Energy Bill

I shall make a little more progress and then give way to the hon. Gentleman and to my hon. Friend the Member for Pendle (Mr. Prentice). There will be powers to enforce compliance with the funded programme. The Bill will make it a criminal offence to operate new nuclear power stations without having an approved programme in place. Failure to comply with the programme will also be a criminal offence. As a provision outside the clauses in the Bill, the Government will ensure investor confidence by establishing a fixed price for disposing of new nuclear waste. That will be based on expected costs, with a significant risk premium built in to safeguard the public purse. Further details of how the system will work will be available later this month, but it is wrong to suggest, as some have, that a system based on fixed costs will mean a taxpayer subsidy for new nuclear power. It will mean no such thing: as I have said, we will build a significant contingency into pricing proposals to guard against public subsidies, in a wide range of possible circumstances. The Bill will also ensure that, in a number of situations, including insolvency, the Government will have the power to seek additional funding from parent and other associated companies. In that way, we will be able to ensure that operators meet their financial obligations. The regulatory structure that the Bill puts in place, combined with the work to determine waste and decommissioning costs and the other facilitating measures announced in the nuclear White Paper earlier this month, constitute an important package of measures. Those measures will ensure that nuclear power is available as an investment option to companies, alongside other low-carbon technologies. At the same time, however, they will, as I have said, ensure that the Government are free to act to discharge their international responsibilities. This part of the Bill also strengthens the decommissioning regime for offshore renewables and for oil and gas installations. Developers already have an obligation to ensure that redundant offshore installations are decommissioned properly, to protect the marine environment and to ensure the safety of other industries, such as shipping. New provisions in the Bill will strengthen the regime and put in place suitable protections for the public purse and the environment. They will also ensure that funds put aside for decommissioning are expressly protected for that purpose, even in the event of insolvency.