Since writing Sovereign Albion, I have been lucky to have some of the truest and best conversations of my life. What was intended to be a personal essay, albeit with a little hope that it might lead to something more, came to represent a first draft at nation-building.
That might sound a little grand, but it’s when I’ve taken these ideas seriously, and stopped caveating the ambition, that I’ve had much deeper conversations and built much deeper friendships and relationships to learn from — especially with founders, artists, policymakers and many others.
These conversations tend to skew a bit more Sovereign — i.e. focusing on hard power, critical industries, state capacity and AI — but frequently stray into the Albion: the aesthetics and cultures that run in parallel to progress. In effect: who we are, where we’re going and how we get there.
So I’m going to record some of these conversations. Maybe you’re like me: you enjoy listening to Dwarkesh, but you’re left wondering what AI continuing to scale means for us. What is our strategy, in Britain, as it does? Maybe you’d like to see us building more infrastructure and homes across the country, but also think protecting the mysticism and enchantment of nature is critical for restoring collective national purpose. Maybe you believe that startups are the delivery units of progress and you’re frustrated by generic, reflexive ‘anti-tech’ sentiment, but you look around and recognise that we’ve made it easier to build slop than sovereignty, industry and state capacity.
Sovereign Albion looks for better choices. Progress and preservation. Based and woke. Rational and mystical. Metal and moss. Means and meaning.
Episode 1 is with John Fingleton and Mustafa Latif-Aramesh, who were part of the UK’s brilliant recent Taskforce on Nuclear Regulation. When it launched, the report quickly became a rallying point for the many people who refuse to accept that Britain is at some terminal value, both economically and culturally. Nuclear could play an enormous role in enabling safe, clean, abundant energy — solving the energy trilemma of cost, climate and capacity! — but we have made it slow and expensive to build. Britain was the first country in the world to have civil nuclear energy, but today we haven’t built a new nuclear power station for 30 years. I want to understand how we got here, and what needs to come next.
Through these conversations, I hope to straddle both the macro and the micro.
I’d like to go down rabbit holes of cultural and technology romanticism, because I think going harder on culture matters in order to:
Raise our ambition
Find conspirators & build relationships beyond value exchange, and
Coordinate at scale, ie. at the level of a nation
But I also want to understand the turpentine of ambition: unpacking the craft of company-building and policy-making — how big things actually get done — so that many more can go down the paths carved out by others. I’ve done this before (see this interview with Octopus CEO Greg Jackson about building an energy giant), and have many ideas for how to go bigger.
I’m also just excited to start imperfectly and to improve at what Tamara Winter calls ‘deploying your taste’. This is definitely an experiment and there are many reasons why it might not work or scale. But if it does, I hope to build an audience and leverage that distribution to give power to the people, ideas and machines rebuilding our national spirit and restoring national agency. I have zero interest in epiphenomenal ~discourse~, but I do care about building a real culture machine that’s upstream of action. So please share your feedback, small or large, so that together we can make this as good as possible.
Finally, thanks to the Centre for British Progress for supporting this experiment, to British AI company Faculty, for making and open sourcing such a beautiful font, and to everyone who has been generous to have great conversations with me this year. Here’s to many more.
Thanks to Julia Garayo-Willemyns, David Lawrence and Alys Key for their editorial support with this episode, and to Ben Mills and The Subthread for production support. Intro news footage source, ©Sellafield Limited.
How to Regulate British Nuclear
John Fingleton is a leading economist and regulator. He was the CEO of the predecessor to the Competition and Markets Authority and was on the board of UK Research and Innovation, and now runs Fingleton.
Mustafa Latif-Aramesh is a leading infrastructure planning lawyer at TLT LLP and Parliamentary Agent who works across nuclear and other nationally significant planning and infrastructure projects.
Britain was the first country in the world to have civil nuclear, to connect nuclear power to the grid at Calder Hall. But today, we haven’t finished a new nuclear power station in 30 years. What changed? How did we get here?
[00:01:12] John Fingleton: The context in which they were built was different. They weren’t as safe as the ones we’re building now, first of all, very clearly. And the, we’ve, a huge decommissioning legacy coming from that.
Secondly, I think in the post-war construction period and, rebuilding Britain, I think it was easier to get things done faster in that period. You were able to build other infrastructure, housing and so on at the same time. I think we’re now in an environment where, people care much more about health and safety, about the environmental depletion.
Quite a lot of that happened over that period as well. some of that stuff’s not as easy to do as it was then.
[00:01:49] Mustafa Latif-Aramesh: I think the only thing to add to that is, is that, is to underline the point about environmental, targets that we’ve set ourselves. The desire and the goal to reach net zero by 2050 and a kind of enhanced need for low carbon energy generation is something that has changed significantly over the last two, three decades.
Just to double a click on that, there’s a lot of people in this space who would say, we can meet our energy needs purely with renewables and nuclear is expensive and they worry about it for lots of other reasons. And we can come back to how much of that expense is self-imposed. But can you just give us a top line summary of like why, we should still care about nuclear today?
[00:02:34] John Fingleton: The Taskforce’s job was not to make the case for nuclear. The Taskforce job was to say if the government wants to build nuclear, how can we do it more efficiently, more effectively? But of course in the course of that, we had to think about, the relative benefits of nuclear and non-nuclear. The cost of solar has gone down hugely over the last 20 years.
However, we don’t get enough sun in the UK. It’s lovely and sunny in the background now, but you look at the amount of sun period in Spain and other countries, we don’t get enough sun. So solar will always have limitations in the UK relative to other countries. We may be able to pipe solar from Morocco or somewhere in the future, but at the moment that’s expensive.
Wind has not gone down in cost. And we do have more wind, but wind is more correlated geographically. So the intermittency problems are more serious. You can argue that if you build lots of batteries, then you can deal with the intermittency through batteries, but you then end with up with a quite high capital cost, a huge amount of land usage, which has its own environmental, challenges.
