Floating Offshore Wind Projects

Cherilyn Mackrory Excerpts

Tuesday 18th October 2022 Westminster Hall

[Cherilyn Mackrory (Truro and Falmouth) (Con)]

I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Stephen Crabb) for securing this important debate, which places a spotlight on an exciting emerging sector for my constituency of Truro and Falmouth in Cornwall and the south-west as a whole. Cornwall is already at the heart of the green revolution. We are mining and drawing out lithium and are drilling for deep geothermal, which is why I have worked on the all-party parliamentary group for the Celtic sea to promote floating offshore wind projects off our Cornish shores.

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for North Devon (Selaine Saxby), who set up the all-party group. She works tirelessly on this issue and is brilliant at bringing all the different threads together. When we became MPs in 2019, I was lobbied by only one company. Not a year later we had a reception on the Terrace where there were between 50 and 100 companies present, and that number continues to grow. It is a growing sector and one that should benefit all parts of the United Kingdom.

I was delighted to welcome the Defence Secretary, the COP26 President and the Business Secretary to Falmouth to see first hand how Cornwall can help deliver this vision. It is right that the Government have a target to raise the UK’s floating offshore wind capacity from one gigawatt to five by 2030. Floating offshore wind in the Celtic sea will be crucial to reaching that target, with the Crown Estate recently announcing that the leasing round for the region will be launched in mid-2023. That could deliver 4 GW of installed UK floating offshore wind capacity by 2035, supporting up to 3,200 jobs, with the potential of £682 million spend in the local supply chain by 2030.

A key part of the strategy is the TwinHub project, which is the first floating offshore wind project in the Celtic sea, based off the Cornish north coast. TwinHub has developed a new design that places two turbines on one platform, which gets twice the bang for its buck. This offshore wind farm will produce more energy while taking up comparatively less space and, by 2025, will be generating enough electricity to power 45,000 homes. The wider opportunities that floating offshore wind and the Celtic sea present will create over 1,500 skilled jobs, with £900 million headed for the regional economy by 2030 based on current projections.

As my right hon. Friend the Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire alluded to, the grid support maintenance will require cohesive collaboration between the public and private sectors, but we need the big port upgrades to build these floating offshore wind farms. Falmouth is one of the deepest ports in the world and is ideally positioned to become an integration port where turbines will be put together before being towed out to sea. Falmouth is also best placed for the maintenance of components and used vessels. The south-west supply chains will then be built up and will develop a strong network of experienced project developers and a wealth of skills and experience. These are all high-quality careers for the future of Cornish children in my schools. Falmouth should therefore receive its first share of the £160 million floating offshore wind manufacturing investment scheme to unlock wider private sector investment in the Celtic sea.

North sea ports already have the necessary infrastructure to be competitive due to their historical industry. If Celtic sea ports such as Falmouth are not upgraded, we risk utilising just one sea rather than the two. I urge the Government to look at further streamlining planning regulations to speed up the upgrades. One thing that the Celtic sea APPG has done perfectly is to encourage a port strategy. If I have one plea for the Minister, it is to try to do that, so that we know which ports will be best placed to do which parts and we can turbocharge development to ensure we get it right. Incidentally, Cornwall Council has submitted its application for an investment zone, which will include Falmouth port. I pay tribute to the council and our portfolio holder for economic growth, Louis Gardner, who has turbocharged efforts since coming into post recently to ensure we get this right for Cornwall.

Cornwall has a rich and proud maritime industrial history. I believe the Government can build on that by supporting investment in the port of Falmouth and the development of TwinHub, as well as ensuring high-skilled, well-paid careers for Cornish young people. If we can do that, Cornwall can continue to be at the heart of the green revolution. I urge the Government to listen to everything that is being said today.

Penrose Review: UK Competition and Consumer Policy

Cherilyn Mackrory Excerpts

Tuesday 8th March 2022 Westminster Hall

[John Penrose (Weston-super-Mare) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered UK competition and consumer policy in response to the Penrose review.

