Gazprom Energy

Baroness Walmsley Excerpts

Thursday 24th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

The noble Lord makes an important point. Gazprom Energy supplies about 20% of the UK business market, as he correctly observes, including many schools and hospitals, and so on. It would not be right for the Government to interfere in individual contractual decisions but for those that choose to break their contracts, the Crown Commercial Service stands by to support them in securing their next energy contract.

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, is the Minister aware of a recent paper by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit which shows that our dependence on Russian gas could be quickly and permanently eliminated, not by more North Sea gas, which is expensive, not immediate, low impact and temporary, but by reducing gas demand by returning to our programme of insulating homes, installing heat pumps and expanding renewables? Of course, that would also reduce household bills, create jobs and provide us with energy security.

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

The noble Baroness posits those as two alternatives but in fact we are doing both. We will still need gas supplies during the transition, but we are spending some £6.6 billion over this Parliament on home insulation measures, and we have one of the largest programmes of renewables in the western world and one of the largest offshore wind sectors in the world. We are proposing to expand that to approximately 40 gigawatts by the end of this decade. None of this can happen quickly—it is a transition—but we will still need gas during that transition. My point is that it is better to get the gas that we will need during the transition from UK sources rather than relying on unstable parts of the world.