My Lords, I have added my name to this amendment because, like the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, I remain concerned about the industry’s access to the workforce that it will need once the UK leaves Euratom. I suggest that the free flow of essential specialist staff could well dry up unless the Government are reasonably energetic in the guarantees that they give them. As the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, said, this is not just a safeguarding workforce issue; it affects the whole sector, as was very well brought out in the Nuclear Industry Association’s briefing. I shall not go into detail on that but it is clear that we need a very skilled workforce coming to this country to help both in maintaining existing reactors and, even more significantly, in building new ones, as well as in the safeguarding area.
With regard to the regular reports that the Government will give to Parliament on progress in the safeguarding area, it is a bit disappointing that we did not manage to get into the Bill a specific reference to the need for an essential specialist workforce. I hope that the Minister will take this suggestion in the spirit in which it is offered, and perhaps he might encourage his officials, when they are producing these reports, to say something about the progress that is being made, particularly with the ONR getting the specialist staff that it needs.
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In conclusion, I would like to raise an issue which Ministers are usually keen not to talk about out loud—Immigration Rules. Successive Governments have been surprisingly flexible when they have been really up against it in getting specialist staff in certain capped sectors of our industries—no more so that in the NHS, where the Immigration Rules have been modified, bent and utilised to bring in specialist people when the country has had a shortage of them. In terms of this debate, what assurances can the Minister give us that the Government will not lose sight of the possibility of modifying the Immigration Rules where necessary to help specialist safeguarding staff to get into this country? I suspect that the industry would also like them to be a bit more flexible when it comes to areas where there may be problems—for example, in maintaining reactors or in getting the specialist skills needed to build reactors such as Hinkley Point C.