Scottish National Party and UK Government in row over cost of nuclear dumping grounds

The SNP has claimed that Scotland could be saddled with a bill of over £22 billion as part of Westminster’s cleanup of nuclear dumping grounds.

By Andrew Quinn, Westminster Reporter, 23 Apr 24, https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/politics/snp-uk-government-row-over-32644089

A row has broken out between the SNP and the UK Government over how much Scotland will pay on radioactive waste.

The SNP has claimed that Scotland could be saddled with a bill of over £22 billion as part of Westminster’s cleanup of nuclear dumping grounds.

But the UK Government has said that the figure is actually much lower.

Radioactive waste is an issue which is devolved to the Scottish Parliament.

The party said this would mean Scotland could be made to pay £22,618,000,000 in total as it contributes 8.6 per cent of the UK’s tax revenue.

This would work out to £22,000,000 every year for a century.

But the UK Government has dismissed these claims, saying that the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority’s annual statement from last year put future costs at £124bn across the UK.

It also said that calculating the amount that Scotland would pay by its tax share was wrong.

Scotland has three nuclear power stations which are currently being decommissioned. England and Wales have 14 sites.

SNP MP Martin Docherty-Hughes said the money should be spent on public services.

He said: “Westminster’s obsession with nuclear energy and weapons neither benefits nor helps ordinary Scots, and yet they’re expected to fork out tens of millions every year for a century to pay for the cleanup of radioactive materials.

“While the Tories have lined up funding for the cleanup of material that shouldn’t have been used anyway, public services have been decimated, and a cost of living crisis that has seen energy bills go through the roof has hammered households.

“Conventional military spending has been recklessly slashed as global tensions rise, with the Tories instead focussing obscene amounts of cash on disposing of nuclear materials from weapons of mass destruction we should never, and will never, use.

“And in prioritising expensive nuclear energy they’ve even refused to support efforts to save jobs and future proof Scotland’s already established and thriving energy sector by matching the SNP Scottish Government’s £500 million funding for a Just Transition.

“The list of projects and causes Scotland’s £22 billion could be better spent on is endless, but as ever Westminster’s spending priorities are askew and based around making Scotland pay for things Scots neither want nor need.

“Hospitals, doctors, nurses, teachers, police officers, members of the armed forces – none of this is a priority for Westminster who’d rather spend billions on unnecessary nuclear projects. Scotland could do far better with independence and focus spending on areas that would actually benefit the people who live and work here. Only a vote for the SNP can secure representatives who will fight Scotland’s corner and stand up for our unique needs and interests.”

The UK Government was approached for comment

April 26, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, UK | Leave a comment

You will not BELIEVE what the Tories just gave Fujitsu ANOTHER government contract for

The ‘fallout’ could be disastrous.

 by Steve Topple, 11 April 2024,  https://www.thecanary.co/trending/2024/04/11/fujitsu-nuclear-uk-contract/

Disgraced Fujitsu – the company behind the Horizon software that helped the Post Office wrongly convict hundreds of subpostmasters – has just been given ANOTHER government contract by the Tories. However, that’s not the worst part – because unbelievably, the deal is for software to support UK nuclear experiments.

Yes. The fallout could be disastrous.

As LBC reported:

The National Nuclear Laboratory, which is owned and operated by the government, has awarded the firm a £155k contract for ‘software support’ until 2025…

The contract, published by procurement data provider Tussell, is for “software support” and is due to run until 31 March 2025.

Hairbrained Tories: we’ve got a great idea… why not give Fujitsu a nuclear contract?

The National Nuclear Laboratory does all sorts of stuff with nuclear energy. As it says on its website, this includes:

four strategic areas: Clean Energy, Environmental Restoration, Health and Nuclear Medicine and Security and Non-Proliferation.

That is, the laboratory dabbles in nuclear science and experiments – including nuclear power and weapons; note its ironic oxymoron that it deals with ‘security’ and ‘non-proliferation’. So, you’d think that the government would want to make sure that the National Nuclear Laboratory was a safe and secure environment.

Clearly fucking not, though – as they’ve now given Fujitsu a contract.

