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National Policy Statements (Energy)

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. If anybody knows anything about nuclear power, it will be him, as Sellafield is in his constituency and he deals with it on a day-to-day basis. My hon. Friend the Member for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney (Mr Havard) did well in speaking to his amendments in a very short space of time. He and the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire (Glyn Davies), who is not in his place at the moment, said that they dislike incinerators. The good news is that people who live around nuclear power stations do not dislike them; in fact, they see them as a source of wealth and a way of developing further. It would be remiss of me not to mention Scotland at this point. These NPSs apply to Scotland as well, energy being a matter that is reserved to this House. We can abide by all of them north of the border except on one thing, which is the most important in the development of any new technology or, for that matter, old technology—planning. In Scotland, planning can be used to stop new nuclear power stations or wind farms being built anywhere, whether offshore, onshore or anywhere else. That is wrong, and the Government and this House should take a careful look at it. Thousands of jobs and billions of pounds are involved in building a nuclear power station. The west of Scotland, in particular, will need 9,000 jobs in a few years' time, and we are not going to get them thanks to a Government north of the border who use the planning rules to stop nuclear development, all because of a doctrine and an ideology followed by many people in this House—the hon. Member for Cheltenham is one of them—that has nothing to do with how real people have to live their lives now and in future. I have heard the talk about Fukushima. Although everybody in this House regrets what happened there, the fact is that the problem was not the nuclear power station but the tidal wave that hit it.