And then questions about grid stability and the ability to scale that up at the level like if energy demand doubles in the next 20 years, which it could do, the ability to scale that up, at the level you need. So I think all of that, I think that explains why so many people are advocating nuclear, but I think somebody who’s critical of nuclear could make also quite compelling points as to why at the current cost level nuclear is not particularly attractive either.
So maybe let’s just dive in on that. I was really struck the first time I read about the comparison of nuclear construction costs in South Korea versus In Britain it’s six times more expensive. It’s twice as slow to build. Can you just, before we dive into the Taskforce recommendations, can you just give us a breakdown of like how we have such a large gap in the UK versus South Korea, both in terms of expense and time. What are the key factors at play there?
[00:04:27] Mustafa Latif-Aramesh: The other important thing to note about the report is that it is not just about civil nuclear. So when we’re talking about why is there a need to deal with some of the issues that we’ve identified, it also relates to defence. And so this isn’t just about environmental sustainability and trying to get low carbon energy generation, it’s about national security, it’s about energy security generally.
And even if you were in a position where, you think there are cheaper forms of energy generation that doesn’t forego the need to deal with some of the issues that we’ve identified from a national security perspective On the drivers for, the differences between say South Korea and the UK.
I actually think you almost want to do this in stages. So there’s the difference between South Korea and the UK, as you said, six times the, cost in the UK compared to South Korea, but it’s also places like France, Finland, where we’re two or three times more expensive than very comparable European nations.
And our report, I think, identifies three key issues in the UK, which are probably a substantial part of the explanation for the increased costs. The first is risk aversion, and, we’re very clear in the report not to single out any particular actor, any type of actor. We think it’s a systems problem, but there is risk aversion that flows through in terms of how even developers, regulators, and government reacts to a nuclear project.
The second key, driver is the lack of incentives that exist in the system. We have not just a ratcheting effect of the standards that, are applied, but we also have a. almost a desire to put process over outcomes. And it’s that last point, about process over outcomes, that is, I think, a substantial part of, the key differences in cost.
For those who don’t have the full kind of international context, is that particularly unique or particularly strong in, in the UK?
[00:06:25] Mustafa Latif-Aramesh: Just to give very specific examples, we quote in the report, a study of all EU member states in how they implement the habitats regulations. And what that, evaluation found is that we have one of the strictest and most, stringent applications of the habitats regulations, compared to other European countries.
it does not take as long to produce a, environmental impact assessment, a habitats regulations assessment in many parts of Europe as it does in the UK.
[00:06:57] John Fingleton: I think the other thing about. South Korea is that they have built the same, reactor multiple times in what’s called a fleet approach.
And there’s been a lot of, I think, political consistency, clarity and leadership around we’re going to do this and we’re gonna do it over time. I think one of the lessons from nuclear and from infrastructure projects in this country generally is the sort of stop start nature of it, which does increase the cost.
So in addition to potentially different, environmental or other health and safety standards are difficult to compare across countries, but you do have the, that sort of, you we would be better off with infrastructure if we had a lot of clarity and a lot of drive about what we’re doing and doing it quickly and doing it in a standardized way.
There’s something about the South Korea model that I think is, also important to that, which is the role of the state as a key financer and deliverer of, these fleet infrastructure projects. Obviously the state is still involved in the UK to some degree. It bears lots of the kind of, financial risk, but is not necessarily involved in quite the same way in terms of delivery. How important is the role of the state in fleet delivery? do we, can we deliver fleets at scale privately?
[00:08:10] Mustafa Latif-Aramesh: I think there are two aspects to that. The first is it’s more about the state setting a framework that will allow a fleet approach to be adopted. Under our current rules, regulations, practices, we have almost a, an instinct to treat each application afresh and have very bespoke consideration of each particular project, our planning policies, our environmental regulations, even the way that we implement the application of particular safety standards.
We’re treating each thing anew. so there is a role in the state in setting a framework that says. Actually, we really believe in fleets. And just to John’s point about start, stop, the example that I’ve heard Julia Pike from Sizewell C mention quite a few times is, because we hadn’t built a nuclear reactor for so long in this country, EDF had to fund their own welders academy.
and, we’re at risk if, of substantial works that sizeable don’t start that we’ll have to reinvent the wheel again. On the second aspect of the question, which is more related to the South Korea dimension, you are right that the, the head of state that the Prime Minister’s office in South Korea takes a very hands-on role in terms of nuclear regulation and nuclear delivery.
I think the issues that we have in this country aren’t only solvable by asking for kind of complete state delivery and complete state control over nuclear development. The comparisons really are other European countries, the US and I think one of the aspects that we, we have to be quite open about is what is, what are the constraints that the UK has that South Korea does not have.
And there is an element of public finances. What is the effect of additional investment? This government has invested quite substantially in SMRs with the announcement of the Rolls Royce project in Wylfa. And so it’s not a case of zero or all out. And so it’s just finding that balance, I think.
I want to understand the unit economics of nuclear construction today and then what that would look like, going forwards. And so I think, the Hinkley point C Contract for Difference (CfD) is £127 per MWh. Sizeable C is financed differently under a Regulated Asset Base model that guarantees investors a return to fund new nuclear. Can you give us a breakdown of, where the main cost drivers are in, in a major nuclear project today and what that would look like, going forwards under, under these implemented recommendations?
[00:10:45] John Fingleton: I think that’s quite difficult to do.
We looked really at the regulatory aspects, but we didn’t get into all of the other engineering costs and so on. So I think we don’t, we haven’t in the report tried to do that. What we have done, as Mustafa has indicated, we try to look at, reasonable comparable countries like France, Finland, Canada, the United States, and if you look at the, their cost base, they shouldn’t have a different cost base than we do in terms of regulatory standards and so on.
People have a high standard of living in those countries, similar systems, democratic government. And in that environment, they’re still able to do it substantially cheaper than we are. And I think we make the point in the report or the announcement around it that if you take the French or the Finnish costs, we could bring that price in the country of difference down to £80 or £100 pounds.