People on X were rightly outraged: (several quotes here)

Christopher Head was the youngest victim of the Horizon Post Office scandal. He told LBC:

When there is a pledge not to bid for contracts you kind of expect them to adhere to that. But the problem is these companies have shareholders, and these shareholders demand profitability. It is frustrating.

Fujitsu made this pledge that they wouldn’t voluntarily bid for contracts within the government while the inquiry is going on – but we all know the size of these companies makes it difficult.

Post Office scandal: you must have been in a nuclear bunker if you missed it

Unless you’ve been in a nuclear bunker for the past 12 months, then you can’t have missed the Post Office scandal.

As the Canary previously reported, Mr Bates vs the Post Office has brought the ongoing scandal over the Horizon IT system, and Post Office and politicians conduct at the time, back into the public eye.

More than 700 people running small local post offices received criminal convictions between 1999 and 2005 after faulty accounting software made it appear that money had gone missing from their branches.

The scandal has been described at an ongoing public inquiry as “the worst miscarriage of justice in recent British legal history”.

Fujitsu: giving the UK its very own Hulk moment?

Yet here we are, with the Tories STILL giving Fujitsu another contract. Worse still, they’ve given it to them on the basis of providing tech support for nuclear technology. So, unless the government fancies itself as creating a league of superhumans, then it needs to revoke the contract.

Fujitsu cannot be trusted to run a piss up in a brewery – let alone software support for a nuclear experiments lab. It could barely handle the tech for provincial Post Offices. The Canary can see an Incredible Hulk moment coming on if this goes ahead – and we hope everyone has their nuclear bunkers ready.

Sign the petition against the contract here.

April 17, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, UK | Leave a comment

Post Office Horizon scandal: four reasons why the government’s model for outsourcing is broken

Alice Moore, Assistant Professor in Public Management and Public Policy, University of Birmingham, January 16, 2024 , https://theconversation.com/post-office-horizon-scandal-four-reasons-why-the-governments-model-for-outsourcing-is-broken-220919

For over a decade, the Post Office and its supplier, Fujitsu, insisted that the Horizon system used in its branches was completely “robust”. When discrepancies appeared in hundreds of branch accounts across the country, the Post Office refused to believe the system was at fault and didn’t challenge the information it got from Fujitsu. Instead, it blamed the shortfalls on sub-postmasters, made them pay the losses, and prosecuted over 700 of them.

The multimillion-pound contract between the Post Office and Fujitsu is at the heart of the scandal. The way the contract worked meant that Fujitsu was incentivised to fix bugs quickly rather than well. The Post Office didn’t have the expertise it needed to understand what was going wrong. The Post Office’s dependence on Fujitsu also meant that it protected its relationship with them at the expense of sub-postmasters and the public.

The problems with the Horizon contract underpin one of the most widespread miscarriages of justice in UK history. But they are also replicated across thousands of other government contracts, including for many essential services, from hip replacements on the NHS to school PE lessons.

These problems are in fact produced by fundamental features of the UK’s outsourcing model.

1. The systems are too complex to understand

The Horizon system was incredibly complex. It had to process all kinds of transactions, from selling travellers cheques to managing rent payments, across tens of thousands of disparate branches, using a complicated web of communications systems.

The problem is, by outsourcing such a complex service, the Post Office ended up without the expertise to understand how it worked and what Fujitsu was (or wasn’t) doing. The contract also limited the amount of information they could get from the system. This all meant that the Post Office lacked the understanding and information about Horizon it would have needed to challenge the story it was getting from Fujitsu.

In its most recent statement on the inquiry into what happened at the Post Office, Fujitsu said “the inquiry has reinforced the devastating impact on postmasters’ lives and that of their families, and Fujitsu has apologised for its role in their suffering … Fujitsu is fully committed to supporting the inquiry in order to understand what happened and to learn from it.”

2. Contracts generate perverse incentives

If a service is complex, like Horizon was, it is impossible to specify everything in a written contract. Any buyer has to miss things out. But then how do they get a supplier to do everything they need and not just the things in the contract?

One of the reasons Horizon had major problems was that it was impossible to say in advance how each bug in the system should be fixed. Instead, the contract just stipulated how quickly Fujitsu needed to resolve problems. Bugs either weren’t fixed properly or the fixes introduced different bugs into the system. This kind of “service level agreement” is still standard in many government contracts.