It is good to have you looking after us, Mr Efford, to ensure that we do not misbehave during the course of the debate. It is good to see you in the Chair.

Just over a year ago, I was commissioned to write a report by the Treasury and the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. It came out almost exactly a year ago and it is called, “Power To The People”. It is about competition policy and was produced at the request of the Government. A year after publication, I thought it was reasonably sensible to think that we might want to have a look at what has happened as a result of my recommendations—which ones have happened and which ones have not—hoping perhaps to goad, tease or otherwise persuade my hon. Friend the Minister to be as indiscreet as he possibly can be about what might happen in future, to fill in any gaps, and discuss the recommendations that have not yet taken place.

I will summarise briefly progress on implementing some of the recommendations in the report in the intervening year and I will focus fairly straightforwardly on the things that have not happened yet, so that the Minister has a text from which to work—if I may put it that way—and on the gaps that remain. To be fair, although I do not want to overclaim on this, it is true to say that there has been a reasonable amount of progress across Government on some of the recommendations in my report.

For example, there have been a series of consultations and commitments from the Competition and Markets Authority about the kind of changes that it wants to make to its internal processes and the way it works. One of the central recommendations in the report is that the CMA needs stronger consumer powers—upgraded to match its anti-trust competition powers—and a whole series of other things necessary for it to move faster to judgments in individual cases much more quickly. Ideally, in most cases—the easier cases—that should be within days or months, rather than in the current parlance, when things can easily run into years; we need faster and more certain decisions.

The CMA is supposed to upgrade its capability to become what I termed the “micro-economic sibling” to the Bank of England’s macroeconomic work. In other words, every time the Bank of England talks about the macro economy, the CMA should have a public role in putting forward our progress in creating supply-side reforms to improve competition in individual markets and in individual parts of the country. As we all know, our country has a real problem with declining levels of productivity and of competitiveness the further away from the M25 one travels.

The report therefore makes a series of recommendations, some prompting a series of consultations on internal reforms to the CMA, which are very welcome. There are things like the

“micro-economic sibling for the Bank of England”,

which I have just mentioned, which has been declared and is due to be set up. There have also been declarations that the CMA’s consumer powers will be upgraded in due course. We will need primary legislation for that, but there has been extensive consultation on it. There will also be things such as stronger penalties for companies that do not comply with data requests and so forth, seeking to slow down the progress of any competition cases. So, all—or mostly—good news in that area at least.

The CMA has also established something called the digital markets unit, the DMU, which will be absolutely essential to future operations in ensuring that we can deal with consumer detriment created by digital network monopolies—the big FANGs of Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google. The DMU is now in operation, but in shadow form, because it does not have any of the necessary legislated powers that it requires. It has at least started. There has also been an increase in the CMA’s resources post Brexit because, as we left the UK, we had to have a stronger domestic pro-competition set of institutions, otherwise all the things that had been happening in Brussels, in the EU’s competition world, would not have been coped with, so they were repatriated.

Equally, the ideas in the chapter on economic regulators are about trying to reduce the overall role of such regulators over time. We should be trying to normalise as much of the markets that they run as possible. There is no intrinsic reason why, for example, energy, telecommunications or others cannot be mostly normal and as usual, as run of the mill as buying a loaf of bread or a pint of milk. We do not need an economic regulator to protect us when we do that. There are large chunks of these markets where we could be just as protected by normal consumer protection laws, and would not need an economic regulator, except for the bits of those markets that are fundamentally based around network monopolies.

Every single one of the economically regulated sectors in our economy—telecoms, energy, water or any of the others—all have network monopolies at their core, whether it is electricity distribution, the national grid, local electricity distribution grids, gas pipes, water pipes or whatever it might be. There is a network monopoly at the core, and those are inherently less competitive. We cannot get them to work in the normal way, and there has to be a residual level of economic regulation on those networks. Perhaps there are some deeply embedded and hard-to-solve consumer detriments in finance, too. Other than that, we could and should seek to erode the role of the economic regulators over time, normalising their markets as far as we can, as this report recommends. It is not a quick process; it will take time, but it can and should be done, outside the areas I have just described.

