Oral Answers to Questions
Claire Coutinho Excerpts(2 weeks, 6 days ago)
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Claire Coutinho (East Surrey) (Con)
Last month, I asked the Secretary of State about the risk of blackouts from the increasing instability of our electricity grid, and he accused me of scaremongering. Since then, I can inform the House that I have been contacted by a whistleblower at the heart of our grid operator, the National Energy System Operator. They allege that senior managers have ordered control room operators to hide information that shows that the grid is not being run securely. They also allege that corporate affairs have interfered with the operational decisions needed to stabilise the grid in order to protect the NESO’s reputation. If true, this is nothing short of a scandal. Will the Secretary of State take back his accusation of scaremongering and launch an immediate investigation into the security of our grid operations?
Michael Shanks
The shadow Secretary of State has made some very serious claims. If she has that information, she should share it with the Department. [Interruption.] Well, she has shared it in the House of Commons. She should also share the detail with us.
No, I do not take back—and I am sure that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State does not take back—the idea that the shadow Secretary of State has been scaremongering, because she has continued to do so; even though the National Energy System Operator has continued to meet the demand that is necessary for all consumers in the country, she continues to peddle nonsense on social media. I think she should look at some of the facts before she does that. The heatwave saw no impacts on consumers, and demand was met at all times. We have a robust and resilient energy system; if she looks at the data, she will see that that is being delivered day after day.
Claire Coutinho (East Surrey) (Con)
According to the press, the Secretary of State is applying for a new job, which means that he must be in need of references. Who will he ask first: the trade unions, who are calling for him to be sacked; the public, who have faced a £300 rise in their energy bills on his watch; or the oil and gas workers, who roundly rejected him at the recent by-election in Aberdeen?
Ed Miliband
I am incredibly proud of our record over the last two years. This Government have delivered the biggest investment in warm homes in our history, broken records on renewables, and secured over £100 billion of private sector investment. We have the biggest nuclear-building programme in a generation, and a plan for 400,000 new clean energy jobs. All the shadow Secretary of State had to show for her time in office was the trashing of our clean energy industries; there was no nuclear power delivered, and we had the worst cost of living crisis in generations.
Claire Coutinho
Let us look at the facts: bills went down £500 under me, but they have gone up £300 under him. The Secretary of State said that he has raked in investment, but that is because he has promised that consumers will pay sky-high prices to wind developers for decades to come. He is decimating British industry. Great British Energy is a complete flop. Is not the truth that the only reason he wants an out from this job is so that someone else has to clean up the mess that he is leaving behind?
Ed Miliband
The truth is that we all face a choice on the future of our energy system. Do we learn the lessons of history—of two fossil-fuel crises in five years, as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Iran war—and say that we want energy sovereignty with clean, home-grown power that we control, or do we not? We have made our choice.
Climate Change
Claire Coutinho Excerpts(1 month ago)
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Claire Coutinho (East Surrey) (Con)
Today, we are voting on something hugely consequential: a new net zero target that will allow Ministers and civil servants to control almost every part of the economy and the cost of goods in every aspect of people’s lives. It will affect the cost of energy, food, housing, heating, transport, holidays and shipping, and which industries will find it competitive to do business in Britain and which industries will not. Yet in this Chamber can anybody put a figure on how much more expensive this will make food or energy bills or family holidays?
Jonathan Davies
Does the right hon. Lady not accept that the investment her Government made in offshore wind power has insulated British consumers against the fossil fuel price hikes we have seen as a consequence of the Iran war? That is evidence that investment in renewable energy is good for consumers and businesses.
Claire Coutinho
I note that the hon. Gentleman did not answer my question, because he does not have an answer. Let me answer his question: on an electricity bill, 25% of the cost is a wholesale cost, and 75% is a non-commodity cost. Bills have gone up so much partly because of the taxes, levies and policies that his Government have chosen.
