MoD report: Faslane choice seems to be Trident or nuclear safety

The systemic problem with the Ministry of Defence (MoD) is that is regulates itself – an unacceptable situation that must be changed to align with public confidence.

Among many other problems, this cosy relationship with itself breeds suspicion and cynicism – often well founded.

It has become known, thanks to Freedom of Information legislation, that an internal committee of the MoD, the Defence Environment and Safety Board, produced a report last year expressing concern on ‘the pressure that resource constraints are placing on safety’.

This relates to problems with decommissioning redundant nuclear submarines (based at Rosyth in Fife) and with leaking nuclear waste facilities at Faslane in Argyll, now the UK’s national submarine base.

We have reported before that safety standards at Faslane are so insecure that the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency has said publicly that, if it had the authority to do so, it would shut Faslane down until the situation was corrected.

The 2009 report from the Defence Environment and Safety Board pins the blame for the situation on inadequate funding and staff shortages – and we have also reported before on critical staffing problems at Faslane.

The MoD, management, environmental and public safety

What the report does not consider is the single issue of management within the MoD – yet the Ministry’s procurement and contract management procedures have been documented and targeted in official reports as being inefficient and significantly wasteful.

Another element of management is the application of wider responsibilities in the allocation of funding in internal budgets. Safety – environmental and public, has never been a priority for the MoD, hence the situation at RAF Machrihanish, which it has now put on the market for £1.

The reason for the apparent bargain basement asking price is that, during its tenure and use of the base, the MoD  failed to observe adequate environmental safety procedures in matters of serious pollution, including potential radioactive pollution. This leaves the site with a notional liability of £20 million to clean it. This figure may prove short of what will be necessary, given that the MoD had not screened the site for radioactive pollution before putting it on the open market – and showing prospective buyers around it.

In addition to the lack of care for environmental and public safety in a self-regulated government ministry, this conduct shows an utter disregard for asset management, leaving the public purse unable to achieve a return on its investment in the site and liable also to carry the costs of such dereliction.

Apply the same flaws in culture, management, responsibility and financial controls to the MoD’s wider operations and it it not difficult to see how the mess that is the elderly and unreliable nuclear waste facility at Faslane has come into being.

It is equally easy to see how there never was the forward thinking and planning on procedures for the disposal of redundant nuclear submarines, still possessed of embedded contaminants once their reactors have been removed.

It is arguable that competent management, intelligent procurement and effective contract management would have produced a better resourced defence service and would have avoided the serious environmental and public safety problems now facing the country – without any change to the budgets allocated to the MoD over the years.

Because Scotland is the MoD’s playground, conveniently far from home base, it is here that the consequences of this arguably criminal culpability will be – are – felt.

The Defence Environment and Safety Board’s report conveniently said that there was no immediate concern, but cited ‘a risk that it will become increasingly difficult to maintain that the defence nuclear programmes are being managed with due regard for the protection of the workforce, the public and the environment’.

The timeline

SEPA  has identified 2014 as the year that the leaking nuclear waste facility at Faslane will become ‘unsafe’ and will require to be replaced before then.

It ks now known, thanks to a parliamentary answer acquired by Caroline Lucas, the newly elected first Green MP in the UK, that MoD planning does not envisage a replacement facility in operation before the late 2010s.

The MoD is of course simply working with its internal regulators to come up with a formula which will allow it to continue to use the unsafe Faslane facilities post-2014.

A cynic would ask whether this internal report is useful to the MoD at this time of forthcoming cuts in the budgets of all departments. Is it an agreed ploy, banking on the new government sticking with its declared intention to shelter the £50 billion Trident replacement programme from the cuts and hoping to use the safety threat – which is real enough – to secure more financial concessions?

The key point is that the MoD has been an irresponsible as well as an ineffective husbander of its resources from the exchequer. It has not adequately invested in safety and in the replacement of safety-critical installations.

The imperative

It is well over time for an independent regulator of defence management across the spectrum of its responsibilities. Without this protection there is a significant democratic deficit and, indeed, a dangerous one in fact as well as in concept.