How are we doing? In some respects, quite well. There is something called the “Economic Regulation Policy Paper”, which I am sure everybody here has been keeping next to their bed for bedtime reading. That came out of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy a couple of weeks ago, and is intended to address the statutory duties of the economic regulators, and increase the level of competition they are involved with. It makes all the right noises and speaks all the right warm words about doing that. I will come back to that in a minute, because one of its problems is that, in modernising the statutory duties, to enable the process I have laid out, it is going to

“launch a review of utilities regulators’ statutory duties in 2022.”

It does not say when that is going to be launched, when it will be finished or what it will do about it when it is done. Everybody here will be familiar with the term “long grass”. I hope the Minister will be able to reassure us that this is not long grass, that it will happen in a timely way, and that he is out with his lawnmower trimming the sward to ensure that it will happen, rather than get parked somewhere and gently forgotten.

There is also good news on public procurement, which has been brought into sharp focus during the pandemic. We absolutely need to have a faster, better and more transparent public procurement process. We inherited this process from the EU as the OJEU—Official Journal of the European Union—rules. They do a lot of good things, but incredibly slowly and in bureaucratic fashion. As a result, we end up with processes that are clunky. When we have a national or international emergency, such as the pandemic, they are cruelly exposed as not working well enough.

I am pleased to say that there was when I published this, and there remains, a continuing commitment to launching a new public procurement Bill. That is due, probably not in this Session, but I hope in the next. It has been heavily trailed, and I hope and expect that it will take what we have and make it much more nimble, digital and open to small firms being able to compete with long-standing large incumbents, such as Carillion. It will not only be pro-competitive but will involve a great deal of better value for money for taxpayers. It will mean that we are less likely to have, for example, a scramble for personal protective equipment, if we have another national emergency such as the pandemic in future.

Finally, on the positive side of the ledger, there has been some progress on the ideas I talked about for trying to improve competition outside the south-east, and to improve retail opportunities for people who need redress, if they have been done wrong and their consumer rights have been breached. There has been a little progress on trying to make small claims courts and ombudsmen work better, more digitally and faster, while continuing to be cheap, so that there is ready justice, if necessary, for somebody who has not got what they paid for under consumer rights. That is all good, but we have a great deal further to travel.

My contention is that in a digital world, we should be able to have the same kind of 24/7 service that we expect when logging on to do our grocery shopping at 3 am— I do not do that, but some people do. That is something that, increasingly, we expect to be able to do. If we can shop 24/7, we should be able to seek redress 24/7 when that is needed, but there is a noticeable gap there.

Although that gap is starting to close, and there have been reforms of the small claims court for example, there has been no reform in other areas that need it, such as in the creation of county competition courts. Such reform is necessary to create opportunity for small, local companies that are being ganged up on by larger local incumbents and prevented from prosecuting their competition rights, because taking someone to the Competition Appeal Tribunal in London for a breach of competition law is never going to be affordable.

Even under the current fast-track approval process, redress is still out of reach for most small regional firms. A restaurant in Bristol, an estate agent in Hull or an hotelier in Liverpool will not be able to afford to do anything if they are being ganged up on by a local competitor until we get what I am calling “county competition courts”. I am afraid that there has been little progress towards that at the moment. Nor has there been progress towards a generalised update and improvement of local trading standards teams. That is needed in many parts of the country to ensure that there are proper defenders of consumer rights.

I do not want to cavil too much, because there is a decent list of progress. It would be churlish to say that nothing has happened in the last year, because it really has. I commend the Government and my hon. Friend the Minister on that progress, but I am afraid that there is a slightly longer list—it is certainly a serious list—of things that have not yet happened on the other side of the ledger. I will run through them quickly, then leave it for others to pick up on any particular points.