Claire Coutinho
No, I will pursue my argument. The vast majority of the costs on an electricity bill are not to do with wholesale prices. The question that I asked the hon. Member for Mid Derbyshire (Jonathan Davies) was whether he could tell us—[Interruption.] He should listen to this; he is not even listening to my point. I asked whether he could tell us what the legislation he is voting on today will do to the price of food, energy, and holidays for his constituents.
Several hon. Members rose—
Claire Coutinho
Let me try this question: how many Members present can say, hand on heart, that they have read the impact assessment for this legislation?
Claire Coutinho
The hon. Gentleman says that he has. Could he cite the number of jobs the legislation will create or lose in the overall economy?
Luke Murphy
The right hon. Lady’s argument would have a lot more credibility if she had not said, in 2023:
“Nothing will distract us from achieving net zero or driving forward renewables…I want people to feel nothing but unadulterated optimism…We are absolutely committed to our targets.”
The facts about climate change have not changed, yet the right hon. Member has changed her mind. Could that be because of those Members sitting on the Reform Bench?
Claire Coutinho
The hon. Gentleman also did not answer my question on jobs. I inherited my party’s position on net zero. I made it clear from the outset that my priority was affordability for Brits in this country, and that net zero should not impoverish consumers. In fact, I made some changes that meant that Labour called me a climate denier and a flat-earther. The hon. Gentleman now comes to this Chamber, not to scrutinise the legislation that will have a massive effect on his constituents, but to criticise me for scrutinising it, asking questions and changing my party’s position.
I am proud to have changed my party’s position, because I care about the consumer, about jobs, and about the price of food and energy. None of the Members on the Government Benches seems to care about those things, because if they did—[Interruption.] I will make some progress, because nobody is answering these questions. If they cared about those things, they would have read the Government’s impact assessment.
Claire Coutinho
Well, the hon. Gentleman could not answer the question on jobs. If he had read it, he would know that the Government’s own impact assessment admits that the modelling does not consider any upside, or downside risks, to the economy arising from the energy transition. It specifically says that it does not consider the impact on jobs. That means that Government Members are voting on legislation without any idea of what it is going to mean for the British worker.
The impact assessment is clear and explicit: the modelling does not analyse energy security. The Government do not know what the legislation will mean for the energy security of our nation. The head of Unite was spot on when she said at the weekend that the Secretary of State
“only seems to be interested in one side of the equation, rushing Britain to net zero with almost no thought for jobs, skills and national security.”
The transition has literally not been properly assessed. What is worse is that Government MPs want to make their political points, but none of them seems to care. Considering how much people are struggling and how much growth is flatlining, are Labour Members really happy to wave through those legal targets without the foggiest idea of what it will do to the economy, the cost of living or energy security?
Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
Will the right hon. Member give way?
Claire Coutinho
If the hon. Gentleman would like to tell us about the impact on jobs, he is more than welcome to do so.
Mr Perkins
I am happy to do so. Is the right hon. Member aware of the evidence from the Climate Change Committee that says that the cost of doing nothing is more expensive than the cost of everything that is needed for net zero? When she attempts to stand in the way of the transition, what she is actually doing is attempting to pile up the costs on British business and consumers, and on the sustainability of our country. She should understand the impact of her policies, rather than attempting to row back on one of the few things the previous Government should have been proud of.
Claire Coutinho
I will come to the evidence of the Climate Change Committee in a second, but first I note that once again, a Member from the Labour Benches cannot cite an overall figure on jobs—I would have thought that the Labour party would be able to cite a figure on jobs.
Several hon. Members rose—
Claire Coutinho
Look, I have given way to a number of hon. Members, and nobody has had an answer. Let me put this to them—
Peter Swallow
It absolutely will be about jobs—I thank the right hon. Lady for giving way. The CBI—not the Government, but the CBI—has found that the net zero economy is worth £100 billion of investment in this country every year and supports 1.1 million jobs.
Claire Coutinho
Oh dear. So the hon. Gentleman has not read that report either, because it includes among those jobs waste, recycling and nuclear power—does he think we did not have those jobs before the net zero target? It also includes soil restoration and land management. It specifically says—[Interruption.] I am sorry; Labour Members do not seem to like this, but I have actually read these reports. They do not seem to realise that that report includes a huge range of things that have nothing to do with the net zero target.
