Nuclear Safeguards Bill — House of Lords, 2018-02-22
Topic: Mixed Topics
Robin Teverson (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): 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.