I have some sympathy with the remarks that have been made, which sets me at variance with my noble friend. When I was chairing the Trade and Industry Select Committee in the late 1990s, we went to Dounreay, which has been the subject of many investigations and problems. Had other colleagues been here, I am sure they would have be able to embellish this far more than I can. At Dounreay, there had quite clearly been a failure to scrutinise the safety arrangements on the part of what was then the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate. It is
fair to say that that part of the inspectorate had pretty well gone native. Dounreay is in a very isolated part of the UK. You cannot go very much further north without getting wet. It is natural that everybody was living and working together, playing golf on the same golf courses, probably drinking in the same pubs and what have you. They came together.
An independent report had to be carried out. It was carried out and, as the Select Committee, we wanted to see it. We were told by the DTI Minister at the time, who I think was John Battle, that it would not be appropriate for a Select Committee to see it. The DTI was the sponsoring ministry. The Nuclear Installations Inspectorate was in those days, as it is now, sponsored by the equivalent of the DWP. It took the Secretary of State for Scotland, who had environmental responsibility for the area, to step in and say, “Publish and be damned”, so we got access to the report. In fact, it was not anything like as damning as people had anticipated, but it was essential that it was produced.
There is a danger in establishing this umbilical link between the sponsoring department and the functions. We have seen it in agriculture and food safety in the past. And we have taken strenuous steps to correct it, but there are still problems. In my experience, the nature of the nuclear industry is such that it is a secretive industry. It grew out of the production of weapons-grade material for nuclear weapons. While it is now under commercial control in a number of respects, it nevertheless still has a culture of understandable secrecy, partly because of what would be regarded as security but also because it is so damn dangerous. The truth is that because of the way in which in the industry is handled, the dangers are minimal.
The culture of the industry is determined not only by security but by safety. At times, there is a sense in which the industry is covering its own back as well as trying to protect people. That is natural. Even today nuclear installations are for the most part in relatively isolated, secluded areas. It is common knowledge that Sellafield was chosen during the war because it was most unlikely that German bombers would ever be able to find the place because it is shrouded in mist and it is likely to be raining all the time, hence the Lake District. In those days, it was just a weapons store.
The industry has a security culture and a culture that is understandably and correctly preoccupied with safety, but it is also at times unduly linked to matters of secrecy where safety can be jeopardised. In my limited experience, I confronted a situation where there had been regrettable failures at Dounreay, which have now been corrected. The report on that was nothing like as condemnatory as people thought it would be but there was reluctance to have it published. It took an independent agency, the Scottish Office, and the late Donald Dewar as Secretary of State—who made it quite clear that he saw no reason why we should not have access to it—for us to get the report. I remember that we got a faxed copy of it as we got off the plane in Caithness. The clerk had summarised it by the time we got to Dounreay and we were able to make use of it when we were questioning officials.
There is a danger in creating too close a link between the ministry and this function. It is important that we discuss it and have it aired but I would like to think that we do not go any further with it because there are too many examples of departments looking after their own too carefully. The ONR took a long a long time to come about. It should really have been in the previous Energy Bill but in those days the DWP and DECC were arm wrestling over it. It was a turf war. The compromise was that they would let it go as long as they had a control over it. The DWP conceded a bit and held a bit and we just have to accept that that is the way in which the matter was agreed. For the reasons I have given, it would be desirable for us to leave it to the DWP rather than having a sponsoring department that might take an overprotective view of what could be at stake here, which could be very serious.