I will press on. When the Climate Change Committee provides advice to the Government about what carbon budget target they should set, it uses its own costings and assumptions. Its analysis determines how billions upon billions—that is thousands and thousands of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money—is spent. I am afraid that is deeply problematic.
Why do I say that? Because the cost of offshore wind used to prepare carbon budget 7 was out by a factor of three. The Climate Change Committee said that offshore wind would cost £38 per megawatt-hour, but contracts were being signed by their Secretary of State for £82 per megawatt-hour, suggesting that something was clearly going very wrong on a key input for the exact target that we are voting on today.
When I wrote to the Climate Change Committee—
Several hon. Members rose—
Claire Coutinho
I will make this point. When I wrote to the Climate Change Committee asking it to look at this matter, it sent me a dismissive reply. So I wrote about it in a newspaper. What did the committee do? It reported me—a democratically elected politician—under the Independent Press Standards Organisation editors’ code and tried to get me to remove my opinion. I did not. Just a few months later, the Government updated their own costings, not to £80 per megawatt-hour or even to £90 per megawatt-hour, but to over £100 per megawatt-hour. That is the Minister’s own figure. That means that not only was I right, but offshore wind was now predicted to cost three times what the Climate Change Committee had said.
I do not know which is worse: that we are making huge decisions on the basis of such poor analysis, that nobody on the Government Benches thinks that this warrants any scrutiny, or that an unelected advisory body is using taxpayers’ funds to try to silence elected representatives rather than focusing on getting its costings right. Everybody in this House should think that is shameful. If the committee was wrong by a factor of three on offshore wind—something that we have better evidence for than pretty much anything else in the market—how can we trust any of the rest of its analysis?
Let us look at some of the committee’s claims. It claims that a low-carbon electricity supply is “cheaper per unit” than high-carbon electricity. Well, if your numbers are out by a factor of three, perhaps you might think that. It also says that
“most businesses will not be…affected by Net Zero”,
particularly in the services sector. How does it justify that? Let me assure the House, if net zero blocks the advance of AI in this country, that will have a catastrophic impact on our services sector. Here is another claim:
“a reduction in meat…and dairy”
will mean a healthier diet. Who are they to tell us what to eat and to give us nutritional advice? The committee makes claim after claim and sweeping statement after sweeping statement with nobody holding it accountable. Yet this advice—this target—will affect almost every part of normal life.
Hon. Members may argue that we need strict climate targets to provide certainty for jobs—that is what the Minister just said—but that is nonsense. The country doing the best at creating clean tech jobs is China, which is now the world’s largest polluter. Hon. Members may also say that this is about our moral duty to fix climate change, but I will remind them that every time a British factory shuts here, where we have some of the cleanest electricity in the world, and we import those same goods back from coal-powered China, we are not helping climate change; instead, we are increasing global emissions. Before Labour Members get on their high horse, I will remind them that the Conservatives are the only party to call for the measurement of the offshoring of emissions. Labour does not want to know because it does not care.
Here is the problem: Labour Members do not want to properly measure whether we are just trading emissions here for emissions abroad because they do not really care whether this target is actually good for the worker, or good for jobs, or good for the cost of living, or good for the environment. That is why none of them cared to read the impact assessment.
Several hon. Members rose—
Claire Coutinho
I have taken interventions from so many Labour Members, and none of them could give a figure—[Interruption.] I will happily give way.
Luke Murphy
Point 299 of the impact assessment says:
“The transition away from fossil fuels will lead to a net increase in job creation”.
I believe the right hon. Lady said a moment ago that it does not mention at all the impact on jobs. I invite her to correct the record.
Claire Coutinho
The analysis that the hon. Gentleman points to refers to TIMES modelling. That is used for the baseline. A few pages away, its says that the TIMES modelling specifically does not look at the impact of jobs on the overall energy transition. It is in there in black and white.
