Philip Sellers, Chair of the NDA Programme Board

The legislative process is now underway. The Energy Bill, introduced in the House of Lords, received Second Reading on 11 December and is now being considered in Lords Grand Committee (see page 7).

Contracts and competition
The NDA will promote and develop a competitive market for nuclear clean up in the UK. By providing appropriate incentives for contractors to perform, the NDA will bring the best available skills to the task of cleaning up our nuclear legacy.

Initial responsibility for the management and operation of site licensees will remain with the incumbent site operators, BNFL and UKAEA. We need to negotiate and agree sensible timescales for the interim arrangements with incumbents that are fair but which do not impair the Government's goal of open and fair competition for site management contracts. It will be for the NDA to decide the timetable for introducing competition.

Funding
The NDA must have the financial arrangements it needs to operate effectively. It will be funded directly by the Government. A statutory segregated account, known as the Nuclear Decommissioning Funding Account (NDFA), will record amounts spent and received by the NDA and indicate the resources needed for clean up looking 10 years ahead. This signals the Government's commitment to funding nuclear clean up over the long-term. It is conscious of the need to give the nuclear clean up market, particularly new entrants, confidence that the NDA will have the funding arrangements necessary to deliver its programme.

The opening balance of the NDFA will be credited with the value of BNFL's Nuclear Liabilities Investment Portfolio (NLIP), the Magnox Undertaking at the time it is extinguished and an additional sum provided by Government. The balance of the account will also be credited with revenues accrued from the NDA's commercial operations, including Magnox generation and THORP and SMP contracts. It will also reflect the annual contribution from Government.

Mobilisation
The NDA will have its headquarters in West Cumbria. It is likely to have 200 to 250 core staff, comprising a diverse mix of skills including: programme management, planning, commercial, technical, safety, environmental and communications specialists. It will also assign staff to oversee sites at which there is a significant level of expenditure, notably Sellafield and Dounreay, where the NDA will have a long-term presence.

The appointment of the Chair, the non-executive Board members and the Chief Executive will go ahead as soon as possible after the Bill becomes law, to enable the NDA to begin recruiting its staff.

LMU
The DTI's Liabilities Management Unit (LMU) is preparing the ground for the NDA. It is made up mostly of secondees from the UK nuclear industry and other private sector staff with some public servants. The DTI has also acquired Bechtel as a partner contractor to bring in valuable expertise built up in the US clean up market.

We now have initial, but comprehensive, plans presenting the scope of work, budgets and schedules needed to decommission and clean up sites. They provide essential 'road maps' for managing site activity under the new contracts. They also provide the raw data from which the NDA will prepare a UK-wide baseline to form the basis for its strategic planning and prioritisation. The work of constructing the baselines has been helped enormously by the assistance and cooperation of both the site operators and the regulators.

The LMU has also been developing possible approaches to contracting for the NDA to consider. Much technical work lies ahead in finalising these arrangements. Once completed, they will provide important tools to enable the NDA to drive forward clean up of the nuclear legacy.

Stakeholder engagement
The Government is committed to creating an open and transparent NDA. Underpinning the DTI's approach has been a commitment to engage with stakeholders at all stages. Last year, the Department held two rounds of regional events with stakeholders across the UK and a national stakeholder event in November. The DTI has also recently published the first draft of a Stakeholder Engagement Framework for consultation until 31 March. The final framework will set out the NDA's processes for engaging with stakeholders on an open and transparent basis and will be recommended to the NDA on its inception. Copies of the draft framework can be accessed from the 'Managing the Nuclear Legacy' website at the following address: http://www.dti.gov.uk/nuclearcleanup/ach/draftframework.doc

The project team's task is clear but challenging: to ensure that a viable Nuclear Decommissioning Authority is in place by April 2005. The Programme Board will see through the effective delivery of that objective.

At our first meeting under my Chairmanship, we adopted the mission statement of ensuring that the NDA would have 'the best funding, the best policies and the best resources we could deliver.' That, of course, is where the challenge lies.