UK Oil and Gas Industry

Debate between Kirsty Blackman and Alex Cunningham

Thursday 19th April 2018 Westminster Hall

[Kirsty Blackman (Aberdeen North) (SNP)]

It is a delight to have the opportunity to speak in this debate. It is always good to have a debate focused on oil and gas; we have not had enough of them recently. I am also delighted to be in Westminster Hall—I feel like I have not been here for some time—and I am thankful for the air conditioning, which is incredibly useful today.

I will not spend an awful lot of time disagreeing with my constituency neighbour, the hon. Member for Gordon (Colin Clark), because I agree with most of what he said, but I will start with a slight disagreement about helicopters. I agree with what the hon. Member for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham) said about people’s nervousness. We and the companies involved ask people to undertake dangerous helicopter journeys just to go to work. In conversations with Airbus and other organisations involved with the helicopters, I have said, “It is not me you have to convince that the aircraft are safe; it is the people who are asked to fly on them.” To do that, those organisations need to have as many conversations and answer as many questions as possible. That is the only way they will possibly regain the confidence of people in the industry.

[Alex Cunningham]

On that basis, does the hon. Lady support my call for a public inquiry so that we have full transparency about exactly what happened and what is being done to rebuild confidence in particular models, which are still yet to come back into service?

[Kirsty Blackman]

I appreciate the hon. Gentleman’s question. To be perfectly honest, I am not clear that an inquiry is widely called for; an awful lot of information has been published. If lots of individuals from my constituency and from the industry more widely asked me for such an inquiry, I absolutely would look at that. I am not saying no, but that is not something that people generally have asked me for. They have looked at the evidence that has been published so far and taken decisions on that basis.

I will talk first about the oil and gas industry in general, although obviously I will speak particularly from the perspective of the north-east of Scotland, as Members would expect of an Aberdonian. I will talk about where we have come from, where we are and where we will go with the industry, and about how to get to those places. As I said, some of my asks are not dissimilar to those of the hon. Member for Gordon.

We were in a situation where the industry was overspending significantly. When it was told that it could have a widget today for £400 or tomorrow for £4, it chose to have it today for £400. There was an awful lot of fat in the system. Now the industry is able to make more profit at $60 a barrel than it was at $120 a barrel, just because it has slimmed down a lot of those costs. One of the most important things for us to do is to capture that—to ensure that, whatever we do, we do not lose the gains we have made.

We have undoubtedly been through an incredibly painful period. We have had an awful lot of pain and suffering in the north-east of Scotland. I get that. A number of people have found alternative jobs—they have been supported in that by various organisations; the Scottish Government have put a lot of effort into that—but some have not. We do not want to forget that there are people who still have not got through the pain of having to go through a redundancy process. We need to remember that and ensure that, whatever we do, we do not set ourselves up for another fall like the one we had. That is really important.

We had a very competitive system, in which companies were unable to work together or point in the same direction. Local authorities were not particularly good at that, either. What really brought local authorities, the business society and civic society in all of Aberdeen city, Aberdeenshire and the north-east of Scotland together was the bidding process for the city deal. Working together on that was really important. I am pleased that we got a city deal. Anyone who has read anything I have said about the deal will know that I was unhappy about how low level it was—I would have liked significantly more money for my city, and I am not sure that many people in the north-east of Scotland would disagree—but the process was very beneficial, as was the direction that the city and the shire took. I hope that we keep hold of that.