Nuclear Safeguards Bill

Debate between Lord Teverson and Lord Carlile of Berriew

Ping Pong (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 6th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, I am also very pleased that we have come to a suitable arrangement. I support this amendment and reflect the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Broers. However, the challenges in achieving this are still major. We know from the leak from the risk assessment of the Office for Nuclear Regulation that we have an IT system that has only just been commissioned and timescales are very short for that £100,000 programme. We know that training has not been fast or easy in terms of recruitment or giving skills to those people to ensure that we have the right number of people in the Office for Nuclear Regulation. We have already had a concession that the standards that can be met by Brexit day are best international, rather than the Euratom standards the Government originally wished for.

Also, I understand that we have not yet had ratification of any of those nuclear co-operation agreements. Although I recognise and welcome the fact that we have agreement with the United States, agreement is not ratification. As the Minister himself said in a Written Answer to me:

“Ratification in the US requires the agreement to remain in Congress for 90 joint sitting days, whereby the US Senate and House of Representatives both sit, and the consent of two-thirds of the US Senate. Congress also has the option of adopting either a joint resolution of approval, with or without conditions, or standalone legislation that could approve the agreement. UK officials have held detailed discussions with the US and both sides are satisfied that this process can be completed ahead of the UK’s withdrawal from Euratom”.


I am glad to hear that optimism, but I still believe that that is a very difficult timetable to meet. I will be interested to hear from the Minister where we are on the other three nuclear co-operation agreements as well.

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

My Lords, as another who took part in the earlier stages of this debate, my eye joined with my noble friend Lord Broers in expressing thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Henley, for listening to the arguments that were made earlier, and to the Government for showing that the dynamic relationship that sometimes exists between your Lordships’ House and the House of Commons actually improves Bills, even in the febrile context of Brexit. I hope that this result today on Motion A, which I certainly support, will be a clear message to those who are given to say glibly that your Lordships’ House is merely trying to wreck Brexit. That is just not true. What is happening this afternoon is clear evidence, which the Government should cite, that there can be constructive work between the two Houses to improve even the legislation on this very difficult issue.

Nuclear Safeguards Bill

Debate between Lord Teverson and Lord Carlile of Berriew

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 22nd February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Teverson]

My Lords, I think we should allow the noble Viscount to sit down, and remind ourselves that he is not the Minister. To go back to something that the noble Lord, Lord Warner, said, in a way, none of the amendments in this group is perfect. Why are they not perfect? It is because we have given our notice to withdraw from Euratom, yet we all know that that was not the greatest thing to do. So we are now trying to claw our way back to the status quo, having given notification under Article 106a of the Euratom treaty. We are trying to find a way to get back to where we want to be, but we are not allowed to withdraw our notification under the treaty. We certainly cannot within the scope of this Bill, but perhaps under the EU withdrawal Bill there is more scope. Who knows? It does not seem so long ago that we were debating that.

I presume the Minister will confirm that we do want to achieve Euratom standards, not bargain-basement, superstore value in terms of just the IAEA standards, although those are important. Can the Minister confirm that a transitional agreement is possible and would work, and that the EU 27 are up for this? Certainly in the publication on transitional arrangements, which was published last month, Euratom is a footnote on a couple of occasions, so I presume that it is in the mix in terms of the continuing acquis during the transition period.

What concerns me most about this is the need—as the noble Viscount has said, and he is quite right—to avoid this rather more precipitous cliff edge than there is even in the other areas of transitional commercial arrangements. When the break from the treaty happens, are we certain that the International Atomic Energy Agency would be prepared to have Euratom act as our safeguarding authority during a transitional period even though we are not legally a member of Euratom? That is a fundamental question. An answer would provide a lot more clarity and perhaps enable us to come back on Report with a suitable amendment which might actually work. We are not in a position to do that at the moment because we do not have that information.

