Andrew Griffith welcomes the government’s £14bn Sizewell C investment but says it is “painfully slow” and less ambitious than Tory plans. The shadow business secretary blames delays on legal red tape and activists, warning Labour “don’t have the stomach” to reform. Report by Covellm. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
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00:00We had a strategy which the government is continuing to invest in nuclear for the long term, add more baseload.
00:07Actually our strategy was a little bit more ambitious than the government.
00:10And we've lost nearly a year now of the government prevaricating when we already had plans in place for things like small modular reactors
00:17to continue the build of Hinkley and Sizewell.
00:21So it's the right direction. None of that, because these will take many years to come to fruition,
00:27takes away from the fact the government said they were going to reduce bills by £300.
00:32Everybody's bill is at least £100 higher.
00:35They're making the wrong decisions in the short term and not being ambitious enough in the long term.
00:40It is painfully slow. Part of that is because when the Labour government cancelled the nuclear build programme in 1997,
00:46I know that's a long time, but it dismantled the supply chain, including some of the expertise of regulators to regulate these.
00:53Some of this is about a planning process, but a lot of it is about a legal process that slows everything in this country down
01:00through things like the overuse of judicial review, activists using the law courts to try and re-litigate decisions
01:08that have been made by democratic elected bodies.
01:10That is a big reason why it's so slow to get anything done in this country.
01:14If we want growth, we've got to properly reform that.
01:17I fear this government of lawyers don't have the stomach for that fight.