Nuclear Safeguards Bill — House of Lords, 2018-02-22
Topic: Energy
Oliver Michael Robert Eden (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, I am sorry if the noble Lord feels that he is not a slow learner. At times, I have felt that he and other noble Lords have been a bit slow on these things. That is why I am trying to spell it out very carefully and very slowly and I will continue to do so. I hope to make it clear so that the Committee and the House will understand that we will have the appropriate civil nuclear safeguards regime in place by next year, which is of paramount importance for us at that stage. We have had already considerable discussions with Euratom. There will be further discussions with the IAEA. I will not go into the details but I can no doubt write to the noble Lord in due course In a sense, this is an amending Bill. As noble Lords will be aware, it will amend the Energy Act 2013 by creating new powers so that we can put in place regulations that offer detail on the domestic safeguards regime, such as accounting, reporting, control and inspection arrangements. It also creates the limited power that I referred to earlier which we will get to in later amendments, allowing us to amend the Nuclear Safeguards and Electricity (Finance) Act 1978 and others. That power will mean that references in that legislation to existing international agreements can be updated once new international agreements have been reached. We will discuss that in greater detail later on I have listened carefully to what has been said on the agreements that we have before us on Amendments 1, 2, 12, 16 and 17. These amendments taken as a group cover the fundamental issue of the United Kingdom’s future relationship with Euratom and our strategy pertaining to this. I fully appreciate the sentiment and the intention behind these amendments. I shall try to address them all On Amendment 1, the new clause proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Featherstone, would require Ministers, when negotiating and concluding the withdrawal agreement, to have regard to the desirability of associate membership of Euratom, and require the Government to report periodically to Parliament the progress to that end. Noble Lords will have heard many times before that there is no such thing as associate membership of Euratom. I made that clear at Second Reading. It is important that discussions on this matter focus on the actual treaty. The concept of associate membership does not exist in the treaty. Given the frequency with which the point comes up, I start my response by reading out exactly what the Government said to the BEIS Select Committee on this point in the autumn: "There are two different articles in the treaty that deal with the relationship between Euratom and third countries. One of them is Article 101, which enables the community to enter into agreements with third states. That is the one that has been used in the research and training context with Switzerland. That requires a qualified majority vote. The other one is Article 206, which enables the community to conclude an agreement establishing a formal association involving reciprocal rights and obligations. That is the ‘association with’ part, not being an associate member. That requires unanimity." It is indeed the case that the Ukraine and Switzerland each have a form of association agreement with Euratom, but those agreements cover only research and training activities. Neither covers nuclear safeguards activities. These countries are not associate members of Euratom. Wanting to maintain a close relationship with Euratom is this Government’s stated objective so we need no persuading on that point. We have already stated very clearly in Statements to the House that the Government will be seeking a close and effective association with Euratom as part of the next phase of negotiations with the EU. We have made clear the desirability of this aim and that it forms part of our negotiation strategy I fully recognise the importance of providing clarity on the progress of the Government’s plans for withdrawing from Euratom and our ambitions in respect of a future relationship with Euratom, which the noble Lord, Lord Warner, asked about earlier; it is relevant to Amendments 2 and 16, which I will deal with later.