Rather than, the £137, whatever number you said it’s at, the moment. So there’s a substantial benefit there. But I wouldn’t stop at that. I think we should be looking at all those elements of costs. But some of them are quite difficult, and, post 9/11, we develop requirements to put concrete shields on nuclear power stations so that airplanes can crash into them.
That’s expensive. So some of these things are just naturally quite expensive. Whether you will always need that with every type of reactor is another question. And some of the, a good deal of the report isn’t just focused on Hinkley and Sizewell, but, or even the SMRs, but thinking about future technologies that are currently, they’re more than PowerPoint presentations, but they’re not a lot more than PowerPoint presentations.
Yeah. But actually they’re, they, point to quite exciting technological developments coming out of, universities and, industry that could enable nuclear to play a much broader and pervasive role in, in generating energy and heat in more environments.
What sort of, can you give us a sense of what sort of things you have in mind now?
[00:12:42] John Fingleton: We refer to maritime. So the idea is we currently power the merchant shipping fleet and cruise liners and so on with, fossil fuels. But you could imagine a world in which we developed a safe, a small, safe reactor that could do that and decarbonize the shipping fleet.
You could imagine building small nuclear plants on barges, which gets rid of a lot of the geological costs that we have at the moment, but also might enable you to relocate them if you need a power in different places. I think Russia has done three barges now with nuclear plants on them.
And then I think, thinking about advanced, modular reactors that serve towns or areas of towns and do combine even power something on a much smaller scale. And when you, I think I read that there are 127 small modular reactor designs in the world at the moment, and then you go into advanced modular reactors, there’s a lot of stuff there and a lot of it will be nonsense, but some of it will be potentially very powerful. So we, what we’ve tried to do is to future proof the regulatory regime so that as those come along, our system may be better able to deal with it.
Maybe we can spend a bit of time on the specific recommendations. I just want to hear from maybe each of you, which you think the most important is of the 47 recommendations that are in the report, what’s your favourite child?
[00:14:04] Mustafa Latif-Aramesh: Yeah, it’s a difficult choice if there are 47 children. But, if I’m allowed, I’ll give probably four and I’ll be brief. One of them is the government defining the tolerability of risk. And just for context, the tolerability of risk, at the moment, is a document that is established by, initially the government, now HSE (Health & Safety Executive), which defines what society considers to be a tolerable level of risk.
And the real issue with that, in a system which has some risk aversion and a slight ratcheting effect, is that you will always be driven down to going beyond what is strictly necessary to ensure a safe, nuclear development. And what the recommendation does, is to say, government should take control of this.
It should explicitly define what is a definition of risk that society thinks is worth the development of new nuclear so that we can be much, clearer about what parameters we’re using. The second is the idea for a commission. So we call it the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And this is effectively a body that will have the powers of all the other regulators.
And it’s intended to be both used as a kind of final arbiter and escalation process to determine quite knotty issues, but also can be used to directly decide things like nuclear site license applications and planning applications. And the thinking behind that is making sure that there is some element of a goal, a duty, we call it a secondary duty, of delivering new nuclear safely and quickly. And I think that has the potential to really change how these decisions are made.
Can I just come in on that? So you previously talked about, you don’t want to point fingers at anyone in particular. There’s a sort of wider systemic problem. That particular commission is designed to accelerate the delivery of nuclear, recognising that there is there is a systemic problem that just slows things down. Can you just give us a bit of a sense of, without necessarily pointing fingers, like what are the constraints that, or what’s stopping the existing regulatory state in nuclear actually getting new nuclear built quickly?
[00:16:18] John Fingleton: On the specifics of the permissioning, you have a number of problems. One is that you often have junior people inside a regulator who will take a view that’s very conservative. The company won’t want to challenge that because they might get a reputation within the regulator of being less safe.
And so they’ll then build something that’s quite goldplated. It is systemic because on the other side, they may not have strong financial incentives anyway. And so therefore the sort of cost benefit to them of challenging it is also, maybe not optimal.
Can you just say more about their financial incentives?
[00:16:54] John Fingleton: Well if they’re, in a lot of cases, so for example, in all, almost all of defence, not all of it, but almost all of the defence, the suppliers are on cost plus contracts, so they just pass cost onto the taxpayer. But actually the arrangements for Hinkley and Sizewell. It’s, there, there is a substantial part of the marginal cost or the additional cost that’s borne by the taxpayer or the consumer at the end of the day.
And it’s very difficult to have or to simulate competition in this environment, pure competition in these environments. But if it’s a supermarket that’s doing something that they’re gonna be very keen to do it at the lowest possible cost. And they’re gonna challenge the regulations up to the boundary and they’ll say, where is the boundary?
And so you get very precise lines, through the process of regulators engaging with competitive businesses. When you don’t have competitive businesses, you don’t necessarily get that. So part of the problem is the culture within the industry, which is to goldplate things and not challenge things back.
We’ve proposed a number of things in the report around escalation, around internal challenge function within the regulators to try and address some of those issues. And the idea behind the commission is that you can take these issues to the commission and get a quick answer, and in a way that’s quite transparent.
That would create precedent for other people and so on. But what we want is to get closer to the regulatory boundary rather than the current situation where everybody is like way under it.
And would that also, and I do wanna come back to the other two [Mustafa], but, I’m just interested in this interplay of, the regulatory incentives that we create and then also the sort of what that means in terms of how expensive these projects end up being. And so if, we’re effectively almost paying twice by both delaying the delivery of projects and then actually being on the hook for the extra costs that, that are introduced as part of that delay, if the recommendations were speed up delivery, do you have views on how we fix the financing side as well?
[00:18:46] John Fingleton: First, if we speed up delivery, we massively reduce the cost because a huge amount of the cost is the interest on the capital and a big part of the cost. But a lot of this is actually about taking cost out. So if you require something to be done that is vastly out of proportion to the benefit that’s being achieved from it, and you take that out, that’s really important. And, we talk about the fish deterrent, but there are many other examples and there’s examples of nuclear safety as well, where, a company is asked to do something, it’s gonna cost £94 million, it’ll save one life every 50 years, and the company doesn’t maybe, in this particular example, the company said, we don’t agree with that. We’re gonna challenge it. They challenge it. The regulator said, yeah, that’s fine. But they might not have challenged it. And in other circumstances they don’t challenge it.