First, one of the report’s central points is about speeding up how fast people can get justice through the CMA if they need it. As I mentioned at the start of my speech, we have to ensure that all but the most complicated, hideously difficult and groundbreaking cases can be decided by the CMA. Most cases ought to take weeks or months rather than years. At the moment, there is no overall core process redesign within the CMA or the Competition Appeal Tribunal, which is effectively the appeals court for lots of CMA cases. Such a redesign—if I can call it that—will be necessary to make dramatic improvements in the availability and certainty of justice.

That matters because at the moment, it is all too easy for large, well-lawyered incumbents to walk backwards, slowly, in the face of a challenge from a small, plucky entrepreneurial, insurgent firm that is trying to transform and disrupt a particular market. If they can strew legal obstacles in the challenger’s path, they can basically make it much harder for Britain’s economy to be nimble.

[Cherilyn Mackrory (Truro and Falmouth) (Con)]

I appreciate what my hon. Friend says about competition. Does that apply to local authorities, which tend just to employ one arm’s length contractor when plenty of local people could bid for jobs such as road building and maintenance, for example?

[John Penrose]

That is a particularly good example of the kind of problem that I was referring to when I mentioned public procurement reforms. I think we should be all extremely interested in what they show. When those reforms come, they should mean that local government, as well as national Government and many arm’s length bodies—from the NHS to English Heritage, and everyone else in between—should be able to make much faster decisions in a way that is more accessible to small firms that are not equipped to wade through pages and pages of tender documents, some of which require a PhD and actually have little to do with whether a product or service is better than the big incumbent’s. That will be an essential change.

Speeding up the CMA is absolutely essential. One of the most glaring and—I am afraid to say—saddest omissions from the recommendations is on better regulation. There is a difference between deregulation and better regulation. I am sure that you are thoroughly familiar with it, Mr Efford, but for the record and for everybody else, deregulation is where standards are got rid of and there is a sort of race to the bottom—that is not what I am recommending in this report at all—whereas better regulation says, “How do we deliver the same standards in environmental quality, food standards, workers’ rights and all the other things that we regard as essential in our modern society, in a way that is cheaper, quicker, simpler, or more digital or more modern? How can we do that in a way that costs the providers of those things less?” If it costs the providers less, that means they can do it at lower cost, which means that consumers can get the same product or service at a lower price in the first place. It is up to everybody and it will be for all our benefit if we can do that.

However, getting rid of red tape and regulation is one of the hardest things to achieve in Westminster and Whitehall, because everybody here knows that the culture of this place is framed in terms of making new rules. That is how civil servants or—dare I say it?—one or two MPs make their career; it is by inventing new rules and not by getting rid of old ones. That is the culture of this place.

Better regulation is an extremely easy thing to say and an extremely difficult thing to do, although there have been examples—rare ones—in the past where we have succeeded. There was a brief flowering of success between 2010 and 2015, under David Cameron when he was Prime Minister, whereby the pro-regulatory ratchet got reversed and for a couple of years we were genuinely making progress, and in fact local firms and small firms and their organisations, particularly the Federation of Small Businesses and similar bodies, noticed it and said, “This is working”.

Unfortunately, when David Cameron left office, the blob pounced; I do not know whether a blob can pounce, but perhaps it enveloped the new regime. When David Cameron left office, the blob looked at what worked—basically, it was having a gateway condition saying, “If you are the Minister for paper clips, you can’t have new rules about paper clips until you have found two old ones to get rid of”; that was the thing that had been making things work until then—and said, “That’s a terribly old-fashioned way of doing it. We’ve got a much better way of doing it. Why don’t we have a big target and we’ll hit the target and that will be good?”

However, because the blob had got rid of all the rigour and all the mechanisms for getting rid of the red tape, what happened instead was that there was a huge target, which was completely missed. In two years, we went backwards, by £8 billion-worth of extra costs, when we had expected to remove £9 billion-worth of extra costs. Instead of removing £9 billion-worth of extra costs, we added £8 billion-worth, which was a £17 billion miss in two years.

