HL Deb 10 July 1963 vol 251 cc1380-96

2.53 p.m.

LORD COLERAINE rose to call attention to the development of the Nuclear Energy Industry in this country, with particular reference to the relationship between the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority and the Central Electricity Generating Board, and to urge Her Majesty's Government to set up a Committee of Inquiry to investigate and report upon the present arrangements and prospects of the Nuclear Energy Industry including the system of tendering, pricing and contracting; and to move for Papers. The noble Lord said: My Lords, on other occasions when I have spoken in debates on industrial questions in your Lordships' House I have sometimes had to declare a personal interest. That issue does not arise to-day; I have resigned from any directorships which had any bearing on the subject matter which we are to debate this afternoon, and I have disposed of such modest shareholding as I had. These decision were by no means easy for me to take, and perhaps your Lordships would allow me a word or two of personal explanation. There is something I should like to have on the record, not so much in fairness to myself, as in fairness to my late business associates.

It would be an overstatement if I said that I parted from these companies with the unanimous acclaim of my colleagues; I did not. My departure was resisted very strenuously. In particular, my noble friend—I suppose I must now call him "the noble Lord"—Lord Aldington used all the resources, and they are many, of an alert and vigorous mind to dissuade me from the course which I was taking. More than that, he has tried, for entirely understandable motives, to dissuade me from making the kind of speech which he fears I may make this afternoon. I say "he fears", because I have not discussed my speech with him. I do not think that the noble Lord, Lord Aldington, is doubtful of the truth of what I may be about to say; I think he is doubtful about the wisdom of my saying it, and doubtful of the propriety of my saying it. This is a matter which, in the last analysis, a man can decide only on his own conscience, not on that of someone else, however much he may value that person's judgment in the ordinary way.

These decisions have not been easy ones for me to make, but at least I have one consolation: I have been told that I am making history. A noble friend of mine observed to me the other day that I was the first man he had ever heard of who had resigned three directorships in order to make a speech in the House of Lords. I daresay that is true; I have no doubt it is very eccentric; but, at least, perhaps it may be taken as a kind of compliment to your Lordships' House.

When I say that I have now no interest in the nuclear energy industry that, of course, is true in only a strictly Parliamentary, even in a technical, sense. I am deeply interested; indeed I am passionately interested. I am interested in an organisation with which I have been associated from its inception six or seven years ago and in a technical and scientific staff whom I know well and respect; and I see this organisation and this staff in danger of destruction by a decision which I regard as arbitrary, irresponsible, unjust and completely without any rational explanation. My Lords, I am not an impartial witness, but I believe I am a truthful one, and I hope that your Lordships will find me a credible one.

When I put this Motion on the Paper originally I had not intended to devote very much of my speech to the negotiations between the Central Electricity Generating Board and the United Power Company. The termination of those negotiations was for me the occasion rather than the cause of my resignation. I was more interested in the whole field of nuclear policy and in the way in which, having observed it for some years, I believed it was being mishandled. But since I put down my Motion two things have influenced me to change my mind, so that to-day I shall devote rather more time than I had intended to the Wylfa negotiations and rather less time than I had intended to the general picture of the nuclear field, though I shall, of course, touch upon that.

These two things that made me change my mind were, first of all, a reply given by my right honourable friend the Minister of Power in another place to a supplementary question, a reply which I believed, and still believe, misled the House of Commons. When I say that, of course I do not mean that my right honourable friend deliberately deceived the House of Commons. Anyone who knows him would know it would be inconceivable that he should do any such thing. What I mean is that my right honourable friend misled the House of Commons because he himself was misled.

In the Commons Hansard of June 27, my right honourable friend, in reply to a Question directed to the rejection of the United Power Company's tender for the Wylfa power station, used these words [OFFICIAL REPORT, Commons, Vol. 679 (No. 135), col. 1628]: What I do not think unreasonable is that the Central Electricity Generating Board should have refused a tender which was not only high but which was for a design that it did not like. First of all, I would ask your Lordships to consider those words, "for a design which it did not like". If those words mean anything, they must surely mean that the design submitted by the United Power Company for the Wylfa station was unacceptable, was bad in such a degree that it justified the tearing up of a letter of intent, I believe a quite unprecedented step, and the termination of what was thought to be a negotiation which had been entered into for valid reasons.

