As the public consultation on the NDA’s current Draft 3-year Business Plan (2011-2014) reaches its closure date this week, CORE raises concerns over the poor level of information provided for consultation, and questions the merits of responding to plans upon which decisions have clearly already been made.
For the Sellafield site, with a planned NDA expenditure of £1.5Bn – the largest for all its UK sites – the 47-page Draft Business Plan 2011/14 devotes just 4 lines to spent fuel reprocessing (the site’s mainstay commercial operations) with the bland and hardly clairvoyant forecast that Magnox and THORP reprocessing would continue. Devoid of any operational target figures for the next three years of reprocessing business – details expected in any self-respecting Plan in the outside world of business, the dumbed-down NDA consultation document provides neither operational detail of other ‘key activities’ on the site, nor a breakdown of what performance is expected from them during the coming three-year period.
Spokesman for CORE Martin Forwood said today:
“The NDA is paid largely from the public purse and it is hard to imagine a greater waste of time, effort and taxpayers money than the production of a document so devoid of detail. To serve up a Plan that could have been written by the proverbial dead parrot is an insult to consultees and suggests that the NDA has next to no idea what will happen at Sellafield over the next 3 years”.
The poor quality of NDA consultation information has been raised before by CORE who told the NDA, in response to its 2008/11 Business Plan (the first 3-year plan to replace Annual Plans) that the lack of substance within the Plan made it impossible to form a reasoned judgement on Sellafield’s operations. CORE responded similarly to the 2009/12 Plan complaining that no improvement in the scope or quality of information provided by the NDA could be detected, and that the vague document, which lacked any semblance of proper commercial detail, defied intelligent scrutiny and precluded any attempt at making a considered response. No response was made by CORE to the 2010/13 Plan and none will be made to the current 2011/14 Plan.
Gauged by the collective number of written responses from organisations and individuals to previous Business Plan consultations, dismay and disenchantment with NDA appears to be increasingly widespread. In its response to a recent Freedom of Information request from CORE, the NDA confirmed that the number of responses to the three Business Plans previously published had nose-dived from 127 (2008/11) to 57 (2009/12) to 30 (2010/13). Given that the Plans cover the 19 UK sites owned by the NDA, the latter figure of 30 responses for the 2010/13 consultation implies that less than two responses were made for each site. Similar response reductions were also noted for consultations on NDA Draft Strategy – the 279 responses to the NDA’s 2005 Draft Strategy plummeting to just 73 for the recent 2010 Draft Strategy document.
Martin Forwood added:
“An overdose of consultations these days from all quarters means that stakeholders have to select those worth responding to. Little wonder that the meaningless consultation charade routinely produced by the NDA is increasingly shunned. They need to raise their game if they genuinely want people to respond or they’ll not only lose further credibility but also any remaining consultation respondents”
back to menu