THE UNCOMMON READER

Alan Bennett (Profile, £10.99)

Does the low-key, softly softly approach to warding off redundancies ever work in the modern world? That is a question that trade union officials at Harwell are increasingly asking themselves as they watch more and more angry members succumb to stress-related illness.

Their problem is that in the fragmented business of managing the £900m clean-up of the former Atomic Energy Research Establishment, it is not altogether clear who they should be negotiating with on the management side to save the 90 jobs now under threat; such has been the success of successive Governments' divide-and-conquer strategies.

The immediate employer of the 367 workers involved in the clean-up and decommissioning operation at the 750-acre site is the UKAEA (United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority). But the UKAEA is itself contracted to its paymaster, the NDA (Nuclear Decommissioning Authority), which, despite having received more money from central government, has decided to cut spending at Harwell and its sister site at Winfrith, Dorset, putting a total of 200 science and engineering jobs on the line.

Of those jobs, 90 are at Harwell. Now UKAEA is already negotiating an early-release scheme (in UKAEA's words) "to resolve an anticipated surplus of about 50 staff across the two sites", Until December last year, the UKAEA believed it would have £120m to spend in 2007-8 - though this was never formally approved. Then it learned on December 19 that the figure had suddenly been chopped in half to £60m.

Hurried last-minute conflabs with the red-faced middle men at NDA, (acting as a sort of buffer between the Government and the UKAEA), meant that UKAEA finally got £85m, but even union officials are left wondering how the poor old management is expected manage in such circumstances. And to add insult to injury, the budget for 2008-9 is now expected to be £60m - a figure which (again in UKAEA's words) "will slow decommissioning at Harwell and Winfrith and will necessitate further job losses".

Now, just as the NDA's overall budget for the coming three years is being considered at the Government's Comprehensive Spending Review, the Conservative MP for Wantage, Ed Vaizey, has stepped into the fray with an urgent request to meet Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Minister Malcolm Wicks in a bid to halt the job losses.

He told The Oxford Times: "I don't blame the Government here. The error is the NDA's, which has cut budgets at short notice at Harwell and Winfrith. But Government intervention is needed now to save money and jobs in the future."

Peter Simpson, chairman of the UKAEA branch of the trade union Prospect, said: "There are angry people suffering from stress here, who very much want us to ballot for industrial action.

"Obviously we are considering such a course. But part of the problem is that at the same time we are negotiating a complicated and delicate pay deal."

And for its part the NDA reckons it must pay the bulk of its budget on clearing up and making safe the most hazardous of the 20 sites it controls.

NDA spokesman Bill Hamilton said: "The NDA's first priority is to make passively safe the most hazardous facilities on its sites, especially at Sellafield and Dounreay."

However, he added: "A further priority is to spend money to maintain the operation of the NDA's commercial facilities, since these provide considerable revenue that help both to fund the NDA clean-up programme and to offset the costs of that programme to the taxpayer."

And there is the rub, for in his letter to the minister Mr Vaizey floats the notion that the cause of the cuts in funding at Harwell is that the NDA's commercial activities produce less money than expected.

He wrote: "I first became aware of the threat of redundancies at the end of January 2007. I wrote to Norman Harrison, chief operating officer of UKAEA... Mr Harrison told me that UKAEA had received two letters from the NDA.

"These letters... indicated that the cuts in funding had been caused by a serious shortfall in the NDA's commercial income in the current and future financial years, based on income from the Thorp reprocessing plant, the Mox fuel fabrication plant and the Magnox generating stations."

He believes the cuts have been caused by the NDA overestimating its commercial income. He believes it is completely unacceptable for the NDA to propose cuts less than four months before the beginning of a new financial year "The impact of these cuts means that up to 200 highly skilled jobs could be lost, not only to Harwell but to the nuclear industry as a whole," he said.

"The restoration of the Harwell site - ie, its decontamination so that it can be put to commercial use - could be held back by 12 years, significantly delaying the Government's Science and Innovation Campus and impacting hugely on British science. The overall cost of the delay could be £500m, dwarfing the money saved by the proposed imminent budget reductions."

He added: "The decommissioning process, which has so far been exemplary, will be brought into disrepute."

He also feels it will lead to doubts about whether any future Government could manage a decommissioning programme, thus providing further doubt about the effectiveness of a future nuclear power programme.

For the wider Oxfordshire community, the idea that penny-pinching now could delay the transformation of Harwell into a Science and Innovation Campus - a source of future high-tech jobs - is worrying.

Even the Government agrees on that point. Mr Wicks wrote to Witney MP and Tory leader David Cameron that it would be "highly unfortunate for any reduction in funding to impact the progress of the UKAEA decommissioning programme at Harwell and Winfrith".

For Mr Simpson, the lack of clarity is galling. He said: "It has been suggested to Prospect reps on more than one occasion that a "softly softly" approach is more likely to have the desired effect than to take a radical stance and use the media as a negotiating platform.

"It has become clearer as time has gone by that the quiet approach is not likely to save the jobs of UKAEA staff or to help make long-term cash savings to the taxpayer."