The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority

Last Updated: 02 December 2011

In carrying out its functions under the Energy Act (2004), the NDA must have particular regard to safeguarding the environment, protect people from risks to their health and safety, and preserve nuclear security. Day-to-day responsibility for health, safety, security and protection of the environment and for compliance with appropriate regulations, lies with our contractors, the individual Site Licence Companies (SLCs). Our role is primarily to provide safety leadership by clearly articulating our mission to restore the environment, our expectations for high safety standards, monitoring our contractors' safety performance and facilitation and encouragement of good practice across our estate. Hence NDA's approach to HSSSEQ is captured as a set of principles that have had stakeholder input and review.

 Health, Safety, Security, Safeguards, Environment and Quality (HSSSEQ) Strategic Underpinning Principles April 2010 (500Kb)

Objective

To encourage high standards in health, safety, security, safeguards, environmental performance and quality, while delivering the NDA's mission of environmental restoration by the remediation of hazards and the reduction of risks.

Scope and Boundaries

The Strategy Management System identifies HSSSEQ as a 'critical enabler' to the development and delivery of NDA's overall strategy. As a 'critical enabler', NDA requires its HSSSEQ principles to be reflected in the strategies, programmes, and plans developed not only by the NDA but also by its subsidiaries and SLCs.

These principles are set at high level to provide overall direction, recognising that in some cases this may result in a need to influence both Government Policy and regulatory strategies. However they neither replace nor remove the responsibility of SLCs to comply with their legal obligations arising from nuclear site licences, and environmental permits. 

Interfaces

These 'critical enabling' principles underpin the development and delivery of NDA's strategy across its estate, and hence are expected to be reflected by individual strategy owners and the implementers of such strategies.

Credible Options

Given the over arching legal requirements and NDA's commitment to encouraging high standards of HSSSEQ, the credible option is the application of these principles consistently across the NDA estate.  Hence their purpose is to clarify NDA's perspective of HSSSEQ, and to set out NDA's commitment to engage with and influence Government Policy and Regulatory Strategy in support of the delivery of NDA's wider mission.

Current Position

Operational responsibility for health, safety, security, safeguards and protection of the environment and for compliance with appropriate regulations lies with our contractors, the individual SLCs. Our role is to provide leadership by insisting on high standards and monitoring our contractors' performance.

We have developed a set of strategic enabling principles covering our expectations for HSSSEQ. The 'critical enabler' principles have been extensively discussed with Regulators, SLCs, and the wider nuclear sector. The principles developed represent an optimised balance between the delivery of high standards, the aspirations of the NDA and its stakeholders, and value to the taxpayer.

Our strategy is mature but we continually review it with stakeholders, especially regulators. In summary, our approach to the delivery of our HSSSEQ strategy will be by:

• developing our overall strategy
• selecting our PBOs
• defining our expectations for SLC performance
• incentivising long term improvements in HSSEQ management arrangements
• monitoring SLC performance and adjusting fee payments accordingly
• working with SLCs and regulators to achieve proportionate regulation in achieving our mission.