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Sir Keir Starmer will on Thursday announce changes to the planning system designed to speed up the delivery of new nuclear power stations in the UK.
The British prime minister will claim that the planning reforms will “clear a path” for the introduction of small modular reactors, which are faster to build than existing larger reactors.
The shake-up will involve the scrapping of a list of eight favoured sites for larger nuclear schemes, giving developers more flexibility in where they can build.
Ministers will remove the expiry date on nuclear planning rules so projects no longer get “timed out”.
They will also announce plans to set up a new Nuclear Regulatory Taskforce to oversee improvements to regulations to help more companies build nuclear projects in the UK.
“This country hasn’t built a nuclear power station in decades, we’ve been let down and left behind,” Starmer will say.
“I’m putting an end to it, changing the rules to back the builders of this nation.”
Only one new nuclear power station, Hinkley Point C in Somerset, is currently being built in the UK, developed by EDF of France. But it is delayed by years and over budget by billions of pounds.
The project is due to start generating in 2029 at the earliest, and cost up to £46bn. That compares with initial forecasts from 2016 that it would start at the end of 2025 and cost £18bn.
Meanwhile plans by EDF and the British government to build a second project in Suffolk at Sizewell are also behind schedule as they try to persuade institutional investors to commit billions of pounds of private funding.
The government has so far equivocated over whether or not they want a third project to be built at Wylfa in Anglesey, despite the last Tory government purchasing the site from Japanese developer Hitachi early last year.
Ministers are already overseeing a competition for private companies to win state support to develop small modular reactors in the UK, and they will now be included in the planning rules for the first time.
In spite of the planning overhaul, ministers will insist that they will uphold Britain’s nuclear safety standards.
In September the government picked four companies to enter negotiations for taxpayer support for their technology: Rolls-Royce, the FTSE 100 British engineer, alongside US-owned rivals Holtec Britain and GE Hitachi, and Canadian-owned Westinghouse Electric.
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