The hon. Gentleman might desperately google it now in the Chamber, but the truth is that no Labour Members read and scrutinised the impact assessment properly because none of them cares. Let’s be honest: they are all here to read their boilerplate speeches, which will all be exactly the same, to virtue signal how much of a good person they are. That is the truth. Most of them come from climate NGOs and green lobby groups—the Minister does too, I am afraid—and they care more about ideology than evidence. How many of them have ever had to turn a profit for a living? How many have had to work out how to pay someone else’s wages? How many have had to consider all the costs that go into manufacturing and selling something in Britain?
The thing is, we could do this so differently. We are 1% of global emissions; 99% are happening elsewhere. Those countries are not persuaded by Britain driving itself into poverty while the Secretary of State preaches at them from his pulpit. In fact, they are asking themselves why they should follow the path that Britain is taking when we are such an obvious example of what not to do. We are a country that is making its energy scarce and expensive, and deindustrialising and impoverishing its own citizens.
What is the solution? First, we must reject decarbonisation by deindustrialisation. Therefore, we must measure the offshoring of emissions and get rid of the unilateral carbon tax and the stringent targets killing off British industry by repealing the Climate Change Act.
Richard Tice
Given that we have reduced our carbon emissions by some 54% since 1990, perhaps the shadow Secretary of State agrees with me that we have led the way and done our bit. It is now time for others to do theirs.
Claire Coutinho
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his question. The question is, can we protect the environment, the economy and living standards? Is what the Government are proposing today going to help us do those things? I would argue that it is not. [Interruption.] Well, let’s talk about it: Labour Members will vote today to increase the cost of aviation and shipping when our competitors in Asia, the middle east and the US are not doing so. That is mad.
The first part of our plan is to save British industry. The second is to make electricity cheap. Just 10% of our emissions are in the electricity system; the vast majority are in transport, industry and buildings. Our electricity is clean. Does Labour even realise that? It is some of the cleanest electricity in the world. The problem is that it is too expensive and deterring electrification. I am not someone on the right who thinks that all clean tech is stupid, but I do think that cheap electricity and consumer choice should be king.
Thirdly, we should wholeheartedly embrace innovation and exports of British clean tech, whether that is the next generation of nuclear, software or consumer products. Finally, we should pay much more heed to nature—something that we were proud to do but this Government are much less keen on. Funnily enough, they are much more attracted to net zero than nature. Perhaps that is because the former gives them unlimited powers to dictate to people what they can and cannot do, and to tax people who do things that they do not like. That is, after all, a socialist’s dream.
I would bet everything that our approach is better for the British economy and the environment, but it would mean wresting this agenda away from the incredibly well-funded green lobby groups with vested interests, who provide these figures that Members on the Labour Benches all merrily cite without having actually read the reports. And, frankly, they do not have the balls to do it—they do not even have the balls to take on their out-of-control Secretary of State.
I will end on this. The public keep being promised cheaper energy and more jobs, yet those things are not materialising. If people want to know why Governments keep failing, they should look at this impact assessment, which I am afraid is mumbo-jumbo that does not tell the reader what the target will do to the cost of food or energy, or the cost of business. They should consider the fact that parliamentarians are prepared to wave it through today. The Minister did not even take any questions. This is meant to be a debate in which we scrutinise these important decisions, but she did not want to answer any questions.
Who in the public voted for this? Who in the public voted for more expensive food, energy bills and boilers? Who voted to increase our goods imports from China? Let us be very clear: this legislation takes control away from Ministers and gives it to civil servants, unaccountable bodies and activists who will tell Ministers that they cannot prioritise the cost of living or the economy, even if they were elected to do so.
The Energy Secretary might not be in post for much longer, but the legacy of his target will be to make us poorer and weaker. Ministers will be more bound by red tape and less able to deliver on their promises, but it does not have to be that way. This is the moment to take back control for our constituents and say that Ministers should not be bound by legislation waved through with no scrutiny—by Ministers who will not take any questions. Ministers should be bound by the democratic promises they have made to the electorate. That is how we fix this. That is how we put our constituents back in the driving seat, and that is why Members should vote to reject this legislation today.
