Recommendation 9

We have recently raised concerns regarding the uncertainty of the estimated costs of decommissioning the civil nuclear estate and highlighted a shortage of skills at the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) and a lack of oversight from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) under previous models of outsourcing 8 Committee of Public Accounts Seventy-Fourth Report of Session 2017–19, Whole of Government Accounts, HC 464, January 2019, para 7, p 10 9 Letter to Tom Scholar, September 2019 10 WGA 2018–19, pp 3–7 11 Q 29 12 Q 115; The Companies Act 2006, 414C 13 WGA 2018–19, p 133 14 WGA 2018–19, para 1.75, p 38 15 WGA 2018–19, p 138; WGA 2018–19, p 133 10 Whole of Government Accounts 2018–19 decommissioning.16 We therefore asked what control the Treasury was exerting over the whole of the project. The Treasury told us that it is closely involved in the management of the liability, working alongside BEIS, but provided no specific examples of how it does this.17 When we asked what controls it had in place to ensure that the NDA was ensuring that the most cost-effective options were being used during decommissioning, the Treasury said that while its spending team works with BEIS, the parent department, the expertise sits within the NDA and therefore the Treasury was unable to second-guess them.18 The Treasury agreed to consider whether itself and BEIS, in managing the liability with NDA, needed a change in mindset to ensure that the required work is being done in the most cost-effective way.19