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Energy: Draft National Policy Statement for Nuclear Power Generation (EN-6)

My Lords, I am sure that the Committee is grateful to the Minister for his careful introduction. It will not altogether surprise him if I return to some of the points that he has made, particularly on the Government’s refusal to countenance Dungeness as a site for future nuclear build. I shall also want to talk, not today but on Thursday, about carbon capture readiness. I start my speech with a compliment. The nuclear NPS is perhaps the clearest statement of the Government’s civil nuclear policy that they have made since they first embarked on it in 2006. The Minister referred to the 2008 White Paper, but there were intimations well before that. After that, the compliments must end. Ministers cannot escape responsibility for the fact that the years of delay before 2006, which was the reversal of policy, means that there is now, as we have been warned by Ofgem, a serious risk of interruptions of the supply of electricity to consumers later this decade. It was only last month that Ofgem gave that warning. From 1997 onwards, this Government’s policy was based on the foolish fantasy that renewable energy—in practice, mostly wind power—was somehow going to keep the lights on. Indeed, former Ministers at the DTI and Defra gave every appearance of believing, no doubt with complete sincerity, that they were presiding over the run-down and eventual disappearance of civil nuclear power in this country. One has only to look at the history to see what happened. They were content to see British Energy virtually go to the wall, to the point where, in order to keep operating, it had to be rescued by the Treasury. That led to the almost inevitable takeover which happened when it was taken over by EDF. The Government’s flagship legislation during this period had nothing whatever to say about new nuclear build. They were concerned only with winding down and decommissioning existing plants and facilities.