Let me tell your Lordships as succinctly and as briefly as I can what the course of events was. In December, 1961, the Chairman of the Central Electricity Generating Board, Sir Christopher Hinton, informed the United Power Company that he was prepared to negotiate an order for a single reactor power station at Wylfa in Anglesey. The reasons were these. The Chairman of the Board had in fact forced an amalgamation between two of the then existing five consortia. It had been represented to him that there was no chance of this amalgamation being effective and the two staffs linking forces and getting together unless there was some prospect of work. He saw the force of that argument. There were other considerations. The United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, as distinct from the Board, had a direct responsibility for two other power stations, one at Hunterston in Scotland and one at Tokai Mura in Japan, and they were extremely anxious that the United Power Company should take over the management and control of those two stations. This the United Power Company agreed to do. So that, too, was an element in the background of the negotiated contract, and I submit that they were indeed sufficiently valid reasons for the Board to abandon their usual practice of competitive tender and to negotiate or seek to negotiate an order with the United Power Company.

The agreement to negotiate was in December, 1961. In February, 1962, the first of 150 design meetings was held between the technical staff of the United Power Company and the technical staff of the the Generating Board. These meetings I think, were held during two or three mornings a week, over a period of months, at the headquarters of the Generating Board. Their conclusions were minuted by the Generating Board and their purpose was to get agreement on the design for the power station. At the end of eight or nine months every point had been agreed. When I say "every point had been agreed," I do not mean that every point had been accepted without argument. Indeed, there was throughout the whole of this long series of meetings a very tough technical argument, and I think it is fair to say that the Board's technical representatives had to be persuaded that the technical arguments put up to them by the United Power Company would hold water. There was one point in particular which caused difficulty, and that was the design of the charge-discharge machine in relation to the reactor. That is the machine which extracts and puts in the fuel elements into the reactor. But even that point was agreed.

In December, 1962, the design was submitted to the Generating Board with, of course, a price. I think in January—it might have been February—of this year the Generating Board issued a questionnaire to the United Power Company. I do not know to what extent your Lordships are familiar with the procedures here, but in the case of competitive tender a questionnaire is issued to the successful tenderer, or at any rate the most hopeful tenderer, and it is issued to no one else. The questionnaire was issued. It contained more than 2,000 questions, all of them technical, most of them on points of detail, some of them on points of principle. They were all answered and the Board expressed themselves satisfied with the answers.

In the light of that account, which I believe a factually true account, how can it be said that the design was unacceptable? The design had been approved over this long series of meetings, the questionnaire had gone out, the replies had come in, the replies had been approved. How could it be said that the design was unacceptable?

There is another side to this story. The Chairman of the Board, Sir Christopher Hinton, was presumably aware of what was going on. It was his staff that was involved. There was a series of meetings between him and the noble Lord, Lord Aldington, the chairman of the company, extending from January until June of this year. It was not until the meeting on May 24 that Sir Christopher Hinton gave any indication that the design was unsatisfactory, and it was only on May 24 that he said that it was unacceptable. In other words, the whole design had been in the hands of the Board for five months before the Chairman of the Board was able to say that it was unacceptable. I cannot myself believe that that is the explanation. I do not know what the explanation is. What I do know is, that during the month of May the engineering member of the Board, who had been responsible for these technical negotiations, was out of the country, 6,000 miles away in Japan; so that, whatever influenced. Sir Christopher Hinton's decision, it was not, I think it is fair to say, the influence of that member of the Board who had been most closely concerned with these negotiations.

My right honourable friend's answer dealt with price as well as with design, and of course it is impossible to separate the two—they go together. When one is considering price in relation to a nuclear power station there are all kinds of highly technical considerations to be borne in mind, which neither I nor, I dare say, my noble friend who is to reply to the debate, would be competent to argue. But I should like to offer two general considerations. The first is this. When Sir Christopher Hinton agreed to negotiate with the United Power Company an order for one reactor station at Wylfa he told that company that he was also going to agree—obviously, for other reasons, because the same reasons did not apply—to negotiate a second reactor with another consortium. I think that every engineer, any practical man, would know that if you have two main contractors working on contracts totalling perhaps £100 million on the same site in a remote part of the country, making double demand on scarce labour, double demand on the building of labour camps and so on, for that reason alone the price must be inflated. I am not a technician, but I should have thought that two contractors working on the same site in those circumstances would have increased the cost of both stations by a large sum, possibly £4, £5 or £6 per kilowatt. I do not know—I am not competent to judge—but certainly there must be a considerable increase.