That was absolutely disastrous compared with what we had been doing for the previous five years, and the thing that worries me is that it is being recommended that we go back to something rather similar. I do not care whether it is one in, one out or one in, two out, but it is essential that we have that gateway condition, because if we do not have it we will carry on going backwards.

I am afraid, and very sorry to report, that the benefits of Brexit report—another piece of bedtime reading, Mr Efford, which I am sure you have gone through in detail—says on page 27 that we will not reintroduce the old system at all but will stick with the one that has just failed, and we will carry on repeating the same mistake that we made before. I really hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will be able to tell me that that has now changed around, but I fear that he will be unable to. If we do not change around, then we will fail again, and—let us be very clear about it—that is what we are currently heading towards.

I have final thoughts on the economic regulators, Mr Efford; I am nearly there. As I say, we have had some progress here, because, as I mentioned, the Government have said that they are consulting on trying to improve the statutory duties of economic regulators to add extra competition, which should lead to shrinking the regulators over time.

However, as I also mentioned, we do not have a date for when the report on the economic regulators is due, so we do not know if anything will ever be done about them; I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will be able to say that the Government will do something about them. Without a date and without a firm commitment in principle that the report will genuinely try to normalise as much of the market as it can, outside the network of monopolies that I was talking about, the suspicion has to be that we are not trying to normalise these markets and that what will happen—unacknowledged, but none the less firmly—is that there will be no appetite for normalising as much of these markets as we can, and that instead the preferred destination is perpetual heavy regulation. I really hope that my hon. Friend the Minister can reassure me that that is not the de facto intention behind what we are currently doing.

My final point is about the final chapter in the report, which is on subsidy control. Subsidies are a very heady political drug, if we are not really careful. No matter the political party we belong to, it is always tempting when lobbyists come knocking. It does not matter whether a Member is in opposition or in government, nor whether it is local government or national or sub-national Government. When lobbyists come knocking, they say how terrible it is that this big, important local employer has been left behind—it did not invest in whatever it was it was doing and is now 20 years out of date, so it has been overtaken by plucky entrepreneurial upstarts from other parts of the country or, indeed, from other countries—and they say, “Isn’t it terrible that these jobs are now at risk? What we need is a just a temporary wafer-thin subsidy to tide us over for a couple of years while we fix things.” Of course, they do not fix things and then, a couple of years later, they come back and ask for more.

That is expensive for taxpayers and it reduces both the productivity of industry and the long-term security and sustainability of British jobs, which become progressively more and more vulnerable to international competition. Ultimately, it is the thing that did for us in the 1960s and 1970s, and which we had enormous pain trying to fix in the 1980s and 1990s. Subsidy control is vital. It is one of those rules that has just come back, post Brexit, from being run by Brussels. We have a Subsidy Control Bill before Parliament at the moment—it is in the Lords. It will do all sorts of really good things to speed up our subsidy control process; it is much more nimble and light-touch. If authorities are compliant with six or seven different principles—

--- Later in debate ---

[Cherilyn Mackrory (Truro and Falmouth) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Efford. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Weston-super-Mare (John Penrose) on securing this crucial debate and on his excellent work not only on his review, but as the UK’s anti-corruption champion. His review is a vital piece of work and reveals how our competition policy can drive enterprise, productivity and growth. I am pleased to recognise that more competition and support for small businesses outside the south-east is key to our levelling-up agenda.

I speak as the Member for Truro and Falmouth in Cornwall, which has an economy built on fantastic small businesses, with three quarters of local companies employing fewer than five people. Although the terms “competition law” and “ competition policy” might seem far removed from our everyday lives, it can be argued that failing to create a better regulatory regime that fully supports small businesses, consumers and fair competition has led to higher prices and lower wages in Cornwall for much of the last decade. We must unpick the fact that Cornwall has the lowest productivity levels anywhere in the UK, and that places the region at the heart of the Government’s levelling-up agenda. I draw the House’s attention to section 6 of the report, which shows that Britain has a well-known productivity problem, especially outside the south-east.

