Industry and Exports (Financial Assistance) Bill

Baroness Alexander of Cleveden Excerpts

2nd reading & 3rd reading & Order of Commitment discharged
Thursday 12th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Alexander of Cleveden (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to speak on a three-clause Bill. I commend the Government on their brevity. It is a welcome change this week after the 220 clauses of the Crime and Policing Bill, the 178 clauses of the Tobacco and Vapes Bill and the 1,200 amendments that we will be wrestling with again tomorrow in the assisted dying Bill.

As every noble Lord who has spoken so far has noted, the Bill does not change policy, only financial thresholds. That narrow focus accounts for the broad cross-party consensus. More fundamentally, industrial assistance and trade policy remain a rarity in modern politics. They are matters of broad common ground. Like the noble Lord, Lord Empey, I served as a Trade Minister, for Labour in Holyrood, and then as a trade envoy for a different Government—proof that trade and industry can be common ground, at least in domestic politics. Of course, updating the financial thresholds after 16 years is eminently sensible, likewise using secondary legislation to raise the limits in the future.

I want to use my time to make one substantive comment on each theme. First, on the industrial assistance aspect, my own interest here dates to 1997, when I was working on the devolution settlement in the early days of the Blair Government. I can reliably report to the House that in all those years of campaigning for a Scottish Parliament, the minutiae of industrial aid rules had not caught the attention of even the most assiduous policy wonk, so in government it proved quite tricky. How do you devolve powers over trade and industry without undermining the financial level playing field within the UK? Today, rightly, financial selective assistance and export finance remain reserved matters but in an elegant constitutional arrangement, Scottish Ministers can prepare cases for financial assistance of up to £10 million for a single project, subject to a Commons resolution.

Last night, after we finished, I took a look at the most recent Industrial Development Act annual report, laid before Parliament in July, on Section 8 spending, which is what we are discussing today. It reported that neither the Scottish Government nor the Welsh Government had any Section 8 spending, compared with £2.9 billion of live schemes in England. There are complexities about the coverage of Section 7 and Section 8 areas and I appreciate, given that I am the last speaker in the debate today—at least from the Back Benches—that the Minister will not have had time to digest material from his officials on this matter. However, I would be grateful if he could write to me about the factors that he believes are influencing the uptake of Section 7 and Section 8 spending in the devolved Governments. These complex distributional issues should not detract from the value of industrial assistance, which is supporting thousands of jobs across the UK and leveraging in billions of pounds of private capital.

I therefore turn to export finance. The Government can take pride that their export finance portfolio is larger than at any point in history. At 70% current utilisation and with a strong pipeline of commercial opportunities, it is right to provide ongoing certainty to British businesses around future export support. Here, I echo the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Pitkeathley, and others: on export finance, the devil is in the operational detail of the specific working capital and insurance schemes, and the ease of access to them by companies. I place on record that the Minister spent his entire pre-parliamentary life in the private sector, so he is well placed to ensure that bureaucratic creep does not diminish the effectiveness of support for exports—particularly, as others have recognised, for small and medium-sized enterprises. They are, in fairness, 88% of the beneficiaries of UK export finance, but we have to watch the opportunity costs for small firms caught in long, complex, unsuccessful applications that are deemed too high risk.

I come to my final substantive point. I ask the Minister to comment on the success of UK Export Finance in delivering its underlying mandate, which is to support exports at no net extra cost to the taxpayer over time. Therefore, echoing the question from the noble Lord, Lord Sharpe, I invite the Government to comment on their attitude to risk. Are the higher thresholds that we are being asked to approve a choice to adopt a higher risk appetite with respect to the likely return, or are they simply an attempt to anticipate greater demand in the pipeline and in the future? I welcome any guidance on that point.

In conclusion, I welcome the steps announced by the Government this week to crack down on sanctions-busting. This is a point that the Opposition raised in the other place. The Minister has responded this week with a new licensing scheme where there are any high-risk exports that could be used in sanctions-busting situations. Finally, I commend the focus of UK Export Finance in helping British business to be part of supporting the reconstruction in Ukraine. On that basis, I support the Bill and look forward to the Minister’s response.

ExxonMobil: Mossmorran

Baroness Alexander of Cleveden Excerpts

Monday 24th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lloyd of Effra (Lab)]

We are co-ordinating the scale-up of industries that will shape the future of the North Sea, going as far as wider offshore wind, carbon capture and storage and hydrogen. The Government have committed over £9.4 billion in investment to carbon capture, with a total of £22 billion for hydrogen and carbon capture this Parliament. That is a huge, positive step for our economy and for jobs in the North Sea.

Furthermore, the clean energy jobs plan—which has £20 million of funding from the UK and Scottish Governments—will support oil and gas workers in training to access the opportunities in clean energy to create the jobs of the future. Looking at the last few years, there was a 75% reduction in oil and gas production between 1999 and 2024. So this is a very long-term trend in the availability of carbon products from the North Sea, not something that has happened just in recent times.

[Baroness Alexander of Cleveden (Lab)]

My Lords, I refer noble Lords to my registered interests. I welcome the Minister’s statement, in response to the noble Lord, Lord Fox, about the establishment of a task force, which has happened since the Statement was made in the other place. I declare an interest as a former Industry Minister in Scotland, where there has been experience over the last 25 years of how to respond to closures such as these. Those sorts of task forces, to work well, need to be quickly established, as we have seen in this case. However, they also need to focus as broadly as possible, including on opportunities for outplacement, retraining, preferential access to local colleges, dedicated pathways into other employment opportunities and on the future of the site itself, involving remediation and the possible identification of other investors who would be interested, if not in plastics production, then in associated activity.

For all these reasons, can the Minister confirm the breadth of the scope of the task force? Can she also confirm that His Majesty’s Government will work very closely with the Scottish Government, which have their own PACE initiative—the partnership for continuing employment—in cases such as these?

[Baroness Lloyd of Effra (Lab)]

My noble friend makes some very important points about the importance of swift and collaborative action, partnership with all those who can assist in supporting the workers in this situation and looking at their individual needs and the economic opportunities that are available today, and training them for the future.

She is right that the task force has been established, and my right honourable friend Douglas Alexander met with Fife Council and the Scottish Government earlier today. The Government are committed to working with them to deliver a local response and, more broadly, to mitigate the impact on workers. That will include working with the partnership action for continuing employment and looking to support the 50 employees who are going to be retained to support the decommissioning until 2028, as well as the 50 who are being offered relocation and training packages to Exxon’s other assets.

My noble friend makes a very good point about looking broadly and making sure that this is in the context of the local economy.