Energy Prices: Energy-intensive Industries

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Thursday 1st May 2025 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Jones]

I thank my hon. Friend for her championing of her constituency. I am still to visit, and I must do that, because I know she has many exciting places for me to see. Electrifying industry is crucial. The Climate Change Committee has said that that is the route and that 61% of industry will need to be electrified. We need to make sure we do that. We are looking through the spending review process, as I am sure she would expect, at how we can support industries to make that change to electric and how we can help with some of the capital costs, which will lead to lower costs in the longer term. Making that leap can be difficult, and that is what we are looking at through the spending review.

[Sir Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

Why is it better, according to the Government, to import gas from Norway instead of developing our own North sea gas fields?

[Sarah Jones]

The North sea fields are a declining basin. We lost 70,000 jobs under the previous Government. Something like only one in 10 of the licences that have been approved over recent years have actually amounted to anything, because of the difficulties of a declining basin. The impact on prices of a very small amount of the global mix coming from the North sea would be zero. It would not change a penny in the costs we would pay.

Scunthorpe Steelworks

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Monday 7th April 2025 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Jones]

My hon. Friend is right, and we will do that. The offer that was put to British Steel and which was refused included conditions to do exactly that, as well as including a number of other things around jobs, as we would expect. It is very important that any deal using British taxpayers’ money is done in a way that we know is within the law and is a good use of taxpayers’ money. I am very mindful of that, and I am constantly mindful of the insecurity that people who work at British Steel will feel, as well as the need for all of us to try to work as hard as we can to ensure that we get a good outcome for those people.

[Sir Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

I thank the hon. Lady for keeping an open mind about what to do to save the remnants of our steel industry. Does she not agree that it is vital that we maintain a strategic capability to make steel? Is it not unconscionable that we are building British warships with imported steel? I recognise that the situation represents the cumulative failings of Governments over many decades, but it is now time utterly to change our policy. That includes the energy policy, which has prioritised things other than price in relation to our energy-intensive industries. I am glad to hear that the Government have some answer to that, but to build up a strategic capability for wartime, which is what we now need to tool up for in this country, we need a wholesale change in energy policy. I hope that she will look for common cause between the two Front-Bench teams, because this should be done on a consensus basis. We do not need to tear chunks out of one another for the mistakes we have all made in the past.

[Sarah Jones]

I agree with the hon. Member’s premise that we need to ensure that we have steel production in the UK, although there is some nuance around some of this. High-quality steel is being made, as we speak, for defence purposes by electric arc furnaces. That is perfectly possible; we melt scrap and add about 20% of primary steel. For some things, depending on what we are making—I know too much about the steel industry now—we do not need any primary steel. We are conducting a review of primary steel, which will be finished shortly. Again, neither Tata nor British Steel is a critical supplier to defence programmes at the moment, but we need that steel production, as I said before, so that we can build whatever we might need in the future. Of course, we will work cross-party; if that is his offer, it is very gladly taken.

North Sea Energy

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Thursday 6th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Jones]

My hon. Friend raises a number of thorny issues relating to ETS, for which I am responsible in the Department. We have been having lots of conversations about how we progress, what the EU does, what we do and what we need to do moving forward. These things are enormously complicated, because pulling a lever here will have an unintended consequence over there, so we are treading carefully, as she would expect.

On the EU partnerships and the new relationships that we have with our partners, they are incredibly important. Today the Prime Minister is with the Taoiseach in Ireland, and we are agreeing an energy partnership. We will be working together in the Celtic sea and the Irish sea to speed up progress on wind turbines by using data and our resources to look at our marine landscape and get to a point where private investors can invest quicker. These things are worth doing, and we will certainly carry on doing them.

[Sir Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

I am in favour of net zero, and this country has achieved a great deal in working towards that, but what planet is the Minister�s Department on? Is she unaware that there is now a national security crisis that demands much higher defence expenditure? Is she aware that the costs of net zero are inflicting untold harm on our industry and have done for some years? It is now time to prioritise economic growth, to target cheap energy instead of net zero, and to generate growth and energy exports in order that we can afford the defence we need. The Department is living on another planet, and the Minister should listen to her Chancellor and her Business Secretary, who are trying to give her this advice.

[Sarah Jones]

I can reassure the hon. Gentleman that I am on planet Earth and that we are well aware of what we are doing. We look at the world around us and see the enormous hike in energy prices, which is linked to our being attached to the global market for oil and gas. The previous Government spent tens of billions of pounds of taxpayers� money in order to protect people against the price hike, and we cannot allow that to happen again. It is absolutely right that we push for cheaper renewable energy, and I remind the hon. Gentleman that I sit in two Departments: the Business Secretary is my boss, and the Energy Secretary is my boss. They both agree with this policy, as does the Chancellor, because it is the right thing to do.

Harland & Wolff

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Thursday 19th December 2024 Commons Chamber

[Jonathan Reynolds]

I thank my hon. Friend for all his support and repeated submissions to the Department. I know how significant this matter is for his community, and he has fulfilled his role as a Member of Parliament in articulating it at every level of Government. I say the same for our hon. Friend the Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Torcuil Crichton)—I visited the Arnish shipyard during the election campaign. It is so important in a job such as mine, and in a Department such as mine, to recognise that we must deliver for the whole United Kingdom. The diverse challenges we face do not detract from the fact that we must deliver for every part of the UK, and that is what we plan to do.

I also thank my hon. Friend for his comments about my officials, who worked very hard to deliver this outcome. I agree with him about the huge potential out there not just for shipbuilding, fabrication and maintenance, but for energy in particular. There is real optimism for the future, but it requires the kinds of foundations that we have put in place through this agreement.

[Sir Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

I add my congratulations to the Government for getting this agreement over the line, but when will we get their defence industrial strategy? So far we have had only a rather lengthy statement of intent. We need to reindustrialise our defence industrial base in order to face modern challenges, and that is particularly essential given the threats we face from the east of Europe at this time. That is very difficult to do in government, because the Treasury hates his stuff, as the Secretary of State may already have discovered, but we will hold him to account on what he described as leading this sector into future growth, and indeed on reindustrialising our steel industrial base and so on, so that we have the self-sufficiency that is vital for the defence of the country.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

I encourage the Secretary of State to be brave in responding to the point about the Treasury.