Viscount Trenchard (Con)

My Lords, I am grateful to noble Lords who have contributed to this short debate, and I thank the House for the thoughtful and considered attention that it has given to my amendment. Let me conclude by returning to the core principle that underpins this amendment. We simply cannot deliver a cheap, reliable and secure energy future without nuclear power generation. It is therefore essential that we increase Britain’s nuclear capacity. Unlike the intermittent technologies so generously backed by the Secretary of State, nuclear provides what no other low-carbon technology currently can: reliable baseload power. It offers inertia to stabilise our grid and consistency to underpin our economy and long-term energy security that does not depend on the weather or foreign imports. It does all this while requiring substantially less new grid infrastructure than widely dispersed solar and wind installations. The more new nuclear we have, the less we need to erect ugly pylons in our beautiful countryside. Yet we are not on track. As things stand, Britain will not have small modular reactors connected to the grid until the 2030s. That is not a criticism of the technology but a reflection of government hesitation—hesitation that stands in stark contrast to the headlong rush to achieve clean power by 2030, relying almost entirely on intermittent renewables and simultaneously dismantling our domestic oil and gas capacity in the North Sea. We also need to explore the urgent need to accelerate the commercial development of so-called AMR technologies, some of which—such as the Japanese high-temperature gas-cooled reactor technology, whose prototype was developed at Winfrith in Dorset in 1965 as the Dragon reactor—are proven to be inherently safe. Like the noble Earl, Lord Russell, I regret the reduction in the funds committed to GBE; it makes it all the more unlikely that Great British Energy will have any funding available for nuclear projects. I thank my noble friend Lord Effingham for his strong support and the noble Lord, Lord Katz, for agreeing to write to me about changes to the corporate structures of both GBE and GBE-N. It is true that nuclear projects are strictly regulated from a safety point of view. I say that in response to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, who said that it could not be true both that nuclear was overregulated, so it should be easy to comply with these additional regulations, and that it was underregulated, meaning that increasing the regulation would make the UK seem a less attractive destination for investment. I think that both are true. It is true that, from a safety point of view, nuclear projects and nuclear power stations are regulated extremely strictly, but the environmental regulations are a different type of regulation. The environmental and planning-related regulations are an additional burden with which GBE-N is not, at present, expecting to have to comply; they would represent an additional burden to investment in nuclear projects. With my gratitude to the Minister and other noble Lords, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.