Energy Security
Anneliese Dodds Excerpts(3 weeks, 1 day ago)
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Anneliese Dodds (Oxford East) (Lab/Co-op)
I welcome the measures in the King’s Speech on energy security, as on many other issues. The Opposition’s wrong-headed approach would leave us tethered to global markets that we cannot control. They would lock our country out of much-needed jobs and condemn Brits to higher bills. The energy independence and nuclear regulation Bills, in contrast, are further leaps towards the stronger energy security we need.
In my speech, I want to tackle an issue—it was actually touched on by the previous speaker, the right hon. Member for Herne Bay and Sandwich (Sir Roger Gale)—which will increasingly drive the amount of energy our country needs to generate: the development and deployment of artificial intelligence. The Government did not bring forward in this King’s Speech our manifesto commitment to
“ensure the safe development and use of AI models by introducing binding regulation on the handful of companies developing the most powerful AI models”.
Indeed, AI was not mentioned in the speech. The Government have acted decisively on one symptom of the lack of regulation: the widespread production of sexualised images. That, however, followed 3 million such images being generated. Harm was already done, and I underline here the recent comments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham Yardley (Jess Phillips).
The Government have, rightly in my view, launched their sovereign AI fund, supporting innovative start-ups to scale up and generate value here in the UK, including access to compute. I know that many Ministers in the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero have been working hard to ensure that the capacity is there to deliver that additional compute. However, when it comes to the design and use of AI systems and models, we have only the AI Security Institute, a world-first, expert-led organisation, but one that lacks statutory powers and has to ask companies politely to engage. Even the Trump Administration now appear to recognise the need for the evaluation of frontier AI models before release. If we are genuinely serious about our country’s economic security, we must devote as much attention to AI and its astonishingly transformative, productive and disruptive potential as we are rightly devoting to energy security and the delivery of home-grown renewables. That will first require working with the EU on digital regulation, and I will push for that to be reflected in the welcome EU partnership Bill.
In the briefing pack for the King’s Speech, the Government maintain that nearly one third of UK AI start-up leaders are considering relocating overseas due to regulatory complexity and capital constraints. Given that regulatory complexity will often relate to cross-border issues, the prescription is not deregulation but regulatory co-ordination.
Danny Kruger (East Wiltshire) (Reform)
Will the right hon. Member give way?
Anneliese Dodds
In order to keep to time, I will not.
Capital constraints, and relatedly, constraints in compute, are real. We must recognise that while unilateral measures to support sovereign AI are important, their scope is necessarily limited. We must again work with reliable partners that share our values, not least within the EU.
Finally, we must be brave enough to open up the discussion on the fiscal framework for AI. We currently tax labour, the very thing that AI will—in some sectors and in specific ways—displace. We must examine now how we might use the public stake from our sovereign AI investments, or mechanisms such as a token tax or reform to capital gains, as the TUC has suggested, to build up the resources that may be needed. There is potential for significant disruption to the labour market, and we must be more ready for it.
Research out today from King’s College London suggests that 69% of workers and 64% of employers are worried about the economic impact of AI-related job losses. A majority of all groups surveyed predicted that AI’s benefits will mainly go to wealthy investors or companies, not workers or society. A majority of all groups also backed Government intervention. If we are to secure the fastest adoption of AI in the G7, as is the Government’s intention, we must deal with those issues too. Our young people will not forgive us if we fail to engage with this generational challenge.
Oil and Gas
Anneliese Dodds Excerpts(2 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Anneliese Dodds (Oxford East) (Lab/Co-op)
I will start by thanking the North sea oil workers now and in the past. I recently read the book “Black Eden” by Richard T. Kelly—perhaps others have read it, too. On just about every single page, I was reminded of people I know, or people I knew in my childhood in Aberdeenshire—the incredible innovators, the divers who risked their lives every single time they entered the water, and the workers on the rigs spending weeks away from their families. They deserve our thanks and recognition. What they do not deserve is histrionics, slogans rather than a plan and to not be taken seriously. They have not been taken seriously by the Opposition motion today.
The Opposition motion misrepresents the industry that North sea oil workers are in. It fails to set out a path towards sustainable employment for them and for their kids and grandkids—and, by the way, they do care about their children’s employment in Aberdeen. It also ignores the need to get energy bills down, let alone to tackle the climate emergency. The claims made in the motion that these measures would somehow boost employment and reduce bills are farcical.
Claire Coutinho
Since I went to Aberdeen recently to talk to workers and to grandparents and their children, I would like to ask the right hon. Lady, when was the last time she spoke to workers in Aberdeen?
Anneliese Dodds
Well, I can answer that very quickly, because many of them are in my family and among my friends. The shadow Secretary of State said before that she had visited Aberdeen. I found it extraordinary that when the Liberal Democrat spokesperson, the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Pippa Heylings), mentioned the fact that jobs in oil and gas extraction fell by a third between 2014 and 2023, she would not even acknowledge it—she looked stunned. Well, I can tell her that for workers in that area, those job losses were painful. Every bust has been painful, and she should acknowledge that, rather than pretending it did not even happen. People who are working in that industry deserve a proper strategy for their future, not magical thinking and empty sloganeering.
Anneliese Dodds
I will make some progress, then I would be happy to take the right hon. Gentleman’s intervention.
The long-term trend very clearly is for the growth of low-carbon offshore industries. That has not been the case for North sea oil and gas. Research at Robert Gordon University—just to let the shadow Secretary of State know, that is based in Aberdeen, the city that she visited—has shown that nine in 10 of the UK workforce in oil and gas have medium to high skills transferability and are well positioned to work in the adjacent energy sector. Hydrogen, carbon capture, wind and other renewables are critical to sustaining high-skilled jobs in both engineering and manufacturing. We urgently need to boost those technologies with an active labour market strategy. That is what will secure the future of those high-technology, safety-critical jobs.
Graham Stuart
I am grateful to the right hon. Lady, who is being very generous in giving way. She is nearly making the right point, which is that the people who work in oil and gas need the transition. This Government are pulling the rug from under them. Hydrogen, carbon capture, floating offshore wind and other developing technologies—even tidal—are not growing quickly enough and fast enough to give those people jobs. That is the point. The Government are destroying the very engineering capability we need for the transition and putting up emissions while doing so, by having imports instead of domestic production. It is mad.
Anneliese Dodds
I could not disagree more with the right hon. Gentleman. I have a lot of respect for him, but surely he will have seen the figures on the relative growth of the renewables industry in the UK compared with other industries. Those people see that there is now a long-term plan for that industry from this Government. That was not the case before—there was not that certainty there before. I want to see renewed, deepened engagement, particularly with the workforce and the trade unions representing them, and a move towards the active labour market strategy that we need, but to suggest that we are not on the right trajectory now after so many years of neglect is, frankly, laughable.
I want to end on this point. Even setting aside the lengthy lead-in time for new drilling, expanding it would not shield our country from oil and gas price shocks, because the price is set internationally. The shadow Secretary of State did not even acknowledge that. She spoke about imports, but she did not talk about prices, because she knows the reality. We need to stop distant conflicts impacting household bills in the UK. We need to get bills down, not keep them artificially high. We need cheap green tech and scaled-up clean power. We do not need the kind of cheap political posturing represented by the Opposition motion.