Russian Gas

Lord Teverson Excerpts

Thursday 8th May 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Verma]

My Lords, my noble friend is right in all those points. Of course, the key to ensuring less dependency on a particular source is having greater diversity. That is what we are trying to do. We are encouraging member states to promote and explore other options for other sources. As my noble friend said, there are a number of areas we are sourcing from, which makes us less dependent on imports from other countries. We are having this discussion and my noble friend was right in saying that the Secretary of State was very firm in putting forward his points of view.

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, I very much welcome the Secretary of State’s strong statements to energy Ministers at the Rome G7. However, we had a lot of similar statements in the 2008-09 Ukraine gas crisis and very little has been done since then. Why does my noble friend think that we will be more successful in making sure that this major change in European gas supply happens this time?

[Baroness Verma]

My Lords, my noble friend is absolutely right. It is about concentrating our minds. This issue has focused everybody’s minds. He is right that we need to do much more to press our partners. The G7 energy Ministers are meeting again in June to commit to immediate actions. Among those will be emergency plans for the winter of this year and we will be looking at how we can offer assistance to those countries that want to have greater dependency on their own natural sources.