The difficulty is, Andrew, it’s like many mole hills make a mountain. There isn’t, there’s not one that has necessarily cost £4 billion. It’s there’s one that cost £94 million here, there’s ones that cost £50 million here, £20 million here. I remember when I finished my PhD, my supervisor said my thesis was too long, 20% too long.
And I said, should I drop a chapter? And he said, no, every sentence is 20% too long. So it’s a bit like every individual component of it is overdone, rather than there being just one thing you can strip out. And so when Mustafa talks about the tolerability of risk that affects everything.
It affects the working conditions in the plant. It affects a whole lot of the operational, the operation of the existing plants, the construction of the new plants. And so bringing proportionality into all of these individual micro decisions will mean savings across a whole range of small areas that add up to a large number.
[00:20:34] Mustafa Latif-Aramesh: Just to give two very specific examples of that. They range from very small things which have a substantial cost to very significant things which have an even greater cost. An example of the former is, someone will, as part of the design development process, say the particular screwdriver that we’re going to use is X millimeters.
Turns out nobody in the world makes screwdrivers of x millimeters. So you end up getting a factory to bespoke manufacture these screwdrivers so that it fits the design that someone just, you know, at some point, said is the thing that we’re going to use. An example of a more kind of pervasive issue is in the decommissioning context.
So the report outlines billions of pounds of savings that could be made through changes to the regulatory regime. A really good example of that is the Winfrith site, which, you know, somewhere in the south of England where they are in the process of doing something that is actively good for the environment by decommissioning the site, making sure that things are disposed of, responsibly.
But the current, kind of framework forces them rather than to keep some of the rubble on site to potentially take it offsite by using 10,000 HGVs. Trucks going on the road network. That is not good for the environment, that is not good for the overall delivery of the decommissioning objective of this government and virtually every other government.
So you’ve got these very, what seem like small decisions on what screw are you using all the way up to actually we might need to use 10,000 vehicles, when really you could just keep it on site. There is a good segue onto the third one I was going to mention. So there are some eye catching recommendations on, the environmental side, but one of the ones that, I don’t think has gotten as much attention is a requirement to report where a mitigation measure is more than £0.5 million. And I think this actually relates to a number of things that John has mentioned. So we have many case studies which highlight the costs of some of these measures, but there’s no requirement to report exactly how much they cost.
So the Fish Protection System costing tens of millions, hundreds of millions of pounds was not something that was widely known. And so the recommendation is, be upfront, say when something is going to cost more than £0.5 million, so that at least the decision makers, and actually the developers, you know what you’re getting yourself into.
And you’re being open about it because a lot of these costs are very difficult to find. So that’s one of the kind of really good recommendations that I hope is implemented and people start to use that as a reason. “Oh gosh, are we actually spending £1 million, £2 million, £5 million on this?”
That doesn’t seem right. And then the last one I was gonna mention is, actually also slightly related to the overall kind of framework we have for the delivery of nuclear.
As it currently stands, we have something called Semi-Urban Population Density Criteria, which prevents nuclear reactors being located near urban population centers as the name suggests.
The methodology that is used to determine whether that test is complied with or not,
1. is from the 1960s
2. is based on an old AGR
3. does not take into account topography
4. does not take into account enhanced safety features or decay rates.
It is quite frankly a really unreliable test and it is being used to determine where we put our reactors. That’s really bad. Not just because it’s a bad methodology, but also some of our existing sites which have very welcoming local communities to nuclear are at risk of not complying with this criteria.
And so the recommendation is that this really needs to be revised so that we can have a system that enables new nuclear reactors in places without affecting safety. We have regimes in place to protect people.
So just to make that clear, there are current places in the country where we could not build new nuclear potentially, that currently have nuclear or are already welcoming?
[00:24:30] John Fingleton: So Heysham is a good example where we’ve allowed housing to be built close to the nuclear power station. So it’s created this asymmetry that now you wouldn’t be allowed to build a nuclear power station under the Semi-Urban Population Density. Even though the new one would be safer than the one that’s been being replaced. So that’s the sort of perverse outcome you get from that.
How quickly do you think the recommendations that you set out could be implemented and how quickly could they be showing an impact?
[00:25:00] Mustafa Latif-Aramesh: On the day of the publication of the report, the Prime Minister also published a strategic steer to the industry. And that says that the government is committed to the quote, “complete implementation of the report by the end of 2027”. That date isn’t picked out of thin air in the report.
In each recommendation, we have a target date for each of the recommendations. The final date that we had was December 2027. And, now that, the Prime Minister has clearly committed to making sure that there is an implementation of the recommendations by then. If you’re asking specifics on how long does it take, it’s fundamentally driven by, can something be solved through guidance? Can something be solved through secondary legislation, or do you need primary legislation? And it’s the primary legislation that is driving the December 2027 date.
From that December 2027 date, can you give us a sense of how this would change the culture and behaviors in the industry?
[00:25:57] John Fingleton: I, think from right now, I think it is, there’s enough a debate about this, that within existing construction at Sizewell and other places, I think there’s probably greater openness for our ability for companies to challenge back and ask questions about stuff. So I would like to think that they, that actually from today, you have a change in some of the debate about where the boundaries should be on some of these issues. Number one.
Number two, on the tolerability of risk that Mustafa mentioned, which we’ve said the government should do urgently. Something like that could have a good, a big effect on the cost of existing operations and new build very, very quickly.
Thirdly, the next project we’re going to start is the, the Rolls-Royce SMRs at Anglesey in Wylfa in Wales.