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

My Lords, after the excellent introduction by the noble Baroness, Lady Featherstone, and the excellent speech by the noble Lord, Lord Warner, I listened with great attention to what was said by the noble Viscount. My conclusion, after he sat down, was that I should take a deep breath, count to three and then try to analyse where we are up to in this debate. My conclusions are: first, we have at the moment a very satisfactory set of standards; secondly, what we are offered as an alternative is a set of good intentions. We know about good intentions; they do not always lead to good standards, or even any standards being adopted at all. I say to the Minister that what persuades those of us who are taking part in this important debate, and who took part in yesterday’s analogous debates, is real anxiety about the standards this country will have in the future, and about whether we will be recognised as coming up to world standards in relation to nuclear safeguards. It was partly with that in mind that I went to look at the EU exit analysis papers at 100 Parliament Street the day before yesterday, which were referred to extensively in the night shift before we signed up to today’s morning shift. I looked in those papers for a single sentence or word about the future of nuclear safety and Euratom. I was only there for three-quarters of an hour so I only had time to read the documents twice, but I do not recall, and did not note, a single word on this issue. It worries me that it was not there because this is a key issue that should have been addressed in the advice given to Ministers, which is what those papers really are.

Therefore, I repeat a question I asked of the Minister’s colleague last night: how many meetings have so far taken place on this issue with European negotiating counterparts? Can we be given a number please? Next question: how many meetings of that kind have taken place on this issue with counterparts in the IAEA? Please can we have numbers because they will give us at least an indication of how far down the road we are towards turning the good intentions into a set of future standards? I am not wholly opposed to leaving Euratom: we may be able to do at least as well or better under other arrangements, but we have to do at least as well or better, otherwise we will serve the country ill.

Nuclear Safeguards Bill

Debate between Lord Teverson and Lord Carlile of Berriew

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Thursday 22nd February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

My Lords, I would like to speak to Amendments 14 and 15 tabled in my name, and in particular to the proposed new clause set out in Amendment 14. I would never insult the Minister by accusing him of being overly sensitive; nevertheless, he will have realised that there is a great deal of genuine concern about what is going to be delivered in relation to Euratom on 29 March 2019. I support what the noble Lord, Lord Warner, just said, which was in the same vein.

My suggested new clause would require the Government to answer certain criteria by that date. The criteria are set out clearly and they have been shown, in the debates on this Bill and on the withdrawal Bill yesterday, to be the ones that cause concern around the House and which the Minister has heard repeated time and again. In debating terms, this has basically been a one-horse race in relation to concern about Euratom.

Yesterday—and I will not repeat them—I cited some answers that had helpfully been supplied by the Minister to questions raised by the Society for Radiological Protection and by me as a result of that society’s representations. What was clear from those answers was that the Government do not know what will be delivered or when. This afternoon, I will cite another piece of evidence that draws the same conclusions. On 12 February, just over a week ago, there was a meeting between 10 officials—nine from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, one from Public Health England and the two senior relevant officers of the Society for Radiological Protection. I have in my hand a record of that meeting, which I feel sure is accurate.

In that meeting, there was what was described as a “Euratom exit update”. One of the officials, who was clearly a senior and responsible official—it is invidious to name officials, so I will not name him or her—noted that the Nuclear Safeguards Bill is currently going through the House of Lords. The official noted that,

“at current there has been minimal industry engagement, due to the short timescales to pass the bill. However”—

the official—

“did note that the bill is a skeleton, and more detailed consultation with industry and professional bodies would take place as the regulations are developed”.

All I am asking for, in my new clause suggested in Amendment 14, is the key to the skeleton or the cupboard where the skeleton is kept.

The official noted that,

“discussions are going well internationally”,

which is very welcome,

“with progress being made on bi-lateral agreements with the US, Australia, Canada and Japan”.

We would certainly like to know more about that. The official then explained—and this is very important—that,

“as part of the EU exit process they”—

the 10 officials—

“are unable to pursue agreements with the various EU countries”—

I think “pursue” means seek—

“till the exit process is complete”.

