Picking up the bill

Who is counting the coppers in the race for local nuclear plants? Fraser Sampson and Sue Chadwick look at how the planning system might both assess and mitigate security risks within the current legislative and policy context.

Under the irresistible headline ‘build baby, build’, the British prime minister recently set out how the UK is to begin production of mini nuclear power stations – small modular reactors (SMRs) - which will be much cheaper and quicker to build than traditional nuclear power plants. These nuclear devices may well be needed to power data centres - such as the one recently approved by Northumberland County Council could  consume more power than the towns where they are located. As evidenced by the Centre for Emerging Technology and Security at the Alan Turing Institute, the viability of such local mini nuclear power facilities will depend on the preparedness of local communities and their emergency services to host them safely and securely.  

Security as a consideration in decision making

The government’s announcement on 6 February 2025 may ease planning restrictions but it will increase other responsibilities for police forces, local authorities and their emergency services partners. The decision to grant consent will need to factor in the full impact on security and policing.

The draft National Policy Statement (EN-7) contains geographical and geological site criteria that will clearly be relevant to site selection and the environmental impacts will also require formal assessment, and consultation with relevant bodies and the public will raise a range of relevant concerns. But building – or considering the build of – a new nuclear site raises significant use-specific issues including the need to police not just the site itself but also any protests it provokes, and offsite impacts such as the transport of nuclear materials. There are existing agency agreements between the Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR) and local police forces but the existing coverage of those agreements - as at 1 March 2025 – is incomplete and leaves large areas including the West Midlands, Yorkshire and the Humber and Scotland unaccounted. Moreover, the agreements expressly exclude activities on new nuclear build sites.

Responsibility for site-based threats to existing nuclear plants sits with the Civil Nuclear Constabulary (CNC). a small (circa 1600) body of permanently armed professional police officers directly funded by the operating companies. The model can be expanded to provide armed policing services to existing critical energy sites as response to new threats from protestors and hostile state actors but in a world of cyber-attacks, insider threats, drone swarms and dis/misinformation, these sites will not be fortresses and while the CNC rely on local policing agreements and vice versa neither will be able to absorb the cost of multiple new mini-sites within their current budgets, affordably or at all.

Additionally, every local authority, police force and fire and rescue authority across the UK is required by the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 (the Act) to have plans in place to deal with emergencies. Emergencies are defined in the Act and include events or situations that may cause contamination of land, water or air with biological, chemical or radio-active matter, or disruption or destruction of plant life or animal life. The proposed proliferation of new nuclear plants will clearly increase the need for, and number of such emergency plans.

Each police area has a local resilience forum (LRF) whose overarching job is to support ‘Category 1 responders’ to fulfil their duties in an emergency. These include chief police officers for the geographic forces of the UK and the British Transport Police but not the CNC.  The LRF responsibilities and arrangements for responding to incidents at existing energy sites are based directly on the UK’s energy strategy. Change the strategy and the assumptions underpinning the model no longer apply.

It is unclear from the government’s communications when the local planning and preparedness work required by the Act will begin and what data LRFs can draw upon to make their risk assessments. What is clear is that critical legal duties directly related to the proposed SMRs and other nuclear plants within communities will need to be re-mapped and re-costed.

Paying for the cost of SMR

There are several routes by which local elected policing bodies (mayors and police and crime commissioners) can plan to recover the additional costs; none are specifically suited to the new nuclear landscape.  

One option is to charge the company direct if they can show that the services provided by around a small nuclear site are “different in principle from the law and order services that they provide in any other public place”. The difficulties with this are made clear in the litigation over football grounds, as is the difficulty in fairly calculating the relevant charges and reimbursement. The issue of protecting nuclear sites has not come up in the past because a large nuclear power station on a remote sites is not comparable. Small, semi-urban placements of SMR and data centres within communities are much more likely to raise these concerns given their size and proximity to public space. 

The most obvious comparison is the model for recharging additional policing costs to commercial ventures, as both public facing and also as with critical security needs. The framework for airport security planning is set out in the Aviation Security Act 1982 (as amended by the Policing and Crime Act 2009) and is built on principles of 1) Collaboration and joint accountability; 2) Transparency 3) Flexibility and proportionality  and 4) A bottom-up approach – the security measures, including any policing, should be based on a proper assessment of the risk. Such an approach might be applied to small nuclear sites as it balances commercial realities and security interests (local and national) and apportions the costs.

Using Section 106 to mitigate costs

The Section 106 power allows a local authority to enter into an agreement to (a) restrict the development or use of land; (b) require specific operations or activities to be carried out in, on, under or over land; (c) require land to be used in any specified way; or (d) require a sum or sums to be paid to the authority. The other formal restriction on the use is that the obligation must be (a) necessary to make the development acceptable in planning terms; (b) directly related to the development; and (c) fairly and reasonably related in scale and kind to the development.

There is one case where some of these issues were explored. (Police And Crime Commissioner for Leicestershire, R (On the Application Of) v Hallam Land Management Ltd & Ors [2014] EWHC 1719 (Admin) (27 May 2014)) The case came to court because there was a significant difference of opinion between the Police and the local authority over when a payment should become due. The Police lost their legal arguments but the case still shows that where a development of significance is proposed (in this case more than 4,000 homes, a district centre, supermarket, two schools and an employment site) then policing costs could be secured through a 106 agreement. In this case the sums secured were £536,834 towards police equipment and £1,089,660 towards the acquisition of premises or extension to existing premises. The judge commented that

“It is obvious that a development of the nature described would place additional and increased burdens on local health, education and other services including the police force. …if it sought to shoulder those additional and increased burdens without the necessary equipment (including vehicles and radio transmitters/receivers for emergency communications) and premises, it would plainly not be in the public interest “

It seems clear that while section 106 can be used to pay for some of these costs it will be essential to know from the start what is required to supply ‘proper and efficient policing’ and to build that into negotiations.

Conclusions

Not only are SMR to be a cornerstone of the UK’s strategy for meeting its climate targets, but the PM also wants the country to return to being "one of the world leaders on nuclear”. Bidders for the government contracts to be announced in April have developed partnerships with ancillary industries and the government is actively addressing some of the complex security issues associated with the rollout of SMRs, including supply chain integrity, insider threats, enhanced cyber security, the transportation of nuclear materials, risks posed by AI, and strengthening regulation and inspection.

The impact on local policing, and the additional direct and opportunity costs however remain unaddressed. In addition to the UK and Scottish parliamentary groups that focus on the nuclear sector, other bodies such as the National Preparedness Commission are aware of the potential for operational and financial gaps opening up between site security and the wider policing support that is a prerequisite for community assurance.

Whether they house reactors, have a transport route for nuclear materials or simply need to lend resources to neighbouring authorities managing the impact of their new nuclear facilities, local policing and resilience bodies have a lot of work to do. Calculating the impact – operational, fiscal and societal – of the new nuclear ambition on communities will be complex, providing for its fair distribution even more so.

We are at the start of a new financial year and  police forces will be publishing their Medium-Term Financial Plans which usually have a 5-year time horizon for flagging significant spend changes and challenges. Given the speed with which SMRs are advancing, police chiefs, local authorities and other civil contingency partners should have already started their forecasting and planning for which they will otherwise be “billed baby, billed.”

Fraser Sampson is Professor of Governance and National Security and a member of the Advisory Board of the Centre of Excellence in Terrorism Resilience Intelligence and Organised Crime Research (CENTRIC) at Sheffield Hallam and Dr Sue Chadwick is Strategic and Digital Planning Advisor at Pinsent Masons.