Our geographical skew in productivity is not normal; only two other European countries, Poland and Romania, have bigger variations than we have. That difference translates into everyone’s wages. In Cornwall, one in three workers earn below the national living wage, and much of the employment in Cornwall is reliant on two low-paying industry groups, namely hospitality and retail. They are sources of pride for Cornwall and its flourishing tourism sector, but it is inescapable that both are sources of low pay and low productivity.

Against a backdrop of rapid change in the world of work and the need to increase productivity, action to improve skills in Cornwall is crucial. Investing in skills will attract more competitive and successful firms, creating a virtuous circle that attracts more high-skilled people to live and work in the area—boosting productivity, jobs and wages even further.

I am in talks with BEIS and other Government officials about the lithium that is under our feet in Cornwall. We are very lucky, geologically. Few people realise that there is enough lithium under the Cornish soil to power at least half of the electric vehicles that we will need in the future. Cornwall is very good at getting things out of the ground and sending them away, but we need to make sure that all the processing to get the lithium to a battery-ready status also happens in the county, creating long-term jobs. To do that, we will have to compete with firms in China and other overseas players. That makes it difficult, and that is why we need to work with Government to make sure that the processing happens locally.

I am pleased with recent progress, such as the news that the excellent team at Truro and Penwith College have applied to the skills accelerator programme, ushering in a new approach that ensures that all technical education and training is based on what employers actually need. That is yet another example of the principal Martin Tucker and his brilliant team at Truro and Penwith leading the way with excellence and innovation in the learning and skills sector. It adds to their strong existing offer, which includes free skills bootcamps in digital and technical careers and the higher level skills project, to support individuals looking to enhance their knowledge and develop their careers.

We must consider all the options on the table to increase the region’s productivity. The report makes several crucial recommendations to reform competition policy and put consumers at the heart of markets, and I urge the Government to consider those recommendations. In particular, the report notes that to raise productivity in areas such as Cornwall, we need to boost the “local competitive temperature” by supporting small businesses to compete with large competitors. That was what I was driving at in my earlier intervention.

I want to highlight two areas of the report: reducing the burden of red tape and supporting digital industries. Laws and regulations are a crucial part of our market economy, as we have already said. They protect staff, consumers and the environment. I have been very vocal about the need for strong regulations on water companies, which are currently responsible for much of the pollution in our rivers, including the River Fal in my constituency. I agree that we need better regulation that maintains standards but applies them in the least costly and most unbureaucratic way possible.

In particular, we must address the growing crisis in the fishing sector that is caused by complicated new export rules, a lack of clarity about fishing quotas and an increase in red tape. At this point, I have to declare an interest as a fishwife—these are issues that I hear about at the breakfast table daily. Those changes have significantly hit our shellfish producers in particular, and some businesses face the real possibility of collapse unless we take urgent action. The fishing industry plays a vital role in the Cornish economy, and I urge the Government to step in and address the issues to secure its long-term future.

We have a lot of small producers in Cornwall, and up until very recently their only option has been to take their catch to market. A couple of years ago, a fisherman might have received £1.50 for a kilo of mackerel at market. They could go into the supermarket the same day and see lesser quality, net-caught fish of the same type—fish that had been in a net for a couple of days and was not as fresh as line caught—and the consumer would be paying something like £10 or £12 a kilo for it. Somebody is making an awful lot of money out of that fish, and it is not the food producer; it is not the fisherman. I am pleased that the Government have been encouraging direct sales, but I encourage them to further reduce the red tape that these boys and girls have to put themselves through to ensure that they can sell directly to farm shops and even, if possible, directly to supermarkets.

I support the report’s proposals for a new pro-competition regime for digital markets. Digital technologies bring us many benefits, transforming our economy, society and daily lives. However, there are downsides caused by firms with enormous network and digital data monopolies, so we must ensure that digital regulation promotes competition and innovation. Digital industries are a growing part of the economy in Cornwall, which has a rapidly expanding digital and creative community that has grown by 76% since 2010. I will do all I can to support the Government to ensure that we build a pro-growth data regime that will allow the digital industry in Cornwall to thrive.

