I am afraid we will have to differ on that. Amendment 1 has been written on good advice, in terms of what EDF does and does not do in its operation, and, on the contrary, what a company such as the China General Nuclear Power Corporation does. There is a clear distinction between those two particular companies and organisations.
The amendments wish to draw attention to the fact that this is not an academic issue. As the right hon. Member for Maldon (Mr Whittingdale) mentioned earlier, we have an agreement in place at the moment whereby the Chinese state nuclear corporation has a 35% stake in Hinkley Point C, a 20% stake in Sizewell C, should it go ahead, and complete control of Bradwell, should that go ahead, with ownership of the site and operations, and with the installation of a Chinese reactor. That agreement has already been reached, so the issue in this Bill is that if the regulated asset base is going to be put in place to finance and bring about the control of a nuclear power plant by the Chinese Government over the next period, we think that that would be a retrograde step for the future of nuclear power in this country, for obvious reasons.
In Committee, we asked the Government whether they wished to make any statement about the future of the agreement that is currently in place, which was agreed between 2013 and 2016 and includes the Secretary of State’s investment agreement, and about future arrangements for nuclear power. We asked if they could they confirm that RAB would not be used as an instrument to extend those arrangements, as far as the Chinese Government are concerned. They have not said anything about that at all; I regret that. Hence we have brought these amendments to try to clarify what RAB will be used for, what the position is concerning the 20% of Sizewell C that looks to be owned by the Chinese
Government in the future, and how that relates to RAB overall. Although it is not central to the RAB debate, it is an important element in that debate and needs clarification for the future.
We did not particularly want to table these amendments. If we had had a statement from the Government that they were not proceeding with Bradwell and were going to bring an end to the arrangements that are in place for Sizewell C at the moment, perhaps things might have been different, but we urgently need some clarification about their intentions in relation to RAB and Chinese involvement in UK civil nuclear power in future. That is what amendments 1 and 2 would achieve.
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Amendments 3 and 4 are concerned with the process of RAB itself. As we have already discussed, a regulated asset base arrangement allows a designated nuclear company to draw funds from a collection arrangement via an intermediary to assist with the investment in the nuclear power plant, with those funds being drawn from the people who pay energy bills—the customers. Not only that, but—this is a big difference from CfDs—the funds are drawn from contributions from customers while the plant is being developed and constructed, not just when production takes place, so they have a substantial stake in the nuclear company as it moves forward, and they also obviously bear a substantial amount of the risk that goes with the nuclear power plant being developed. We are concerned about not the RAB mechanism itself but the extent to which potential overruns in time or in cost could expose the bill-paying public. This is a very pertinent and relevant discussion at the moment because those bills—those collections—are a levy on customer bills for the future, and that levy will be made for a long time to come.