Recommendation 17

We asked the Department about the progress of the Holliday inquiry into the failure of the Magnox procurement and contract which was launched in 2018, and of the Department’s ‘Tailored Review’ of the role and governance of the NDA. The Department committed to ensuring that these reports are completed and published as a priority, and said it expected the Holliday report to be published imminently and the Tailored Review by the end of the year.31 It said that the delays with the Holliday inquiry had been due to a number of legal challenges related to the inquiry, but that the Department had accepted all the conclusions of the inquiry’s interim report and the most important forward-looking actions recommended in that report had now been taken. The Department also confirmed it would comply with the recommendation of our 2018 report on the Magnox contract to write to us within six months of publication of the Holliday inquiry with progress on the implementation of the inquiry’s recommendations.32 Transparency about the scale and nature of the challenge