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Energy Bill

I, too, support the amendment. The noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, referred to the French reactors being built at Flamanville and in Finland. I discussed this at some length last year with people from Areva, and the Finnish reactor is quite interesting. Their argument is that the delays—there certainly have been delays—and the additional costs that have flowed from them have been almost entirely due to very slow decision-making by the Finnish regulators. Areva has had to wait for long periods between the different stages of building that reactor, which I think is at Olkiluoto, and it felt that it was being not very well treated by the Finnish regulators. So far as concerns the station being built at Flamanville—the other one that the noble Lord mentioned—I contacted EDF when the first complaint about the French regulator was announced a few weeks ago and, although it has recently been given much higher prominence in the British press, for reasons about which one can only speculate, the EDF people were not overly concerned about this. They agreed to say that they were not complaining about the activities of the regulators, which they recognise have to be thorough and persistent. In connection with Flamanville, one understands that the French regulators have been concerned to ensure that there is no backsliding. As the design of the EPR reactor has become more settled and two plants are now under construction, EDF entirely recognises that it is appropriate that the regulators should make absolutely certain at every stage that all the safety and quality requirements that they lay down are being met. The French regulators have been quoted as saying that they had become aware of certain slapdash practices—I paraphrase their words; I am not sure what they were in French—and that they were very concerned to stop that happening. However, when I discussed this with the senior management at EDF a few weeks ago, they were not concerned that the regulators were acting in any way improperly. The noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, referred to the paramount importance of safety in this—the NII has had a remarkable record in this over the years—and it is right that they should be held to that. Secondly, there was a good deal of publicity surrounding the visit of President Sarkozy to this country. There was talk of a lot of collaboration between the British and the French on nuclear matters and a reference to including regulation. I took that up through a parliamentary Question, in which I asked whether this was likely to lead to a mutual approval process, whereby something that had been approved by a regulator in one country could be accepted by the other. If I were a Minister, I would be extremely cautious about that. That was the nature of the reply that I received—that there was no intention that there should be any mutual recognition of the standards. Without knowing all the details, it is difficult to work out exactly what this collaboration amounts to, or whether it is something that was put in as an embellishment or to add, as Gilbert would have said, ““corroborative verisimilitude”” to an otherwise unconvincing narrative of collaboration between the two countries. My third point is the reason why I support the amendment. It has been well known in the industry for some time that the regulator has had difficulty in recruiting qualified people to fill the gaps. After all, the authorities broadly said for the best part of 10 years that they were not interested in nuclear power and that all that they would try to do was keep the nuclear option open. It may interest the Committee to know that Professor Robin Grimes runs a programme at Imperial College called KNOO—Keeping the Nuclear Option Open. When I suggested to him after last year’s White Paper that he might like to change the title, he said, ““No, there’s far too much goodwill being invested in the name of KNOO””. So the KNOO it is. But this is the basis of the problem. With Ministers being firm in making it clear to their officials that they were not interested in nuclear new build, but only in decommissioning and the treatment of waste, it was hardly surprising that the chief inspector of the NII found it difficult to recruit. It was initially a problem of pay. However, after great fuss, he eventually obtained a significant uplift in the maximum that he could offer to future members of the NII, which has certainly helped matters. I hope that the Minister will reassure us that, with those enhanced rates of pay, the chief inspector, Mike Weightman, is able to recruit the people whom he wants for the work that he is now doing, which covers not just new build but decommissioning and the preparations for waste disposal and so on. But it is new build, particularly the approval of the new designs, which is taking a good deal of his time. Mr Weightman made it clear to a meeting that I attended that the inspectorate was proposing to break with previous traditions. Instead of one announcement—““Yes, this is being approved””—he proposed that there should be a series of announcements as each stage of the approval process was reached, which would give greater certainty and enable potential investors in new nuclear build to take the matter forward without there being a long gap. I am trying to put the amendment into context. Regulation, particularly of new nuclear build, is hugely important. I hope that the Government will smile on the amendment, because the public need regular reports on the process of regulation. That is what the amendment would achieve. I fully support it.