The second general consideration that I should like to put to your Lordships and to my noble friend is this. When the first of these design meetings began in February, 1962, and probably for the next two months, the United Power Company did everything they could to persuade the Generating Board that the specification which the Board had put forward was uneconomic. As I understand, in the case of a nuclear reactor (I suppose the same is true of any power station) the cost of electricity depends greatly on the rating. The Board specified a rating of 500 megawatts for the reactor. The United Power Company insisted, or tried to insist, that nothing below 600 could be made to be economic. This argument was resisted by the Board. But, eight or ten months later, the Board had to admit that the argument was right, and the specification was raised to 600 megawatts. But by that time it was impossible, because of the time factor, for the U.P.C. design to be altered to go up to 600 megawatts. They were supposed to have been in on the site, first in March, and then in June. It was impossible for the U.P.C. design to be re-rated to give 600 megawatts, and the best that could be done was to raise it from 500 to 535. I submit that is a most important point when we are considering the price. It is important because the original specification entailed a high price, but the Board refused to change the specification until at length they saw the point. But by then it was too late, on the time scale which was envisaged, for the U.P.C. design.

I think I know in broad terms the argument that will be put forward on these points by my noble friend, because it is the argument which, at a late date, was pulled out of the drawer by the Generating Board and put to the United Power Company. The argument is that the Generating Board were persuaded to accept a design that they did not like because they were assured that they woud get a kind of bargain-basement reactor in consequence, or at any rate that they would get a cheap reactor—in other words, that it was a condition of the acceptance of the design that the price should be below some purely arbitrary figure. All I can say is that I do not accept that argument. I do not believe that there was any such condition. If there had been such a condition, it would surely have been in the minutes. There are thousands of them. I cannot say that I have read the minutes, because I cannot understand them; but I am told that there is no such condition anywhere in these voluminous minutes. If there had been such a condition, surely that would have been made known to the United Power Company by the Board. The engineering member of the Board and, I think, other members of the Board were in constant touch with the managing director of the United Power Company, and they never even mentioned such a condition. I do not believe that it was a condition; I I think that it was an afterthought. Of course the U.P.C. company maintained that their design was an economic one, in the context of a rating for the reactor that was uneconomic, and within the context of a time scale for construction that was very close. Of course they maintained that it was economic, and I still believe that it was economic; and it was, in fact, the best that could have been done by anyone in those circumstances.

My Lords, I said that there was another reason for my argument about Wylfa this afternoon. The announcement which was made yesterday, and which appeared in the Press this morning, said that the Generating Board were going to negotiate a contract for a 1,000-megawatt power station—that is, a two-reactor power station—at Wylfa with the English Electric Group. I think that I must give your Lordships some of the background of this, too. I think you will find it difficult to believe, but it is absolutely true.

At the same time as the United Power Company were arguing the case that 600 megawatts, not 500, was the economic rating for a single reactor, they were arguing another case. The technical staff of the United Power Company had come to the conclusion that, if in fact one contractor could build two reactors at Wylfa, the costs would come down quite dramatically. This was put to the Board. At first they disbelieved it, and then they were persuaded to allow the United Power Company to put in a tender and a design for a double-reactor power station of 1,000 megawatts. This was done. The original tender was put in in December, and a revised tender at a slightly higher rating was put in in March. I should say in passing that the English Electric Group were informed by the United Power Company of what the United Power Company were saying to the Board about the two-reactor station.

The design went in with a price, a price that was contractually binding; and it showed a price for the reactor which was certainly very close to the cost of electricity from conventional power, and I think almost certainly below that cost, and the Board were very interested. But Sir Christopher Hinton was not. Sir Christopher Hinton laughed it out of court. He said that it was not worth considering. So that was that. But it was not all that, because the announcement in the papers to-day about the 1,000-megawatt power station at Wylfa means that once again the argument of the United Power Company was sound; once again it was rejected; once again it was accepted, and once again it was accepted at the expense of the United Power Company. I do not want to use words that I would regret, but that does seem to me to be a dishonourable transaction.