That’s a really good test case of, can we do this at a substantial lower cost than we’ve done it before? So I would say that, obviously there’s a lead time into doing that. There’s various processes to go through, but we should be trying to do that really quickly. for example, the commission idea requires primary legislation to give effect to it.
But what we’ve suggested is in the meantime, the regulators get together and develop a lead regulator model that begins to implement what that would look like in practice without the statutory provisions. And so that’s something I would expect to be applied with immediate effect from, from now. So quite a lot of this can happen. And even if you know that, something requires a statute, the fact that it is going to happen begins to gear things up towards doing that.
The other point I would make, and it’s a more general point about supply side reform, that people always say, and it could be the expansion of Heathrow or the Oxford Cambridge corridor or whatever else, “Oh, it’s gonna be years before it’s built.”
But actually we know as with HS2, that the moment there’s a commitment to doing something, the property values begin to change. Investment begins to flow in because if you’re a company and you’re thinking of investing in the UK, you’re going to build a plant, you’re going have to employ people, train people, etc.
And that’s gonna take many years. What you want to know is there’s a commitment to having the infrastructure that you need to be delivered by that time. So actually it crowds another investment earlier on than you might otherwise think. So I think it’s a mistake to think with supply side reform that the benefits only come when the project is built.
I want to, go inside the Taskforce process a little bit. If, you’ll go with me. The Taskforce was effectively a six month process. What does the sort of chronology of that process look like?
[00:28:29] Mustafa Latif-Aramesh: So I think it’s worth saying the very kind of high level summary of what we did, and then we can go into some of the details of it.
So we were established and immediately we, fairly immediately, we put out a call for evidence. And the call for evidence was relatively high level saying, asking people, what do you think works well? What do you think doesn’t work well? And we had consultation responses. We then considered those in tandem with.
Various site visits, various discussions with, regulators, government departments, environmental groups. And on the back of that, we published an interim report. That interim report started to drill down into very specific questions. Based on a initial understanding of what we thought the issues were and what the potential solutions might be.
We certainly hadn’t reached a kind of firm view at that point. We wanted to make sure that we were doing a, carrying out a process that was start high level, get more specific. We then had an encouraging amount of responses to the interim report that was published in August. And at that point we started to get down into a level of detail, which was about what are the specific solutions, what are the specific delivery vehicles for dealing with specific issues?
And we had a a series of workshops. Not just with government departments, again with regulators, environmental groups, developers, new build, decommissioning. And we, essentially just started floating ideas, asking provocative questions when we think, when we thought people weren’t going far enough to see exactly what the limit was.
And that’s what led to the final report. There is a brief few weeks between where we landed and the publication of the final report, which was based on testing the recommendations with, again, various government departments and people just to see.
And regulators.
And regulators just to see exactly where
Tell us about that, the Taskforce. Obviously it’s an advisory body, it doesn’t have formal powers. To see implementation, you need both political will, but also for departments and regulators and all of the bodies that you’ve just spoken to, to be the delivery arms of this going forwards.
How do you think about when you’re doing this taskforce, how do you think about allocating your time between getting to the ideal right answer and then also working with other agencies, organizations, bodies in the state to understand what their constraints are, what they’re gonna do, getting them bought in, and being the sort of, vanguard of this going forwards?
[00:31:05] John Fingleton: We had a, civil service team about 10 people, and they did a huge amount of work in the background talking to other government departments about things and then surfacing to us areas where we needed to get involved with those departments on specific issues like, I don’t know how many meetings we had about the Semi-Urban Population Density Criteria, because I think we had some meetings and then we thought, let’s just scrap it. And then we were saying, scrapping it is, could create even more uncertainty for developers in the short term. So let’s leave it there, but create an alternative pathway, which is what we came up with.
So actually, quite a lot of those refinements benefited from interaction with people in government departments who said to us, have you thought about the implication of doing something that dramatic? And we thought, actually, maybe we’ll refine this. So they did get refined as a result of this process.
But I think essentially, I would say, it took probably seven months in total. There was probably two months of initial scoping of issues, visiting sites, finding out stuff. Then there was two months of more in depth discussion with people, and then there was two months of finalizing recommendations with some gaps in between, because some of these things take a little bit of time.
I think we, we told people that what they told us was not going to be attributed, so that was important as well because I think, again, goes back to this point about outcome over, over process. You could have run a process where you took evidence from everybody and reported back what everybody said and so on.
And I think some people who might disagree with us think, oh, you should have published everything. Everybody said, actually, we need to get something done quickly and efficiently here. And I think we wanted to demonstrate with the process that nuclear itself might be done in this way, that you actually just get on and do things and work out, like what’s the answer?
And try not to agonise too much about, every, every single detail supporting that.
There were five of you on the membership of the Taskforce. How do you think about splitting up and allocating responsibilities between you? Who does what? Who holds the pen?
[00:33:04] John Fingleton: I guess that happened, maybe not quite top down, but I think I did ask Taskforce members to take the lead on particular things. Each person led on particular chapters and particular themes and, when we had the workshops, different Taskforce members chaired the meetings.
My general style is very distributed. I don’t need to, if I’m at a meeting, I don’t need to chair every meeting. So Mustafa chaired lots of meetings that I was at and other people, and that just spread the load. So actually, I would say as chair, I, I probably did, much less than a chair might normally do because we spread it out across the Taskforce members very effectively.
And I think it was also, it was interesting when we had our very first meeting. Everybody on the Taskforce was up for quite radical change and really bought into the idea of that. But, Mark Bassett had done a lot of work internationally, really understood all of the international aspects and led on the international.
Andrew Sherry understands culture very well, but also has deep expertise on defence nuclear. And then Sue Ion has been in this sector for a very long time, has a very distinguished record. Also, had been on the board of AWE, the Atomic Weapons Establishment, so knew defence as well as civil, and is one of people credited with getting Tony Blair to change his mind about nuclear 20 years ago.
She had deep knowledge across the entire sector and then Mustafa has a great deal of experience in, in planning and environment in other areas. And then I understood regulation, but knew nothing about nuclear. So there was quite a nice debate between us because we all brought very different expertise, but we were able to, I think, respect each other’s expertise.