3. The buyer is locked in

Complex services also require a supplier to invest in things like software, equipment and training that are specific to that service. There’s an idea in economics that if a supplier needs to make these “specialised investments”, it’s very difficult to get rid of that supplier. They have a huge advantage over their competitors, because anyone else would need to make these investments all over again.

This is what happened with the Horizon contract. Once Fujitsu had built the system, it couldn’t be replaced by another supplier, even when things went wrong. In the original procurement, it scored bottom on eight of the ten quality criteria, but won the contract because it said it would pay for the up-front development costs. The contract has since changed, but Fujitsu carried on and has just had its contract renewed up to 2025.

Getting locked into complex contracts is quite common for government. In 2014 HMRC announced that it would end its £8 billion contract with Capgemini for the UK’s tax collection system. It had to assign a budget of £700 million just to pay for the cost of transferring the contract to new suppliers. Now, ten years on, Capgemini is still the supplier. Apparently unable to find an alternative, HMRC ended up extending the contract to at least 2025.

4. Suppliers are prioritised over workers and the public

Because it couldn’t replace them, the Post Office depended on Fujitsu. This was compounded by the fact that Horizon was also essential to the Post Office’s business. Horizon was responsible for processing all branch transactions and keeping track of all money coming in and going out.

Losing Fujitsu would cause huge cost and disruption to an essential system. The Post Office depended on keeping Fujitsu onside during contract negotiations and making sure they were financially healthy. Predictably, they protected that relationship over sub-postmasters, who were individually expendable. This also came at the public’s expense, who got a poor service and have had to foot the bill for the Post Office’s mistake.

Essential public services across the UK rely on a few “strategic suppliers”. Government bodies are dependent on protecting their relationships with these suppliers and are invested in their financial stability. The collapse of Carillion in 2018, at a time when it was contracted to build NHS hospitals, brought home just how bad things could be if a major supplier went under.

How far the government would go to protect other strategic relationships remains to be seen. But as long as UK government bodies outsource complex, essential services, it’s unlikely that the Horizon fiasco will be the last public scandal with a government contract at its heart.

April 17, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, UK | Leave a comment

Keir Starmer doesn’t speak for Labour members on nuclear weapons

14th April 2024,   https://labouroutlook.org/2024/04/14/starmer-doesnt-speak-for-labour-members-on-nuclear-weapons/

‘I am opposed to the use of nuclear weapons. I am opposed to the holding of nuclear weapons. I want to see a nuclear-free world. I believe it is possible.’Keir Starmer, 2015

Labour CND has issued the following statement in response to Keir Starmer’s visit to Barrow, Friday 12 April

Keir Starmer used a visit to Barrow-in-Furness on 12 April to announce Labour’s ‘unshakeable absolute total’ commitment to Trident, Britain’s nuclear weapons system, and Labour’s plan to raise military spending to 2.5% of gross domestic product under a Labour government which means billions of pounds more public funds allocated to the military budget.¹

Starmer should be under no illusions. He does not speak for the majority of Labour Party members, however, or even the public on these issues. Nor does this allay Tory voter fears that Labour is a safe pair of hands when it comes to defence.²

Trident is the ‘bedrock of Labour’s plan to keep Britain safe’, he said. The UK’s ‘nuclear deterrent’ was ‘maintained on behalf of NATO’. This was ‘a generational, multi-decade commitment’ from a Starmer government.

International tensions are growing, and with them the risk of nuclear confrontation. Politicians may believe Trident guarantees us a place at the top table. But the assurance of Labour and Tories alike that it brings safety for people in Britain is a cruel illusion. Meanwhile UK domestic politics continues to ignore the true international situation which is that Britain has not signed the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons which came into force in 2021.

Politicians may believe Trident guarantees us a place at the top table. But the assurance of Labour and Tories alike that it brings safety for people in Britain is a cruel illusion.