Improving productivity in areas such as Cornwall is key to levelling up in the UK, and that is why it is important that we invest in skills and reform to make better regulation in industries such as fishing and all the way to digital markets. I look forward to supporting the Government as they consider the recommendations of the report, and I will continue to champion all our small businesses, innovation and competition now and in the years to come.

Oral Answers to Questions

Cherilyn Mackrory Excerpts

Tuesday 21st September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

Absolutely. In relation to this question, I pointed out that UKRI spent £15.9 million in the last fiscal year. The UKRI portion of our Department’s spend is being negotiated in the course of the spending review. I would be very happy to follow the guidance of the hon. Gentleman and make sure that we properly fund research into motor neurone disease.

[Cherilyn Mackrory (Truro and Falmouth) (Con)]

T7. Cornish Lithium, alongside Geothermal Engineering Ltd, will play a vital role in levelling up across Cornwall with the economic and job opportunities that they can provide. Will the Secretary of State, or a Minister, commit to visiting Cornish Lithium and GEL with me in the near future so that we can show him why their project very much deserves to have continued support from Government?

[The Minister of State, Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Greg Hands)]

My hon. Friend is absolutely tireless in promoting Truro and Falmouth. The project she mentions is very interesting. Last year, the new Foreign Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss), made a successful visit to the site. Subject to diary commitments, I or the Secretary of State would be delighted to visit to see the latest progress, which is supported, in part, by our Getting Building fund.

10-point Plan: Six Months On

Cherilyn Mackrory Excerpts

Tuesday 18th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

The accusation that BEIS somehow did not pay people who worked on the scheme is a very serious one and I need to investigate it. I do not think that was the case but, as I said, I will investigate.

As I have mentioned, the green homes grant was composed of three elements. One was the decarbonisation of public sector buildings through Salix, the public finance body, and another relied on local authorities to distribute funds to enhance social housing and decarbonise those buildings. Both those elements were successful. The other element related to owner-occupiers. It was a short-term scheme that was always designed to end at the end of March, which it did, and we are looking to develop a replacement.

[Cherilyn Mackrory (Truro and Falmouth) (Con) [V]]

Falmouth boasts the deepest natural harbour in western Europe and it is well placed to play a leading role in the UK’s ambition to deploy a gigawatt of FLOW—floating offshore wind—capacity by 2030. FLOW deployment in the Celtic sea alone could create more than 3,000 jobs. Local universities and the private sector have come together to accelerate deployment with a Strength in Places fund application. Will the Secretary of State visit the port of Falmouth with me—perhaps while he is in Cornwall next month—to see the exciting plans for ensuring that Cornwall is at the heart of this emerging sector?

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

I am not sure which is coming first—St Ives or Falmouth—but I am sure that arrangements can be made for such a visit.

Oral Answers to Questions

Cherilyn Mackrory Excerpts

Tuesday 15th December 2020 Commons Chamber

[Alok Sharma]

The hon. Gentleman raises an important point, and of course we have dialogues with landlords and tenants. As he will have heard, the rent moratorium has been extended to 31 March, and he will also know that because the rates holiday continues, that is money that does not have to go out, which can be used for other purposes.

[Cherilyn Mackrory (Truro and Falmouth) (Con)]

  The Government are leading the way with the green revolution, and in Cornwall we are teeming with green potential. Will my right hon. Friend work with my Cornish colleagues and I to help put Cornwall at the heart of the green industry, unleashing geothermal energy, lithium, floating offshore wind and their vital supply chains, creating long-lasting jobs in Cornwall?

[The Minister for Business, Energy and Clean Growth (Kwasi Kwarteng)]

My hon. Friend and I have had a number of conversations about the green industrial revolution. I am very excited about the opportunities in her wonderful county, and I look forward to visiting, when restrictions permit me, some of these wonderful projects.

Oral Answers to Questions

Cherilyn Mackrory Excerpts

Tuesday 29th September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Alok Sharma]

The best thing we can do to continue to keep the hospitality sector open is to ensure that we get the virus and the infections under control, and that is precisely what we are doing with the proportionate measures that the Government are taking.

