King’s Speech

Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist Excerpts

Tuesday 19th May 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to open this debate on behalf of His Majesty’s loyal Opposition. I am delighted that this debate will include the maiden speeches of several noble Lords. I look forward to hearing from my noble friend Lord Blackwater, whose historical understanding and insight into Britain’s constitutional makeup will be an asset to the whole House. The noble Lord, Lord Dixon of Jericho, with his experience at Citizens Advice and in advocating for society’s most vulnerable, brings a public-facing experience to the House from which we shall all benefit. The noble Lord, Lord Hobby, has had an extensive career within the education sector, and I know I speak for the whole House when I say that his expertise will be welcomed and appreciated in this important forthcoming education legislation. Lastly, the noble Baroness, Lady Leaman, brings to the Liberal Democrat Benches a wealth of experience, and I look forward to supporting her campaign to address the scourge upon our society that is violence against women and girls.

I will first briefly touch upon education, beginning with the SEND system. This Session will introduce legislation that recognises the crucial moment we find the system in. Costs are ballooning and councils are flailing, and it is the most vulnerable children who are the worse off for it, yet the impression remains that there will be no additional departmental spending until 2029, when central government will absorb SEND provision. When this occurs, it will account for £4 billion of the £6 billion annual shortfall, and that is before we account for the projected council deficits of £14 billion. I hope that the Government will, in due course, set out a timeline to deal with these costs.

I reflect briefly on the impact of the Government’s policies in the past Session. We began with a new tax on education, advertised as an equaliser, which has served only to funnel more children into a struggling state sector. The number of pupils leaving private schools is now almost four times more than the 3,000 originally estimated due to the Government’s policy. That tax was meant to be one half of a trade-off that helped recruit 6,500 new teachers. That plan has failed: there are in fact 400 fewer teachers now than when they took office.

Under-25 apprenticeship starts are down, gender-questioning guidance has been watered down, parental and school freedoms have been reduced, and the Government have yet to put forward a concrete policy regarding poor-value degrees which shackle graduates with decades of spiralling debt. My noble friend Lord Markham will speak to that latter point, but I can only hope that the Government recognise the damage of these policies in the last Session and will have learned something from them.

Turning to the focus of my contribution—energy— I declare my interest as an independent consultant to Terrestrial Energy, a US nuclear technology company developing generation 4 advanced nuclear technologies. In the light of the still mounting costs of energy, I shall use this opportunity to give an overview of the policies that have brought us to this point and highlight the need to change course in order to prevent this Session’s legislation rendering us entirely energy dependent upon undependable power and unreliable imports.

The Secretary of State is doubling down on his headlong rush towards renewables without properly acknowledging the consequences of this approach. Britain continues to suffer some of the highest wholesale electricity prices in the world. Since the Government were elected on the promise to reduce energy bills by £300, they have risen by £73. Meanwhile, constraint costs reached £1.7 billion in the past financial year, while balancing costs stood at £2.7 billion. By the Secretary of State’s 2030 target, those combined costs are projected to rise to £15 billion.

The blind pursuit of renewables is costing the British economy and the British people. The problem is not renewable energy itself, but rests on the fact that there is currently an absence of perspective and balance in the Government’s strategy. The Secretary of State is committing the country to intermittent power generation without ensuring that sufficient firm power exists to support it. Hoping that the wind will always blow and the sun will always shine cannot and will not deliver a competitive, affordable and secure energy sector. What it will do is leave the British public increasingly dependent upon the whims of the weather, while paying for the privilege.

The Secretary of State does at least quietly acknowledge the need for firm power. We welcome his acceptance of the Fingleton regulatory review and look forward to working constructively with the Government on its implementation in the forthcoming nuclear regulation Bill. Nuclear power should form the future foundation of our national energy system. It remains the only source of low emissions and firm power capable of delivering genuine domestic energy security. However, the Fingleton reforms will have to cut through the layer upon layer of environmental and planning bureaucracy that has paralysed development. We will see whether the Government are really going to take on the many MPs in the parliamentary Labour Party and the Green Party when it comes to accelerating the delivery of new-build nuclear.

Recent nuclear projects have been characterised by soaring costs and ever-extending construction timelines. Environmental impact assessments and planning procedures have too often become more burdensome than the construction of the plants themselves—and that is before we even begin to discuss the procurement of the most cost-effective technology. We welcome the announcement of the Rolls-Royce SMR development at Wylfa, but it is disappointing that building will not commence until 2030. Meanwhile, there is ample room on that site for a gigawatt-scale development as well, to commence development much earlier alongside Rolls-Royce.

All these projects need skills, and there is an acute shortage at all levels, from technical skills—welders, electricians and general engineers—to apprentices both graduate and postgraduate. I was pleased to hear the Minister’s comments on this skills shortage for renewables, but I encourage the Government to consider establishing an SMR fleet technical education centre in North Wales to complement the work of the Bangor University nuclear department at M-SParc. There is also an urgent need for a thermal hydraulics facility and a materials test reactor to put us at the forefront of global research. If we are to build global expertise in this field, we need to start developing this critical infrastructure now, not only to provide technical support and training facilities for the operating fleet here and overseas, but to create high-value clusters around these technologies of the future.