Several hon. Members rose—
Pippa Heylings
I thank my hon. Friend, as always, for her passionate defence and her knowledge on this issue. I worked for 20 years in east Africa, southern America and the Caribbean on UK climate policy, including under the previous Conservative Government. I saw countries already facing water shortages and what that meant: devastating crops and economies, and putting countries into recurrent economic recession. We must be committed to net zero emissions by 2050 because the science when the former Government agreed this—
Claire Coutinho
The hon. Member is making an emotional speech, and I understand she cares deeply about this issue. This target is imposing costs on our businesses in Britain, which is driving them away from one of the cleanest energy systems in the world. Our refineries now pay more on their carbon tax bill than they do on their wage bill. What does that mean? It means we are importing back those same goods from countries such as India that have higher emissions—twice the emissions, in fact. Why should we set a target more onerous than that in other countries, driving production away, only to import goods with higher emissions? What does she think that will do for climate change?
Pippa Heylings
Perhaps I would contest the fact that we cannot equate the emotion with a rational mind as well. These are science-based targets that the hon. Member’s Government agreed to set. What is recommended in the carbon budget order is set by the independent Climate Change Committee, with robust figures, and the science has shown us that this is our best chance to limit warming to under 2°. Global collective action avoided—at least for now—a 4° warmer world, and as I understand it, the Treasury has accepted modelling to show that we have accepted a 2° warmer world. It means that every Department will have to look at what a 2° warmer world means and how we adapt to that. I agree, however, that the impact on our industry, with some of the highest energy prices, means that it is less competitive. Let us therefore work together and focus directly on how we can get energy bills down.
The Liberal Democrats welcome the seventh carbon budget, and we are glad that the Government have accepted the advice of the robust and science-based Climate Change Committee, which puts us on a consistent and achievable pathway to meeting net zero while building a fairer and thriving new economy.
Pippa Heylings
I very much appreciated the work that the hon. Member did in her former role, and we were together at that COP meeting. Yes, I congratulate the Prime Minister, but I also congratulate former Prime Ministers. I was working internationally, and I worked on the macroeconomic budgets of developing countries, particularly the emerging economies, and we saw what they could do to follow the UK’s lead and leapfrog technologies in their economies. I absolutely agree with the hon. Member, which is why it is disappointing to hear from those on the Conservative Front Bench that they want to delay science-led targets and oppose environmental action, which would lead the world in a more insecure and uncertain place, and leave businesses without the certainty they need. I urge them to help us rebuild the consensus that we need. It can only smell of a desperate attempt at political opportunism to join Reform and gamble with the lives and livelihoods of future generations.
Claire Coutinho
If the evidence is so science-led, will the hon. Member explain why the Climate Change Committee was out by a factor of three—300%—on the cost of offshore wind, which is one of the key inputs for the target that she will be voting for today?
Pippa Heylings
I will look forward to seeing its answer when you send a letter back—
Caroline Voaden (South Devon) (LD)
It is 40°C outside in some parts of the UK. We are obviously not ready for what is coming, so there could not be a better day to discuss climate change and carbon targets. The seventh carbon budget should be welcomed—it is good that the Government have accepted the Climate Change Committee’s advice—but it falls far short of what is needed.
We are making good progress on renewable energy and I, for one, believe that is to be celebrated. However, I will not focus on energy because many other Members in the Chamber have done so already. Instead, I will focus on key sectors where we have seen pitiful progress, but which are absolutely central to meeting our emissions targets and making the transformational change needed to meet more ambitious, longer-term targets. This is not just about net zero; it is about making people’s lives better through lower bills, warmer homes and stronger, more sustainable communities, and it is about improving the quality of our lives as we struggle with the soaring temperatures and devastating floods—and doing so through more than just investing in renewables.
