Nuclear Safeguards Bill

That is a little strange in that the Prime Minister referred to transition periods for the overall EU negotiations in her Florence speech, and the Secretary of State did so strongly in his written statement on 11 January. If the hon. Gentleman wants to be assured, as far as the nuclear industry is concerned, that there will be a seamless transition at the point at which we are no longer a member of Euratom, I would have thought he ought to be strongly in favour of aspiring to a transition period. As he knows and we know, the process of recreating in the UK all the things that have been done by Euratom for 40 years—we will discuss that later—will be extremely difficult, lengthy and problematic. It will certainly, in the opinion of many people, be extremely difficult to achieve in the period ahead if we corral those negotiations and are to complete them by March 2019. If he thought about it for a moment, he would recognise that the last thing we could conceivably want is a period of, in effect, nuclear shutdown, or of defaulting on our international obligations because we are not ready to carry them out on Brexit. That is why a transition period may be so important.