How does a Taskforce membership body like that get pulled together in first instance?
[00:34:53] John Fingleton: Oh, that was, to be perfectly honest, that was perhaps one of the more frustrating aspects. Because I was asked to do this in early February, but then it didn’t get announced until May, until mid…well, my appointment was announced in mid-May, but the rest of the Taskforce members wasn’t announced until late May. I was early April. Then the rest came in mid-May. So although the Taskforce formally began on around the 10th of April. Actually, the other Taskforce members didn’t get appointed until, I think like the 28th of May or something. Yeah.
So I interpreted the six months is when they got appointed because we needed that. We had begun the, I’d begun the consultation process before the others got appointed. But that, I would say if the government was doing this again, just getting on and getting everything up and running slightly faster would be, could have been done, could have gone us there a month earlier.
But, it worked well once it got appointed and started.
If you were starting over, what else would you do differently?
[00:35:50] John Fingleton: I would have liked to have had more, more economics in it. You asked the question about cost. More economics and more finance, and we didn’t get that work stream up and going until rather late in the project for complicated, actually probably quite boring bureaucratic reasons, but it would’ve been nice to have had a constant economic work stream throughout it.
I think it would’ve given us more numbers to base things on. We held off putting them into a lot of the numbers into the reports simply because I think if you’re going to put numbers into a report, you need to be sure about them.
But I think that’s some work that’s work that the treasury and others could do now, particularly to demonstrate to the OBR, the Office of Budget Responsibility, what the productivity benefits might be, what the cost savings on decommissioning might be. We’ve given some rough indications.
I would’ve liked to have been able to calibrate what the extra funding into nature conservation restoration projects would’ve been, because I think it’ll be substantially greater than what it is now.
But it’s quite difficult to do that in a short timeframe, and it would’ve required an extra layer of consultation. So that would probably the thing I would’ve probably liked to have done more.
[00:37:05] Mustafa Latif-Aramesh: I’m going to be slightly diplomatic and answer your question by saying what I think went really well. And
That’s so boring!
Mustafa Latif-Aramesh: there, there is a, point in it, which I think is helpful for the underlying principle of your question, which is one of the things that is now in the public domain is a letter that is, is sent by the ONR, but it has a number of co-signatories across the nuclear chairs.
So we’re talking Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, the Environment Agency, EDF. That letter says quite clearly, we welcome this report. We are keen on the implementation of this report to help drive the industry forward, having effectively the nuclear establishment, and the key regulators saying that they endorse a report that is quite radical on a number of different measures, I think is a significant achievement because it shows how much desire there is to change things.
And so for future government reviews and reports, I think if you want to get in a space where the Prime Minister is saying we accept the recommendations, or the steer is saying we’re committed to complete implementation by the end of 27, you cannot get there unless you have done the legwork.
And I think there’s always room for more, legwork in building up that support. So if we had an additional month, we could have got even more. But where we have landed is a position where the ONR is, saying very clearly, we welcome this.
[00:38:40] John Fingleton: Although if we had another month, I worry, I do worry that, a lot of people will began to, because, this is, this requires a good deal of effort and ingenuity and actually challenge around preconceived ideas to implement.
And I worry, I think there was a right moment in time just before the Budget to get this out there because I worry that people always want to pare away things. And if we had another month, more might have got, we might have got more pushback. I was quite keen to get it out there and to get political commitment to it, because my preferred approach to do that is to say we’re doing that from a position of strong political leadership.
Is the deep state real?
[00:39:27] John Fingleton: No, I mean in the, in a letter I wrote at the start of the report, I do make the point that it’s an awful lot easier in our system for people to say no.
And that very few people have the ability or the incentive to say yes. And there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of risk aversion.
Parliamentary committees perform an important role, but they do tend to punish people who’ve taken calculated risk-based decisions. So you get a lot of risk adversity in decision making. So there’s, that’s one problem.
The second problem is that every government department has its own priorities. And I think that getting big reform that requires, and this touches on 5, 6, 7 departments of government at the same time to put effort into prioritising the same thing.
That is not something that’s easily done, and only the Treasury and the Prime Minister can really push that and they have to do it together. So having the Chancellor in the Budget and the Prime Minister in the strategic steer and his speech on Monday, have them come out so clearly, positively, in favor of doing this, I think does send a really clear signal to those government departments and to others. So I don’t, no, I don’t think it’s about the deep state. I think it is. And I think if you talk to civil servants leading in these departments, they feel they need strong particular leadership in order to give them the ability to move forward.
So you get this chicken and egg thing because the politicians will say, oh, the civil servants aren’t delivering this as fast as I want, but the civil servant, the politicians are not covering my ass on the risk. And so you want to get that positive, virtuous circle where you have political appetite for change.
Political risk appetite and political backing. And then I think the civil servants are prepared to deliver that at pace.
For what is worth, I’m not sure in my mind that the deep state is actually some like grand hidden conspiracy. It’s more sort of emergent property of splitting the difference before the decision is actually really taken, and this kind of compounding over time. Risk aversion. Everyone’s wanting to find the compromise rather than necessarily like just starting from the high ambition thing and then following that through. And if everyone is doing that at scale across many different departments, it’s very hard to retain the sort of like original high ambition, stretching level of ambition if sort of every layer of sort of process someone is going, as you said, like just shaving it off, shaving it off, shaving it off. And they, often are doing it in my sense from for what they believe to be very well intentioned kind of reasons. But the cumulative effect is that you, end up in a very different place from where you started, I think.
[00:42:03] Mustafa Latif-Aramesh: It’s a bit strange to be quoting John when he’s sat next to me. But in the forward that he mentioned, there is a line that says “you will be encouraged to consider consult and dilute. I encourage you to resist.”
