Progress on the Sellafield site: an update
4 March 2015
A statement from The Rt Hon Margaret Hodge MP, Chair of the Committee of Public Accounts:
Despite my Committee’s calls in February 2014 for the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority to make big improvements, the cost of cleaning up the nuclear waste at Sellafield continues to soar and has risen by an astonishing £5 billion to £53 billion in February 2015, from £48 billion on 31 March 2014.
The Authority’s work at Sellafield is not just costing more, it is also taking much longer than planned and, for 2014-15, it looks like work will be behind schedule for the fourth year running.
It has taken far too long for the Authority to deal with management incompetence at Sellafield. My Committee concluded in February 2014 that the Authority had not demonstrated why Nuclear Management Partners’ ownership of Sellafield provides value for money. Yet the Authority only took the decision in January 2015 to terminate this contract with Nuclear Management Partners, which is almost a year after my Committee told it to do so if performance did not improve. It is galling that breaking the contract will cost the public purse £430,000.
I expect the Authority, the Department of Energy and Climate Change, Nuclear Management Partners and Sellafield Ltd to tell me how the escalation in cost of cleaning up Sellafield will be stopped and performance put back on track, when they appear before my Committee on 11 March.