Recommendation 22

There is an increasing backlog of maintenance tasks at Sellafield which is affecting the condition of Sellafield’s assets. Sellafield Ltd could not carry out some tasks during the COVID–19 pandemic due to restrictions on working practices to prevent transmission of the virus. However even now, fewer maintenance tasks are being carried out than was the case before the pandemic: 12% fewer tasks were carried out in 2023–24 than in 2018–19.58 We also queried whether Sellafield Ltd knows enough about the condition of its assets – given that it does not have information about the condition of 9% of its most important assets. The Department accepted that this was a challenge – as, for example, older assets might not have been built with monitoring equipment installed.59