Starmer doesn’t speak for Labour members on nuclear weapons

14th April 2024Barrow, CND, International, Labour CND, nuclear weapons, starmer, TridentLeave a Commenton Starmer doesn’t speak for Labour members on nuclear weapons

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‘I am opposed to the use of nuclear weapons. I am opposed to the holding of nuclear weapons. I want to see a nuclear-free world. I believe it is possible.’Keir Starmer, 2015

Labour CND has issued the following statement in response to Keir Starmer’s visit to Barrow, Friday 12 April

Keir Starmer used a visit to Barrow-in-Furness on 12 April to announce Labour’s ‘unshakeable absolute total’ commitment to Trident, Britain’s nuclear weapons system, and Labour’s plan to raise military spending to 2.5% of gross domestic product under a Labour government which means billions of pounds more public funds allocated to the military budget.¹

Starmer should be under no illusions. He does not speak for the majority of Labour Party members, however, or even the public on these issues. Nor does this allay Tory voter fears that Labour is a safe pair of hands when it comes to defence.²

Trident is the ‘bedrock of Labour’s plan to keep Britain safe’, he said. The UK’s ‘nuclear deterrent’ was ‘maintained on behalf of NATO’. This was ‘a generational, multi-decade commitment’ from a Starmer government.

International tensions are growing, and with them the risk of nuclear confrontation. Politicians may believe Trident guarantees us a place at the top table. But the assurance of Labour and Tories alike that it brings safety for people in Britain is a cruel illusion. Meanwhile UK domestic politics continues to ignore the true international situation which is that Britain has not signed the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons which came into force in 2021.

Politicians may believe Trident guarantees us a place at the top table. But the assurance of Labour and Tories alike that it brings safety for people in Britain is a cruel illusion.

The possession of a nuclear weapons system makes the UK a target. The decision to site United States nuclear weapons on British soil – taken without public or even parliamentary debate – puts us on the front line of any nuclear attack.

Britain’s nuclear weapons system is not independent as Starmer claims. Trident is dependent on US technology and know-how.

Even sections of the military recognise that the money spent on Trident would be better deployed elsewhere, arguing for increases in areas of conventional defence.

Disregarding these and many other arguments against nuclear weapons, in a statement shot through with jingoism, Starmer

has made three commitments which he argues will defend the UK economy and prioritise British jobs and skills:

• to build all four new Dreadnought nuclear submarines in the UK, at Barrow-in-Furness;
• to maintain Britain’s continuous at sea nuclear deterrent; and
• to deliver all future upgrades needed to properly equip Trident.

A commitment to increase the military budget means cuts elsewhere in government investment and public spending. Figures released by the Treasury as part of the Spring Budget showed that Core Military Spending was £54.2 billion pounds for the year ending March 2024, around 2.3% of GDP.³ How else will a Labour government, committed to fiscal responsibility as well as lowering taxes, find the extra resources to fund Starmer’s commitment to increase the military budget? It will come at the expense of the NHS, education, and the ability to address child poverty or to abolish the two-child cap on child benefits. It will also come at the expense of dealing with the human security threat of climate change.Labour CND says the next Labour government should not allow its priorities to be dictated by the Conservative Party and their establishment friends. We need is a radical rethink about spending priorities and about British foreign policy.The incoming Labour government will face a range of challenges. None of them will be solved by nuclear weapons or spending ever more money on the military.

Notes

1. Keir Starmer, My commitment to the UK’s nuclear deterrent is Unshakeable Absolute Total, Daily Mail exclusive, 11 April 2024 athttps://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13298999/Keir-Starmer-vows-Britains-nuclear-deterrent-safe-hands-promises-unshakeable-commitment- Trident-new-generation-nuclear-submarines-built-UK.htm ↩︎
2. See for example the hundreds of reader comments in response to the above, which have appeared within hours of the article being posted online. ↩︎
3. Dr Stuart Parkinson, Co-Chair GCOMS-UK (UK branch of the Global Campaign on Military Spending) and Executive Director of Scientists for Global Responsibility, Spring Budget 24: Military Spending Continues to Grow at the Expense of Climate Funds and Overseas Aid, at https://demilitarize.org.uk/spring-budget-24-military-spending-continues-to-grow-at-the-expense-of-climate-funds-and-overseas-aid/ ↩︎

April 16, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, UK | Leave a comment