Recommendation 20

The previous Committee criticised the NDA in 2018 for failing to learn the lessons from projects it had cancelled after belatedly realising that there were more cost–effective ways to reduce risk (having spent £586 million of taxpayers’ money on three projects it had cancelled since 2012).51 The NDA told us that up to 48% of the money already spent on RAP could be written off – meaning £127 million of taxpayers’ money would have been wasted.52 We wanted to understand why Sellafield Ltd had not taken action sooner in light of the amount of money at stake, and the consequences of the delay to SRP. Sellafield Ltd told us that it now has options which it did not have in 2020, as it has completed the clean–up of the building it wants to use to carry out plutonium analysis. It also told us that the review which led it to ‘pause’ spending money on RAP in early 2024 had only taken six weeks.53 The Department also observed that deciding to stop a project as important as RAP was “a tough call to make”.54 Managing the condition of ageing assets