[Cherilyn Mackrory (Truro and Falmouth) (Con)]

  I was extremely pleased recently to welcome the Secretary of State for International Trade to Truro and Falmouth, where she was able to look at the globally significant lithium grades in geothermal waters in my constituency. Will the Minister ensure that the Government continue their part funding of this United Downs project to help it to continue its important steps towards the commercial production of lithium in Cornwall?

[The Minister for Business, Energy and Clean Growth (Kwasi Kwarteng)]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for the work that she is doing in this area. I also congratulate the United Downs project on last month securing £4 million from the Government’s getting building fund. As the Prime Minister has said this weekend, the UK will lead by example by keeping the environment firmly on the global agenda and serving as a launchpad for a global green industrial revolution.

UK Internal Market: White Paper

Cherilyn Mackrory Excerpts

Thursday 16th July 2020 Commons Chamber

[Alok Sharma]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his comments and for his support for the principle of the UK internal market. I hope that that is something we will hear echoed across the House as we open up to questions. Let me address some of the points that he has raised. The first thing worth noting is that he talked about anxiety. The real issue at the moment is giving certainty to businesses, so that they know from day one that they are able to operate as they do now within a coherent, seamless internal market. That is what this White Paper proposal absolutely gives them. I have spoken, as I am sure he will have done, to business representatives and organisations over the last 24 hours, and they have told me that this is one big issue off the risk register of companies.

The right hon. Gentleman talked about standards. I would point out to him once again that the UK has some of the highest standards in the world across a whole range of areas. I have listed issues around maternity and paternity pay, around the exclusions and around zero-hour contracts. I say to him once again—I am sure that this issue will be raised by others as well—that we are not going to be compromising our high environmental standards, our high animal welfare standards or, indeed, our high food safety standards in the deals that we do.

The right hon. Gentleman then raised the issue about working together. He will know that the common frameworks programme has been running for some time, and we have had consultations and discussions around that. If colleagues in the devolved Administrations want to have a discussion about standards, that is absolutely the right forum in which to do it. He also mentioned the state aid rules. I know that he will understand the reason that we want to continue to have this as a reserved matter. We want to ensure that there is effectively equality across the whole of the UK and that there are no distortions. I understand his desire for us to set out the details on this, and that will come.

In conclusion, the White Paper gives certainty to businesses. It is about protecting jobs and livelihoods, and about supporting businesses in making their investment decisions. That is good for consumers as well. It is about underpinning our recovery from covid as we seek to work together. I say to all colleagues that this is about businesses and people, not about politicians, and I hope that that is the spirit in which we will conduct the rest of this debate.

[Cherilyn Mackrory (Truro and Falmouth) (Con)]

Nothing is currently more important for our whole United Kingdom than the protection of public health and the support of our economic recovery. Does my right hon. Friend agree that the proposals in the White Paper will ensure that all four nations—indeed, all four corners—of our United Kingdom can overcome this crisis by working together and promoting good co-operation between Westminster and the devolved Administrations?

[Alok Sharma]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right: that is precisely what I want to do. This is a consultation; we are consulting and we want to get people’s views. My door is very much open to having a dialogue and discussion with anyone who wants to come forward.

Oral Answers to Questions

Cherilyn Mackrory Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd March 2020 Commons Chamber

[Alok Sharma]

I am delighted that the hon. Lady has raised the issue of solar power, because, as she will know, solar photovoltaics is a UK success story. There has been rapid deployment over the past eight years, and more than 99% of the UK’s solar PV capacity has been deployed since May 2010. The latest figures indicate that we now have more than 1 million solar installations, or 13.4 GW, of capacity installed.

[Cherilyn Mackrory (Truro and Falmouth) (Con)]

In Cornwall we have some exciting new emerging industries such as geothermal energy and lithium extraction. How is my right hon. Friend encouraging those industries to produce green energy in the future?