Sizewell - value assessment

Campaigners accuse government of ‘lack of transparency’ over Sizewell C value. A campaign group has urged the NAO to review the UK government’s spending assessment for the nuclear power project in Suffolk. A campaign group has written to the National Audit Office (NAO) calling for a review of the government’s value assessment for the controversial Sizewell C nuclear power station. Campaign group Together Against Sizewell C (TASC) has written to the audit office calling for a review of the government’s value-for-money assessment, which underpinned £8bn of public spending on the nuclear power station. It claims there has been a lack of transparency over the government’s audit of spending on the nuclear project, which unlocked billions of pounds of subsidies before a final investment decision (FID) has been made. “It is worth recalling that when EDF first proposed Sizewell C, they budgeted the costs to get to FID to be £458 million,” the campaign group said in its latest letter to the NAO. “With a £2.5 billion spend by the previous Tory government, £5.5 billion authorised by this government under the Devex Scheme and an estimated £700 million invested by EDF, the cost of getting to FID is approximately 1,900% of the original budget.” TASC called the underbudgeting by French energy supplier EDF “staggering”. According to its registration document in 2020, EDF had “planned to pre-finance the development up to its share of an initial budget of £458 million”. “There has been no explanation as to why these costs are so astronomically higher than the original estimate, how such increases have been justified and how much more public funding is likely to be assigned to what many observers are calling ‘Labour’s HS2’,” it said in the letter.