The ‘cleaning up’ of Britain’s 12 Magnox nuclear reactors should
be taken back into public control, following today’s (Monday 27
March) announcement of the termination of the contract with
Cavendish Fluor Partnership (CFP) to carry out this work.
The call came from Unite, the country’s largest union, as the
Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) said it was ending its
14-year contract with CFP, awarded in 2014, to decommission the
12 redundant Magnox sites.
The union said that the whole contracting out process had
been ‘deeply flawed from the
start’. The big losers are the taxpayer and
the workforce who faced cutbacks to their pensions because of
the ‘financial mess’ that
this contract culture had created.
Unite national officer for energy Kevin Coyne
said: “The whole contract process has
been deeply flawed from the very start. This was highlighted by
the High Court case which ruled that the NDA had failed to treat
all bidders the same when it awarded the 2014 contract to clean
up the Magnox reactors
“As a result, failed bidders EnergySolutions and
Bechtel now stand to be awarded almost £100 million in
compensation – a bill that the long-suffering taxpayer will have
to pick up.
“The other big losers will be the workforce which
faces a reduction in their pension entitlements. Unite is
currently consulting its 3,000 NDA members on a new pension
package which will ‘save’ the Treasury £320 million – ironically,
the compensation payments of nearly £100 million will eat up
nearly a third of that sum.
“The workers will have reduced pension entitlements
and other benefits because of this financial mess. The
government, through its 2016 Enterprise Act, forced through
legislation designed to cut the terms and conditions of Magnox
employees, including exit payments and changes in their
pensions.
“We welcome the announcement that business secretary
will hold an independent inquiry
into the deeply flawed contracting out culture which we called
for last summer.
“However, it is clear that the
‘clean up’
contract should be taken back into public control where it should
have been in the first place.”
Unite has 45,000 members in the energy sector.