There is another point about the announcement in the papers to-day which I imagine will not have escaped your Lordships' notice. That is its timing—not so much the timing of the announcement, as the timing of the decision. I have no doubt at all—at any rate, it seems to me highly probable—that this decision was come to in order to prejudge this debate; and I myself think that the fact it was come to in this way at this time is an affront to the House of Lords and an affront to Parliament. It may well be that the Board had already made up their mind on this in a general way. They knew that this debate was to take place. It seems to me quite incredible that in the light of that knowledge they should have taken that decision before there had been any chance for Ministers to hear the debate.

That brings me to my next point. I think that Parliament must consider very seriously the powers which are vested, almost accidentally, in the hands of some of these nationalised Boards and in the hands, in particular, of the Chairman if he has a forceful personality. The Central Electricity Generating Board are, I think, far and away the largest electricity supply organisation in the world, and therefore exert tremendous influence as a customer. I do not know to what extent your Lordships are familiar with the electricity supply industry, but perhaps I may put it this way. The private sector of the electricity supply industry is dealing, in effect, in single articles costing millions of pounds. The cost of a large generating set might be anything between £10 and fl 5 million. For that article there is only one customer in England. There is another, a much smaller one, in Scotland. At any rate, there is, effectively, only one customer. If that customer is offended, even the most powerful firms in this country are at his mercy. I do not believe that that is a healthy situation. I do not believe that any man should have that power. If he must have it, then he must, too, have very special qualities: he must be known to be of absolutely balanced judgment; he must be known to be absolutely fair-minded and impartial; he must be known to be able to listen courteously and reasonably to the arguments that are put to him. Above all, he must be known to be free of any trace of vindictiveness.

Sir Christopher Hinton has many outstanding virtues. He is a brilliant engineer. I daresay that he is the most brilliant engineer that we have in this country. He is a man of dominating personality. He is a man who thoroughly and completely knows his own mind, until he changes it. But I do not think that Sir Christopher Hinton's warmest admirers would attribute to him those particular qualities which I have ascribed to the ideal chairman of a nationalised Board with these immense powers in his hands. It is not unfair to say that even the biggest firms are cowed by the powers which are exercised by the Chairman and the Central Electricity Generating Board.

My Lords, it is not simply a question of the Board being rough, and perhaps quite naturally and sensibly rough, about orders: it extends far further than that. Sir Christopher Hinton, for good reasons or bad—and I think they may be very good; certainly, they can be defended—has conceived it as his duty to rationalise the electricity engineering industry. He forces amalgamations and then, as in the case of the United Power Company and Wylfa, disclaims all responsibility for what he has done. In one case I know of he compelled a big company to cancel its foreign licences. He exerts an economic dictatorship on a pretty wide scale. This may be justified, in the light of the greatly increased size of sets—though whether that is a wise policy is another matter. But it may be in that case that it is necessary to rationalise this industry. That, after all, was done in the case of the aircraft industry. I do not know whether or not it was wisely done, because I know nothing about it; but presumably it was done for good reasons. But there was a great difference there: it was done by the Government, as a result, I think, of the long deliberations of a Cabinet Committee. This is done by a single man, or, if you like, by the Board, who have no responsibility to anyone, except for that narrow shadowy responsibility which is owed to, or at any rate exacted by, my right honourable friend the Minister of Power.

Of course Sir Christopher Hinton would deny that he exercises this dictatorship; and in a sense he would be right. His method is more subtle, but not so much more subtle. What he says is: "It is not for me to dictate to your company what it should do. That is your responsibility, not mine. All I tell you is that unless this suggestion is adopted, your company is extremely unlikely to get an order from the Board."He has said that to me. My Lords, I believe that that is an abuse of power. Some would say that it is inseparable from the conception of a nationalised industry, where inevitably power is highly centralised. For myself I do not think so. I think it is a problem to which a nationalised industry must always be prone. It is something for which one should always be on the watch. But it is not necessary that a situation like that should exist in a nationalised industry.

