Nuclear union delivers strike warning to Darling

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Nuclear union delivers strike warning to Darling

Trade and Industry Secretary Alistair is meeting representatives from Britain’s biggest nuclear union for crisis talks on a new industry-wide pension scheme.



The Secretary of State will meet Prospect and other key trade union leaders at the BNFL Sellafield reprocessing plant in Cumbria on 14 July. He will be told that failure to resolve nuclear workers’ concerns over their pensions will result in industrial action across the industry.

Mike Graham, national secretary for Prospect, the union for nuclear scientists, engineers and managers, said: "We need clear answers on a range of points within the next week. British Nuclear Fuels is about to be broken up, starting with the sale of Westinghouse at the end of September, followed by the British Nuclear Group itself.

"But our members still do not know who will be covered by the new industry pension scheme; whether government will underwrite their pension rights; and why inferior terms are envisaged for new entrants, which will create a two-tier workforce.

"If the government does not meet our concerns, this is one issue on which industrial action across the board is a certainty."

Scientists and engineers in Prospect fully support the government’s intention to expand nuclear power, as announced in this week’s energy review. But the union has warned that failure to address pensions fears and skills shortages in the industry will derail the strategy before it gets off the ground.

Prospect is insisting the government honour its guarantees, given in 2004, and extend coverage of the new combined nuclear pension scheme to all staff across BNFL except those in reactor sites.

Otherwise Prospect believes that movement of staff across decommissioning companies will suffer, damaging the very flexibility that is meant to be integral to the competitive decommissioning process.

Prospect also wants to ensure that if any clean-up company gets into financial difficulties the government makes clear where their pension liability falls, which presently rests with government; and that an inferior money purchase scheme for new entrants does not result in dumbing down pension provision across the industry.