it is a reason why there may be more bureaucracy, delay and confusion about who will do what and when. I still believe that the key role of the NDA is as yet untested and unproven, but at least I would give it a fair wind, which I certainly would not give to Nirex on the waste issue, because I think that there we invented a body, fully owned by the state but entirely funded by the industry, that ended up failing to deal with the waste issue. We have learned some lessons from that, but on the NDA, urgency is needed regarding what it sees as happening to the sites. The situation at my own local site at Berkeley is interesting. We have not only the decommissioning—I say decommissioning rather than decommissioned because the facility is still in a state of being decommissioned. We have not only the station but the old lab sites next door. During the past six months to a year, we have passed quite an interesting staging post. Until about two years ago there were about 1,500 to 1,800 people on that site. It is now down to a few hundred people, largely very technical people, so we have seen a rapid rundown. The worry about that is that it was supposed to be the future of the industry. Of course, it was not the only future for the industry, and many of the people have gone on early retirement, so it is not as though we have lost them on the scrap heap; they went because of their age profile. There is an age profile with the industry, which needs to be understood. Many of the people who have been in it are coming out of it because they are retiring. Many other people have gone up to Sellafield, where there has been an accretion of people because of the stability of employment there. That is important because we need to make actual statements about where the future of the industry lies. If it is always seen to be in decline, even if that footprint is partial, it nevertheless is not a good way to relaunch it. The matter to which I am referring is not the responsibility of my hon. Friend the Minister, although he would have come to see the facility, but the skill level is very important and the way in which people have come together to use the skills is even more important. The decline can be rectified. It was pleasing to hear at a meeting that certainly a couple of us went to this week that there is an upsurge of interest in nuclear engineering and that college courses are beginning to fill up. That is promising, but we have lost many good people who cannot easily be replaced and we cannot pretend that that will not damage the industry. We need the Government to clarify what will happen to the sites, and to put pressure on the NDA to say what it thinks it should be doing—the selling on of the sites and the contracts have not really been covered. It is crucial to be transparent about what is happening if we are to convince the public that we know what we are doing. If we, as the people’s representatives, cannot understand what we are doing, it will be difficult to persuade them that things are going well. On the nuclear installations inspectorate, one of the industry’s problems is that it has not one regulator but two; it also has to answer to the Environment Agency. The fact that the Berkeley nuclear lab site has been de-licensed could be good news, because we might go on to use it. However, with two regulators there is always the danger of in-fighting. There has certainly been a question about how independent the regulators are, given that everybody in the industry knows everybody else—people move around within a closed industry. We need to look into that carefully. In conclusion, we have to convince the public that we are serious; nothing will happen if politicians argue that they need another review, whether it is a review of energy, of waste or of the way in which the industry can be restructured. We have to convince them that now is the time for action if we are serious about global warming and finding a centralised answer to energy provision as well as local solutions. We must be honest and open; people must believe that there is a clear structure. I should like to hear my hon. Friend the Minister say something about the fact that we have a structure that will stay in place for the foreseeable future. We do not want further change. If the NDA is going to continue in its crucial role, it must be open and it must push on. However, we need to know who is going to launch the new build. I do not think that the state can wash its hands of it; it has a critical role to play. It might not be able to do everything because much of the industry is in the private sector, but in other countries there are all sorts of paper walls between what the state commissions and who does the work on its behalf. It is not true that there is privatised industry in all other parts of the world; nothing is that clear cut. I hope that my hon. Friend hears what I am saying about urgency, openness and attempting to engage with people who, in the main, are uncertain but not against the industry. Some are obsessed with the belief that the great British public are anti-nuclear. That is not true. Most of them are agnostic, but we have to get those agnostics on board. Other parties might not agree, but I would challenge them to tell us their solution. If renewables cannot fill the gap, what will they do if they do not want to see the lights turned off?