Recommendation 16

We asked the Department if it believed it now had sufficient oversight and governance arrangements in place to oversee what the NDA is doing. The Department admitted that under its previous governance regime it had missed some of the issues that led to the failure of the Magnox contract, but told us that the relationship between the Department and the NDA had since been transformed, with the Department now providing greater scrutiny. Since 2017, the Department has been represented on the NDA’s Board by someone from UK Government Investments (UKGI) who can alert the Department about any emerging issues, and the Permanent Secretary of the Department has access to all NDA board papers and minutes. Since 2016, the Department has also had a dedicated team looking at the NDA which has grown over that period, and which interacts with the NDA in a stronger way than before. The Department receives a quarterly performance report which goes into detail across all the NDA group’s major targets, and holds quarterly meetings with NDA officials which look at both the decommissioning strategy and policy and progress with specific projects, and the CEO of the NDA and Permanent Secretary of the Department meet separately every quarter to discuss progress.29 The NDA also runs an enhanced commercial assurance process which looks at an early stage at commercial decisions that are coming down the track, and the Department is embedded directly into that process.30