I sincerely hope that the forthcoming legislation will address these shortfalls, but such reforms will inevitably take time to produce results. Given the projected timelines for Hinkley Point C and Sizewell C, nuclear power is unlikely to provide reliable, large-scale firm power before the mid-2030s. In the meantime, we must still rely upon oil and gas as the foundation underpinning intermittent renewable power. The Secretary of State knows this. Last year, he instructed NESO to ensure that 40 gigawatts of backup electricity generation is available by 2030 through new gas-fired power stations to guarantee supply when wind and solar output is low. Yet, while he acknowledges this, the Government have simultaneously pursued policies that make oil and gas less secure and more expensive. Indeed, the flagship policy in the energy independence Bill will be the statutory ban on the licensing of new onshore oil and gas fields in the North Sea.

Gas still accounts for roughly a quarter of our annual energy consumption, half of which is imported. Banning new licences will only increase our reliance on these foreign imports. Increasing reliance on imports makes little environmental sense; in fact, it is positively damaging. The average carbon emissions intensity of North Sea gas production is 24 kilograms of CO₂ per barrel of oil. The Jackdaw field, were the Secretary of State to approve it, would produce just 8.5 kilograms per barrel of oil. That is what the ban on licensing will prevent. And what will replace it? In its place, we will be reliant on imported LNG, which has an average carbon emissions intensity of 85 kilograms per barrel of oil. That is not a sustainable energy policy.

Similarly, banning new licences only makes us less secure. Renewables and firm power are inseparable. Wind and solar provide only as much security as the reliable backup capacity supporting them. By relying on imported LNG, we make ourselves very vulnerable to international instability. The most recent war in the Middle East demonstrates precisely why dependence is so dangerous. What happens when the Ras Laffan is disrupted? What happens when global shipping lanes close? What happens when another international crisis sends imported energy prices surging overnight?

We have already seen, specifically across the Iberian Peninsula, the very real risks associated with instability in energy supply. Blackouts become a real risk and carry with them profound economic and human consequences. We constantly hear that the North Sea is a declining basin, yet for 40 years annual projections have repeatedly underestimated the remaining reserves. Norway was supposedly written off in 2010, yet last year it produced 4.1 million barrels of oil a day compared with the United Kingdom’s 1 million. It drilled 49 exploration wells—us, none. The only thing that separates many of these fields is an arbitrary line across the continental shelf.

With constantly improving technology supplemented by AI, the potential to exploit undiscovered reserves remains substantial. The companies are ready to invest; the expertise exists. All that is lacking is a Government willing to reconsider their own self-defeating policy.

Beyond the environmental incoherence and insecurity inherent in the Government’s policy lies the question of cost. The Minister will no doubt continue to argue that oil and gas prices are set internationally and that increasing domestic production therefore brings little benefit. But this ignores the economic reality. The more Britain develops its own reserves, the less exposed we become to international supply shocks, whether in the Middle East or elsewhere. Greater domestic supply does not insulate us entirely from global markets, but it does improve resilience and it reduces the current exposure to volatility.

Secondly, quite apart from production levels, the Government still exercise enormous influence over energy costs through taxation. The reason why energy bills now sit £73 higher than when the Government took office is not merely international pricing; it is that the Government are accelerating towards net zero while loading additional policy costs and levies on to consumers to fund that transition.

Even if wholesale prices were to halve over the next five years, forecasts suggest that consumers would still face electricity bills 20% higher than they currently stand. It is no wonder that, faced with these burgeoning costs, the Treasury’s own economic modelling predicts that energy-intensive sectors will be forced to cut over 160,000 jobs this year. That loss is a direct result of deindustrialising, high-cost policies and, thus, entirely lies at the Government’s feet.

The economic principle remains straightforward: if you reduce taxation and regulatory burdens, you reduce costs, and the market does the rest. If the Government were serious about lowering bills, they would consider the Conservative proposal to scrap the renewable obligation scheme, which currently guarantees some wind farms prices three times above the market rate for electricity. They would repeal the energy profits levy, stimulating investment and protecting jobs in the north-east of Scotland, and they would remove the carbon taxes which continue to inflate electricity costs for households and businesses alike.

Jobs are declining and bills are rising. Far from increasing our energy security, the Government’s current approach risks making Britain more vulnerable to blackouts and more dependent upon unstable imports.

True energy independence requires reliable, firm power on which the wider system can safely operate. In the long term, I hope sincerely that nuclear energy will fulfil that role, but, until the necessary reforms are enacted and new nuclear capacity is operational, we face a straightforward choice: imported oil and gas, or domestically produced oil and gas. The latter is environmentally preferable, supports British jobs, generates revenue for public services, reduces exposure to international instability, and helps moderate costs for consumers. The Government remain trapped within a dogma that serves no one except the most rigid net-zero ideologues. The forthcoming legislation gives Ministers an opportunity to rethink that approach. They should seize that opportunity, reduce the tax burden, restore investment confidence and allow domestic production to proceed. If they do that, Britain may yet achieve genuine energy independence.