MPs hit out as costs of clean-up work at Sellafield soar to ‘astonishing’ £70bn

A damning report from the Public Accounts Committee said progress at the site in Cumbria had been “poor”, with targets missed, costs “escalating” and timescales slipping.

The MPs made a series of recommendations, calling on the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) to terminate the contract of private consortium Nuclear Management Partners (NMP) if its performance did not improve.

The report said the consortium had been brought in six years ago to help Sellafield improve its performance and had its contract extended last October despite “spiralling costs and poor performance”.

Margaret Hodge, who chairs the committee, said costs were rising to astonishing levels, such as the doubling to £729m of one project on storage silos over 18 months to last September, while another project had been put back six years to 2023.

She said: “Cleaning up the nuclear waste on this hazardous site is estimated to cost more than £70bn in cash terms. What’s worse is that the cost is likely to continue to rise.

“The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, which owns Sellafield and which appointed NMP, said itself that it did not expect NMP to meet its savings target for the first five years – despite NMP being on course to earn £230m for the job.

“Timescales have slipped and reprocessing targets have been missed. NMP has failed to provide the clear leadership, strong management and improved capabilities for the job.

“There has been a high turnover of executives and NMP has failed to train staff with the right skills and experience. Instead it used expensive NMP staff – at an average cost of £300,000 per expert in 2012-2013.”

She added: “We are not confident that taxpayers’ interests are being protected in the contractual relationships between the private companies involved in managing and operating the Sellafield site.”

The committee called for the National Audit Office to review the NDA’s approach.