And I think that’s what you’re getting at. There is, I certainly don’t believe in some grand conspiracy to try to water things down, but there is a process that everything goes through. And so as John said, the reason for being quite keen on the very full-throated endorsement from the Prime Minister, and the Chancellor was to start from the position of this is about the detail of implementation now. The principle has been accepted. So now we are working towards the detailed solution. We’re not going to undo everything. And I think, and anticipate that’s how most of the people that we’ve engaged with will, will see those see those endorsements.
Can you just say something from the joint experience you’ve had with this Taskforce, it feels like there’s a sort of emerging taskforce theory of everything where if the government really cares about getting something done, it will create a taskforce. On vaccines, AI safety, nuclear regulation. How scalable is this model to every other sort of class of problem that, that we have in government?
[00:43:19] John Fingleton: I think there are other ways of doing this. I sit on a advisory group that advises the Australian Treasurer so the equivalent, their Chancellor. And it’s a very different mechanism, but it’s actually produced quite a lot of substantial regulatory reform in Australia.
And what they do is the Australian Treasury brings us papers and proposals. And there’s seven of us. And we sit there and it’s been going for two years now, and we give them advice on it. But actually once something then has gone through that process, it has a lot more credibility within the system and then it goes out for public consultation and so on.
So there are other ways of doing it. I think the key is to implementation. So we model the implementation recommendations on something called the Haddon-Cave report, which is an investigation into, an airplane crash in Afghanistan about 15, 18 years ago that showed up substantial failings in the safety regime for, for aircraft.
And what Haddon-Cave did in his review was he actually, his implementation group was established before he reported, but the implementation group tracked the recommendations in a very precise way and it all got done. And so we were trying to model it on that. So as Mustafa said earlier, the, the, they, each recommendation has an owner and has a date.
And we’ve said there should be an independent implementation group that sort of holds the government to account on that. And part of that is about doing that.
The second observation I would make, and I think this happens in the private sector as well as in the public sector, there is a big difference between asking somebody whether, it’s in the business, the general counsel and others, “what can we do about X?” and saying “I want to do this, tell me how to do it.” And I think very often you get a different answer.
One of the consistent themes throughout your work has been that the sort of broken regulatory state can encourage rent seeking, it can encourage entire industries or people to go into sort of unproductive activity. Can you just illustrate a little bit about how that works?
[00:45:24] John Fingleton: I’m sitting beside an excellent lawyer and many of my friends and my colleagues are lawyers. But there’s a wonderful paper, in the American Economic Review in 1993, Murphy, Shleifer, Vishny, which basically looks at economic growth rates and regressed it against the ratio of engineers to lawyers in the economy and finds that the more, the higher the ratio of engineers to lawyers, the better the growth rate.
And you look at countries like China and others that are run by engineers, and you look at countries like Ireland and the UK that are often run by lawyers, and we have a different approach to doing these things. That’s slightly tongue in cheek. But I, do think one of the important measures of, being able to do economic growth is actually a focus on building things and getting things done rather than the focus on having debates about building things and getting things done, is really, important. And in this country we rely too much on legal process to sort out problems rather than trying to agree things ex ante so a lot of the issues we’ve seen in this sector about delaying, delaying big projects because of debates about issues that are not actually central to the project, is really, important.
And that’s not to say that we don’t need excellent lawyers to sort out these things. But I just see we, we end up often with just way too much litigation. Way too much rent seeking. Way too much argumentation about dividing the pie rather than argumentation about how to increase the pie.
[00:46:50] Mustafa Latif-Aramesh: I think just to give a specific example of that, and then I’ll deal with the abolished lawyers point, but the specific example of that is something called regulatory justification. This is an approval that you have to obtain, in the very early stages of a nuclear project where you ask DEFRA if the benefits of your technology outweigh the disbenefits to human health.
Now immediately alarm bells should start ringing because that question is dealt with in planning. We have a whole site licensing process that is focused on safety. We have dose limits. So this additional approval is something that is highly duplicative of other aspects of our process. The government, probably three weeks before we published our report, issued a notification that it had awarded a tender which cost £8.7 million for I think six or seven consultants to help it administer the regulatory justification process. That is obscene, because this is not a process that is required.
If the question is, does nuclear technology, the benefits of it outweigh the harm to human health? The answer has already been given by government. So the fact we are awarding contracts of millions of pounds is an example of, I think a process in which, this kind of behavior that John is talking about is allowed to flourish. From my personal perspective, I think lawyers should be less involved in these kinds of processes because they are fundamentally planning judgments. They are safety judgments. They are not that exist in a legal framework. They shouldn’t be legal decisions. But, if I was speaking to other lawyers, the argument I present is an economy in which we have greater amounts of development means greater amounts of work.
So even though you are less involved, there is more of a, a portfolio of projects to be involved in. John’s 48th recommendation is abolishing lawyers. But, there is a serious point that there is scope.
[00:48:52] John Fingleton: One of the, one of the issues we deal with in the report is the Aarhus convention, but we list the Judicial Reviews that have happened in on, the two big nuclear plants.
And by and large, they’ve all failed. They’ve all been found, almost a lot of them to have not been either without merit or not having great merit. They’ve all been designed to delay and slow down something. And to, to my mind, there’s been just huge wasted activity, both in terms of the cost of stopping everything in the supply chain, but also just the cost of going to court.
And you sort of think there must be a better way of doing that. And so a lot of the gist of the report is how can we try to get to the answer we’re going to get to in a faster, more efficient way? And so I would think, for example, with Sizewell C, there’d been a number of, of cases that have delayed or increased the cost of the plant.
But in actual fact, if you’re living nearby, I can see, if I lived near Sizewell C, I would be frustrated by the cost of the construction, the trucks on the roads, everything else. But actually a lot of these challenges just drag that out. So instead of getting on with it, doing it quickly,
You get on with it and do it slowly. And it’s like ripping off a plaster really slowly.
So if you live nearby, it just means you have the construction for longer, it’s down, it’s back, etc.. And that’s often may even be not in the interest of the people bringing some of these cases that, that, they end up harming themselves or damaging their own environmental, environment locally more than any benefit they get for anybody else.
