Oil and Gas: Subsidies and Licensing

Baroness Blake of Leeds Excerpts

Thursday 20th January 2022 Grand Committee

[Baroness Blake of Leeds (Lab)]

I take this opportunity to welcome the noble Lord, Lord Offord, and to wish him all the best with his maiden speech. As a fairly new Member, a maiden speech being made in these circumstances is a first for me. It feels as though he is jumping in at the deep end here, but I look forward to hearing his contribution. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, for securing the debate.

Time is extraordinarily limited. We have so much to discuss in this hour and we are not going to do it, so I do not want to cover too many of the points that have already been made, other than to recognise the seriousness of the examples that the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, and others gave of where things are going seriously wrong in the whole debate about what a subsidy is. The Government might have a technical definition of a subsidy, but there are certainly other means of getting money where it needs to be which distort the market, lower the price and make fossil fuels a much more positive option than they need to be.

In the limited time I have, I want to turn first to the very nature of the debate. Running through all this is transparency. We have so many examples of where undue influence is being brought to bear, and that lack of transparency in so many areas of public life now is becoming a real scandal. This debate fits very well into that area.

The other important area I want to dwell on is the whole issue of the plan that we need to get to net zero. It is all very well talking about where we will be in 2050 and what it will look like, but we need to know what it will look like in 2022 or 2025. The year 2030 is obviously recognised as a critical date, but the plan really is missing. For example, I took part in the debate on the Subsidy Control Bill last night. Where is the plan which says that if we are investing and giving subsidies to any range of interests, the recipients have to demonstrate that they are joining the collective effort towards net zero? I am afraid that the absence of this in government policy and the lack of costing of what it is actually going to take gives me deep cause for concern.

This is against the backdrop of the impact not only on the planet but on individual households and families, the cost of living crisis, the choices that people are making on whether they heat their homes or feed their kids, and the crisis we saw with the break in deliveries from the shortage of drivers. It is that lack of resilience and forward planning, and the whole issue of security that is wrapped around it, that I do not believe the Government are really taking seriously enough.

The other issue is the obligations that we came to from COP 26, and there is another dimension to this. Although the outcomes were lauded as some degree of success, there was watering down from other countries across the world. While we must look at local imperatives, we need also to look at the global imperatives. We have some really important discussions about trade deals coming up. Are we making sure that those countries that failed to sign up fully to COP 26 will receive our full influence?

We can talk about government action, but the Government need to empower those out there who can actually make the difference. I draw your Lordships’ attention, if they have not already seen it, to the letter from the CBI, the TUC and different green groups to the Government suggesting a really practical way forward. Until almost a year ago, I was the leader of the second largest local authority in the country, and there is a lack of powers going down to local level, where the differences can be made by reducing energy consumption and through planning and transport powers—all the things that can really make the difference and reduce our dependency on fossil fuels.

I highlight one of the asks from the letter, which is that the Government establish a cross-government initiative to review all those policy areas. Is the Minister aware that such a cross-government initiative has been set up? Do different departments of government talk to each other and say, “If this department does that, the knock-on impact will be something else”? Those are the collective actions that everyone at local level has been charged with taking for many years, but the Government are falling down.

I urge real focus to go to those areas that can assist this agenda. The clock is well and truly ticking. As the noble Baroness said, the debate about corruption is absolutely at the top of the agenda. What is being done to address what we collectively are doing to enable our dependency on fossil fuels, and all the corruption to which it leads? When will we see a real road map to achieving net zero by, at the very latest, 2050?