I would ask your Lordships to compare the practice in these matters of the National Coal Board and of the Central Electricity Generating Board. Of course the National Coal Board does not provide an exact analogy, but it is, I think, a fair analogy, even if it is broad. The Chairman is a different man, with a different character, and a different policy, and a different organisation through which he works; and he is more successful. The amounts dealt in are not so great, but still they are substantial; and the Coal Board, just as much as the Generating Board, is a monopoly customer. What happens in the Coal Board, on its works contracts side, is this. The amount of money available to the areas and to the divisions is settled, I think, centrally; but once that has been done, each area, or each division, is able to order, within a fairly wide list of approved suppliers, from whom it likes. That means, in effect, that the monopoly customer in the case of the Coal Board has split himself up voluntarily, as it were, so that he is no longer a monopoly customer; and the supplier is able to deal with quite a large number of customers in the areas and in the divisions. I cannot help feeling that some inquiry should be made to see whether some modification of that set-up could be used in the case of the electricity supply industry, and even in the case of these very large generating stations. It would of course be expensive; it might be cumbersome, but I believe that it would be well worth paying the cost, in order to avoid the evils which I have described and which I believe to be very real evils.

My Lords, I should like for a few moments to turn your Lordships' minds back to the glad, confident morning of the nuclear energy industry five and ten years ago. Those were the days when it was thought that nuclear energy had given into our hands a key which would fling open wide the gates to a glorious future. It was said, and truly, that nuclear energy was the greatest advance in man's mastery over nature since the discovery of fire; and very great things were expected from it for the industry of this country, for the export trade, for the welfare of mankind in general. Now we have come to a rather bleak midday, and what is it that has happened? There have been many things.

Perhaps we were too optimistic; perhaps we were too rattled over Suez. Certainly the supplies of fossil fuels, coal and oil, have become more abundant. Certainly interest rates have gone up. But more important, I believe, than any of these external features, has been the policy of Her Majesty's Government. At the start they had a policy. It was pretty fluid; it was subject to constant variations. But I think that in time interest was lost and control was lost. I think that, at any rate until yesterday, there has been no policy. Now there is a policy, at least so far as the next reactor is concerned. I believe that there has been no policy, because the whole issue of nuclear energy for civil purposes has been allowed to drift in midstream, as it were, between the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, on the one hand, and the Generating Board on the other. The United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority has been unable to put forward any coherent programme because the Generating Board could veto it: the Generating Board could not put forward a coherent programme because they had no constitutional authority to do so, and their only interest in nuclear energy is, as it were, the fortuitous one that they are the largest potential customer.

The effect of this vacillation, this lack of policy, on the industrial consortia—I am not thinking now of the company with which I was associated, but of all the industrial consortia—has been absolutely catastrophic. They have never known from one day to the next, hardly, what they were expected to do; what the policy was over the next three or four years. They have had to rely upon rumours and hints. They were put at a tremendous disadvantage and a tremendous expense, and I have no doubt that a great many of the losses of which they complain have in fact been due to this lack of any clear-cut policy on the part of Her Majesty's Government. I should have thought that it was the duty of the Government, and in particular the duty of my right honourable friend the Minister of Power, to sort this thing out before now. I do not believe that my right honourable friend has in fact effectively controlled nuclear policy at all.

I should like to refer to a passage in the recently-published Report from the Select Committee on Nationalised Industries. It is on page 123, paragraph 393. The particular sentence to which I should like to draw your Lordships' attention is this: He"— that is, the witness for the Ministry of Power before the Select Committee— readily accepted the Board's figure of £20 million a year although it had never been specifically discussed with them". Now, what was that figure of £20 million a year? It was the Generating Board's calculation of the additional cost of nuclear energy at the present time over conventional power from ordinary coal-fired or oil-fired stations, and the accuracy or otherwise of that figure must really be the basis of one's nuclear policy. If the figure is accurate, you say, "Well, can we afford to spend £20 million?" If it is too high, then you could say, "Perhaps we ought to go a little faster". If it is too low, then you pull in your horns.

Now this figure is in fact disputed. It is disputed by the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority. The Authority maintain that the life of a reactor may be expected to be 30 years; the Generating Board maintain that it should be 20 years. That figure of £20 million is calculated on the basis of twenty years; but, of course, if the Authority are right—and I should think they are at least as likely to be right as the Board are, probably more likely—then obviously the cost of the reactor, the cost of nuclear energy, is far, far lower than the Board maintain, because capital costs and interest rates are so enormous, so much a part of the production of electricity in an electricity station, that if the period of amortisation is extended for a period of one-third, costs come tumbling down. The same considerations apply to the life of the fuel element, on which there is a similar difference of opinion between the Authority and the Board. This figure of £20 million is surely absolutely vital, and yet the witness for the Ministry readily accepted it although it had never been discussed with the Board. That seems to me to be a terrible indictment of the Ministry of Power and, therefore, I am afraid, by constitutional usage, of my right honourable friend.