I think there’s actually a really important point here around, we’re in the worst of all worlds of sort of weak state capacity and zombified private operators who can’t move quickly, don’t have freedom to move at pace. And at a time when you have a sort of, there’s this crisis of liberalism and on the one hand you have people saying, all corporate actors are bad.
On the other hand, you have a, version of ‘everything-is-fineism’. There’s clearly such an enormous gap in the middle for a critique that drives a wedge between rent seekers who kind of poison the well for everyone else and the productive capitalists who are, potentially founding companies and building way out, out of malaise.
And it feels like this is an agenda that is is core to that. If anything we’ve almost made it easier to build slop and sovereignty and industry because it’s so hard to build these projects.
[00:51:19] Mustafa Latif-Aramesh: There, there is a line in the report, and it’s in a section called Our Philosophy, and it says there is enough blame to go around.
And I, again, just to emphasise the point, we’re not trying to pick out any particular actor in this entire framework and say, you are responsible for this. What we’re saying is there’s a systems problem. And I think that’s the gist of, or the thrust of what you are saying, that actually that there are a number of different components.
The risk aversion aspect is not just something that is directed towards elements of the state. It is something that is deeply embedded in our current duty holders, the developers of nuclear development, of our existing reactors and future build. The other aspect to this, I think is it is worth noting how thin some of the initial resistance is.
So as an example, I mentioned regulatory justification. One of the, immediate responses to that is actually there’s an international convention that says we need to do justification and then optimisation. And then you’re thinking, okay, that, that sort of makes sense. How does everyone else in the whole world interpret this?
Turns out we are an outlier. We have, the ability to follow rules in a way, that is completely different from everyone else and say that this is the correct interpretation. So whether it’s that convention or another one, I think there is a serious issue with us giving weight to quite thin, thin resistance.
And part of the report is saying that’s not just one person saying that in a room. It is all of us acting in a way that is highly risk averse. And I think that is a much more fundamental issue than anything else.
[00:52:56] John Fingleton: I think it’s incredibly important that people have access to justice, that regulators are held to account that there is, there are appeals mechanisms that can do that.
I think it’s when you see that the appeals that are brought generally don’t succeed, you sort of think, maybe the system isn’t working as well as it should. I think in other areas of regulation, I see judicial reviews that are actually correcting quite important errors that regulators have made.
I also see judicial reviews in other areas where, actually, the consultation process hasn’t been well run. And so it hasn’t taken account of the effects on people. But I think it’s when you’ve had an excellent consultation process being well run and the regulators follow the process, and then people bring judicial reviews simply because they don’t like the outcome.
And you can understand that there’s a negative impact on them. I also think as a society, government could be better at just trying to compensate some of the losers on some of these things.
I, I, first got into regulation 30 years ago on recommending deregulation of taxis in Ireland.
But actually I built into it a model of compensation, and I think
How did that work?
It basically said that, every taxi driver should be given a second medallion and allowed to sell it. And the medallions, the scarcity of the medallions was what was holding up the price and restricting supply.
And so it doubled it, it doubled the number of taxis overnight and brought down the price of the medallions. But, it meant there was an element of compensation in there.
But, if I look at, other areas of reform, so completely outside of this, but you look at, for example, something like stamp duty reform.
The government finds it very difficult to move from stamp duty to some sort of land value or property tax. There’s a very nice paper by the Centre for British Progress, which I’m on the advisory board of, that actually goes into the transitioning of this, how you would do this in a way that minimises the impact on the losers and gets you to a different equilibrium.
And I think just generally in public policy, thinking about how you move forward in a way that that avoids a large class of people who lose out from a reform in the short term, even if the beneficiaries are far greater, we need to get better at doing that. So for example, in the context of energy in France, they give people who live near power facilities cheaper power.
Reflects the disruption.
We do a bit of that. So for example, there’s been quite a lot of work done by EDF and Sizewell on, with the local communities, and if there’s a power station or a nuclear station, but any big facility, even a wind farm or whatever being built nearby, you’re going to have disruption to local people.
And it’s, I don’t think it’s enough just to say, “oh, grin and bear it”, always. Sometimes having some compensation mechanism can massively improve the efficiency of the delivery.
[00:55:54] Mustafa Latif-Aramesh: I think just on that point to, to give a, another kind of case study of that, there is a famous Supreme Court case in this country, which relates to a wind project in the Forest of Dean. And in that case, the developer was trying to do the right thing by saying we will give a local community package. They were giving essentially some discount on local bills, in exchange for the kind of concerns that John’s highlighted. The Supreme Court ruled that is unlawful.
And so one of our recommendations is actually about, we should be legalising fully, to the fullest extent possible, community benefits so that you can actually compensate people for some of the losses that they’re feeling. The current rules say the payment of that kind of community benefit cannot be considered in planning decisions. That seems wrong. That’s a disincentive to the kind of compensatory win-win solutions that we want to see that will reduce the overall amount of objection to new development.
I also think the fact that case had to go all the way to the Supreme Court. It’s quite telling only for the developer who’s trying to do the right thing to be told you are doing something unlawful.
I think there’s a wider point here around, there’s some brilliant writing by Aled Maclean-Jones on the different role that nuclear plays in the imaginary in France and in Britain, and how it is a sort of real source of civic pride in France in a way that maybe we haven’t quite been able to yet build it in, in, in Britain.
So much of this is about, detailed regulatory recommendations, that’s absolutely understandable, but really what’s upstream of that is like building the sort of culture of consent for nuclear and a sense of civic pride that definitely exists in other countries.
And one of the reasons I’m so excited by this report is it is the plan for building way more nuclear over the course of the next few decades than we’ve ever done before and doing so safely, doing so cheaply, doing so at scale.
And I just really appreciate you guys taking the time to, to share more about how this has worked and hopefully we’ll see it implemented in full going forwards.
[00:57:54] John Fingleton: Thank you very much, Andrew.
[00:57:55] Mustafa Latif-Aramesh: Thank you.
