Clean Energy Transition Guidance

Lord Grantchester Excerpts

Tuesday 8th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

The noble Baroness will understand that the CDC has an independent board, but its policy is fully aligned with the Government’s by excluding fossil fuel investments, except under certain tightly limited circumstances. As such, the policy excludes future investment in the vast majority of fossil fuel subsectors, including coal, oil and upstream gas exploration and production. It has invested over $1 billion of climate finance in the past three years and set a target for 30% of all new commitments, in 2021, to be on climate finance.

[Lord Grantchester (Lab)]

The Government’s guidance states:

“Support for unabated gas fired power generation is conditional on: a country having a credible NDC”—


nationally determined contribution—

“and long-term decarbonisation pathway to net zero by 2050 in line with the Paris Agreement”.

There are other conditions. How do the UK Government reach this determination? Is this made known to companies and published before any applications for export finance support are made? Will the Government have a traffic light system for this?

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

As I said, the guidance document was very tightly worded and there is a set of tightly defined criteria that must be met before any support for unabated gas power is approved. This judgment as to whether the criteria are met will be based on all available evidence sought from the relevant project sponsor, the financing institution, the partner Government and the advice of experts in the relevant department or departments. Based on this evidence, and in borderline cases with the approval of relevant Ministers, proposals will be judged either to meet the tightly defined criteria and approved or not. I am afraid I have no knowledge of the intention to introduce a traffic light system.