I must refer very briefly to the White Paper of 1955. Your Lordships may remember the general tenor of the White Paper of 1955: how it opened the vista of the enormous possibilities that lay ahead; how it explained that the Atomic Energy Authority would be responsible for research and pioneering, and how the Generating Board and the South of Scotland Electricity Board would put into service the stations developed by the U.K.A.E.A.; and how it made the very important, fundamental point that the thing could work only if there was the closest co-operation between the Authority and the Board. For many years there has been practically no co-operation between them. Your Lordships will find a reflection of that in the Select Committee's Report.

I think myself, if I am allowed to say so without any breach of privilege, that the Select Committee have not quite got the right end of the stick, because the Report rather implies that all the blame is on one side; that Sir Christopher Hinton was willing to co-operate but that the Authority was not. I do not myself think that that was the case, and the explanation may be (I am not sure of this) in another passage of the Report, where they say that they were unable to examine the U.K.A.E.A. on these matters because they had no authority to do so. I am not clear as to whether it was only the defence aspects they were unable to examine, or the whole aspect of the relationship between the Board and the Authority; but, be that as it may, co-operation, which was essential to a successful programme, has not been effective, and again I consider that the Minister of Power should have been alive to this and should have seen that there was co-operation. What has in fact been happening is that the Authority have made a proposal and the Board have imposed a veto.

There is the case of the A.G.R., the advanced gas-cooled reactor, which yesterday the Board announced they were going to order. How much more sensible it would have been if that anouncement had been made by the Board months ago! because in the meantime enormous harm has been done by the Board's attitude. The Chairman of the Board has been criticising the A.G.R. publicly. He has been explaining at great length that the usefulness of the Magnox reactor is coming to an end. He has been shopping around for some other system that can be manufactured under licence; in particular, a system called CANDU, which is a Canadian system, and the effect of this on the efforts of the industry to try to get exports has been quite catastrophic. It has been impossible to get interest in the export of these Magnox reactors when the Chairman of the Generating Board has been running them down. That is one element in the lack of co-operation between the two bodies.

I think the facts that the Government and the Minister have to face are these. We all recognise that nuclear energy is not something for the present; it is something for the future. In twenty or thirty years' time young men now entering industry will be in control of it in this country; and the kind of industry they will be controlling and the kind of oportunities they will have will depend very largely on what we do with nuclear energy to-day, and how quickly we advance the progress. Of course, the power stations which are building now, and which are becoming more efficient with each one built, are still in the stage of Stephenson's Rocket. What will be happening in twenty years' time, if we handle this right, is anybody's guess. There may be the most miraculous developments.

But if that is the background to Britain in the 1970's, is it really sensible to put the control of the long-term development of nuclear energy in the hands of the Generating Board, whose chief concern, whose only statutory concern, is the price of electricity to-day, on July 10, 1963. Surely that cannot be right; and I think that this point, too, is apparent in the Report of the Select Committee where they lay great stress on the fact that the Generating Board and Sir Christopher Hinton have to supply expensive electricity in order to meet the nuclear energy programme; and would it not be better if in some way the taxpayer made a direct subvention from this? I think it would be better; but I still believe the point I am trying to make is of value: that it is not sensible to base the whole industrial future of this country in twenty years' time on these narrow day-to-day considerations of the price of electricity to-day. I do not know what the answer is, but I think the question should be gone into and I think, if it were gone into, it would be found wrong for the Generating Board simply because it is a customer, to have a determining voice—because it has that to-day—in the future of the reactor programme.

My Lords, I am afraid that I have occupied far more of your Lordships' time than was either seemly or, I daresay, prudent; but I can only thank your Lordships very much for your patience and for the attention you have been good enough to pay to what I have been saying. I hope that I have said enough to convince the Government, and if not to do that, to persuade your Lordships that this is a matter which does demand further inquiry—the matter of the Wylfa negotiation; the matter of the whole system of tendering; and the matter of the future atomic programme in general. I think, as I recommend in my Motion, that a Committee of Inquiry should be set up. I think myself that it should be composed in part of scientists and technicians and in part of laymen. This whole subject is so bedevilled by the experts that unless we have both on the Committee nothing will happen. I believe that if it got to work and made its Report the outlook for nuclear energy and for British industry would be a great deal better than it is to-day. I beg to move for Papers.