Prax Lindsey Oil Refinery

Carla Denyer Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd July 2025 Commons Chamber

[Michael Shanks]

I will avoid the wider political points in a week when workers are finding out about job losses, because that is obviously devastating for them. I will just say that the Government have published their industrial strategy, and this is the first time the country has had an industrial strategy in a very long time. [Interruption.] Well, let us say a credible industrial strategy, if the right hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Graham Stuart) thinks he had one before. Again, I ask him to present it to me. We are investing in the industries of the future, and delivering thousands of jobs on the Humber and right across the country. We are making sure that investment comes forward in jobs for the future. [Interruption.] The problem with the right hon. Gentleman’s point is that his party opposes that investment. It opposes the very thing that will deliver the jobs of the future, and I am afraid that is simply an untenable position. Either he is for or against investment in jobs; he has to say which it is. The industrial strategy is the way to deliver that.

[Carla Denyer (Bristol Central) (Green)]

The last time we discussed Prax Lindsey, I asked the Minister to support my energy jobs Bill—a plan for the redeployment and retraining of oil and gas workers that is proactive and industry-wide rather than reactive and crisis by crisis, and that would be paid for by the companies. That is what the workers and the unions want, but the Minister said he did not agree with it. He has now said that the Government will fund a training guarantee for these refinery workers and is asking this company’s owners to make voluntary contributions to support workers. That is progress, but will he now turn this into a proactive and industry-wide plan, and please go beyond asking the company nicely to do the right thing and require it?

[Michael Shanks]

I think the hon. Lady slightly misses the point. The company went into insolvency. The workers are therefore entitled only to statutory redundancy. I do not think that that is acceptable, so I have called—not nicely, but directly—for the owners of that company to do the right thing, put their hands in their pockets and fund proper redundancy for those workers. That is separate from a wider piece of work we are doing around the transition. I think she also misses the point about the importance of delivering investment in oil and gas that is also investment in renewables and in carbon capture, utilisation and storage to deliver the jobs that come next, so that there is a transition for those workers. I have said that I do not support her proposal, and I am happy to say that again because it would do neither of those things. It is essential that we support the oil and gas industry in its current form, but recognise that it is in transition. We still have decades of oil and gas to come in this country, but we are already building up the industry that comes next. That needs investment, and it also needs us to build infrastructure, which many people in her party seem to oppose.