Vauxhall at Ellesmere Port and Battery Manufacturing Strategy Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateDepartment: Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy
Christian Matheson
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Vauxhall at Ellesmere Port and Battery Manufacturing Strategy
Christian Matheson Excerpts(3 years, 9 months ago)
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Kwasi Kwarteng
I would be delighted. I am clearly going to be a much-travelled Secretary of State investigating all these potential sites for gigafactories. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for the excellent work that he has done in his short time in the House of Commons. He has really made an impact and got his voice heard, and the people of Redcar are very well served. I would be very happy to visit the constituency, as I have done in the past, to look at the opportunities for the energy transition.
Christian Matheson (City of Chester) (Lab)
The workforce and the management at Ellesmere Port have done everything that has been asked of them to keep that plant productive and efficient, but as my hon. Friend and next-door neighbour the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders) said, they are on tenterhooks waiting for a decision. I pay tribute to the right hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark) for his excellent opening remarks. When he was Secretary of State, he kept all the parties involved, including MPs and the local council, Cheshire West and Chester. Will the Secretary of State do the same? We want to help him to get the right results?
Kwasi Kwarteng
I really appreciate those words of support and help. This is a cross-national issue and a cross-party issue, and I would be very happy to engage with the hon. Gentleman. He knows that I have already made a commitment to visit the HyNet industrial cluster near his constituency. I am very much committed, as previous Secretaries of State have been, to doing all I can to make sure that we get the right investment and the right result.