If that is right, it is extremely worrying. I am sure that the Minister can be supplied with a copy of the minutes of that meeting.

It was also noted that,

“there have been wider EU civil nuclear issues around legal ownership of fissile material and radioactive waste”.

Contained in that single sentence is a host of problems that will have to be unravelled in great detail if there is to be proper nuclear safeguarding.

Having read those notes, with the welcome support of the noble Lord, Lord Fox, I tabled Amendment 14. It requires the Secretary of State to publish a report setting out the answers to all these questions before 29 March 2019. It requires the making of,

“regulations providing for the implementation of any agreements covered”,

by the clause and a statutory instrument which should be approved by each House of Parliament.

There is an evidence base for the kind of quality assurance that any responsible Government would demand of any contractor to which they were letting a contract. As a Parliament, we are entitled to demand, respectfully but necessarily, a similar level of quality control for the Government before we lose the legislative opportunities available to us and throw this enormously important issue to the wolves—or to a skeleton.

[Lord Teverson]

My Lords, I will speak to my Amendment 9. One of the things I have tried to do in this amendment—I could not do it completely satisfactorily because of where we are in the Bill—is to ask what are the key things we need in place before it is safe and practical for us to leave Euratom and the system we have. There were three specific areas that we needed to cross that finishing line before we entered out into this brave new world. They are listed and they are very clear.

The first is that we should have an agreement from the International Atomic Energy Agency that our safeguarding procedures and the body that we are talking about in the Bill are approved. We need that; without it, we are unable to move forward. Secondly, because we are one of the few nuclear weapon states in the world, we need a voluntary offer agreement with the IAEA that relates to our new status outside Euratom. Thirdly and very practically—we have had a description of the difficulties around this—we need active nuclear co-operation agreements that have been confirmed or agreed by the other side. Whether we can get grandfathering rights on them is very difficult in some instances—the one with the United States has been particularly highlighted in that degree—but we also need to have those in place for those nations where we have active nuclear trading of the type of products listed in the schedules of the Euratom treaty and under the international agreements of the IAEA.

The difficulty in drafting this amendment was that if we do not have these in place, what do we do? My solution to that was very simple: that we should seek temporarily—as the Minister said, we have already gone through the process of agreeing withdrawal from Euratom, rightly or wrongly—to withdraw the notice under Article 106a until we have those three areas of agreement in place and we can be certain that we can go ahead. It is my opinion that we can do that ourselves unilaterally. More certainly we would need to get the agreement of the 27 other member states. That would clearly be the right answer, in that we would continue to be a member until we had those in place.

I was unable to put that in the amendment because it was out of the scope of the Bill, apparently, so I have looked to move on. What we would have to do here is, effectively, to have a transition period. On that, I come back to my question to the Minister that I raised in the first grouping of amendments: do we know that there will be a transition period with Euratom, the negotiation on which, as I see it, is going ahead and will have to be agreed or not on 22 March—it is only a month away—and that we can indeed somehow satisfactorily subcontract all these responsibilities to Euratom and to the international agencies should one of these vital areas go wrong? That is an entirely reasonable question for which I would expect us to have a workable strategy to avoid that cliff edge, if that should happen for all sorts of reasons that, quite clearly, are not totally in the Government’s control. From that point of view we need contingency and to understand the route map if those three areas are not fulfilled. I look forward to the Minister’s response on them.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Carlile of Berriew]

I am grateful to the Minister for giving way. I suspect that she is now on paragraph 15, but she is not answering this debate, which is about whether Her Majesty’s Government are prepared to provide specified information to Parliament on certain criteria. What she is telling us would all be very interesting if we had not heard it many times before, but it is a dissertation on the roles of different organisations. Can we please have an answer to this debate? It is 4.32 pm on a Thursday and I would have thought that it could be answered in a few paragraphs—maybe numbers 47 to 50.

[Lord Teverson]

I was happy with the answer that the Minister was giving about NCAs.