My Lords, in moving this amendment, I want to explore the status and independence of the ONR. I have great respect for the ONR and its work, and I wish to enhance its status.
In this crucial area of nuclear safeguards, the ONR will replace Euratom in overseeing the UK’s obligations to meet international nuclear safeguard standards, ensuring that civil nuclear material is not diverted into military or weapons use. This is a distinct responsibility and is separate from the ONR’s current role in relation to nuclear safety. Essentially, the ONR will be policing the UK in respect of its international commitments, and on that basis its independent status needs to be enhanced.
A Cabinet Office memorandum of 2014 made the situation clear:
“Non-ministerial departments do not have direct ministerial accountability. Their need for independence from ministers is … greater than for NDPBs, and includes regulators and tax authorities”.
They are government departments in their own right. The memorandum continued:
“There will be a ‘sponsor minister’ who has residual policy responsibility for the continued existence of the non-ministerial department, the overall policy and statutory framework within which it operates, and represents the non-ministerial department in Parliament. However, a non-ministerial department operates independently of ministers, generally receiving funding directly from Parliament”,
negotiating with Her Majesty’s Treasury,
“and is accountable directly to Parliament”.
My argument is that the ONR should be established as a non-ministerial government department to recognise the important new responsibilities that it has been given. Some of the bodies that have that status—the Competition and Markets Authority, the Crown Prosecution Service, the Food Standards Agency, HMRC, Ofsted and Ofgem—have been considered by one Government or another to have needed that status to show that they are robustly independent. Looking at nuclear safeguard responsibilities, there is a very strong case for enhancing the status of the ONR in that way, and I hope that the Minister will be sympathetic. I beg to move.