First, I will talk about farming. I welcome the reopening of the sustainable farming incentive, which we heard about earlier today. But yet again, it is a first-come, first-served subsidy that will work against the smaller, poorer farmers—the ones who need it most. The bigger operations will dive in first and get that money. We need long-term sustainable incentives for long-term sustainable agricultural planning.
We also need a land use framework, so that we can prioritise the most productive land for producing food and other less productive land for renewable energy. We should not be using our most productive agricultural land for solar power, but we need both and we have to have a land use framework to make that work. And yes, we also need to look at the carbon emissions from soils and peat. If we do not have healthy soils, we cannot produce food. Going back to what the shadow Minister said, perhaps she needs to think about the role of soil—
Caroline Voaden
No, because I do not have much time.
We also need massive progress on tree planting, and I commend my local district council for planning to plant one tree for every resident in the South Hams. It is making cracking progress.
Secondly, I would like to talk briefly about transport. If we do not have a major shift towards public transport, we are not going to get people out of their cars. That shift means buses in the south-west. The right hon. Member for Makerfield (Andy Burnham) has promised that he is going to revolutionise buses all over the country in the way that he did in Manchester, and I really look forward to seeing how he is going to do that in Devon, where many communities do not even have buses, let alone affordable buses.
We need to look at EV charging, especially for people who have to park on the road. That is a real challenge. We are certainly not seeing it where I live. I would also like to talk about active travel. Devon county council has told me that it will take five years to get a cycle path, even once it has been agreed by all the landowners. That is absolutely ludicrous. If we want to get people on bikes and walking to cut emissions and improve health, we have to cut the red tape and make this easier to achieve.
Lastly, the Climate Change Committee’s target for heat pumps for 2035 is 1.5 million a year, yet we are installing only a third of that. The cost of Heathrow expansion could pay for 4 million heat pumps to be installed across the country. Expanding airports while we are trying to cut emissions makes absolutely no logical sense to me at all. The economic benefit is not proven, the social impact will be catastrophic and the emissions impact on the climate will be unbelievable. I think we should take that budget and put it instead into helping households with heat pumps—
Alistair Strathern (Hitchin) (Lab)
I thank the Minister for the leadership she has shown on this issue, not just since taking up her role, but long before she came to this House—that is a powerful lesson at the heart of some of today’s debate. We have heard a lot from some Opposition Members about how inherently global this problem is, and that the UK decarbonising alone will not tackle climate change. They are obviously right—it is an inherently and intractably global problem that we cannot tackle alone—but they seem somehow to build from that to an argument that we will get other countries to go faster by going slower ourselves. The lesson that the Minister showed in a previous job by arguing for the Climate Change Act is that by showing global leadership, we can bring other countries along with us on this difficult journey. We brought in the Climate Change Act, and now 75% of the country’s GDP is covered by binding emissions targets. We know we need to go further, which is why the debate about how we meet those targets is so important—but it must be a debate about how we meet them.
There has been a lot of loaded language about climate denialism, and I accept that Conservative Members are not denying the existence of climate change. However, by denying the real and existential consequences of not meeting the science-backed targets, they are engaging in a subtler, but no less pernicious form of denialism. That is betraying our constituents and their futures by failing to recognise the existential challenge of climate change, and by failing to engage with the real and important debate that we should all be having about how we meet those targets and the policy trade-offs needed.
Claire Coutinho
I appreciate the hon. Member’s tone and the quality of his remarks, but does he not agree that denying that the Government are making electricity more expensive and deterring electrification—something the former Labour Prime Minister has acknowledged—and denying that we are offshoring emissions by putting extra carbon taxes on our businesses that other countries do not face, therefore increasing global emissions, is also part of the problem?
Alistair Strathern
The right hon. Member is right to highlight that we need to do more to drive down the costs of energy and bring others with us on the journey of decarbonisation, but that is not the debate we are having today. We are having a debate about scientifically binding and informing climate targets that will have existential implications if we do not meet them. By not engaging with some of the deeper policy conversations about how we get there, the right hon. Member is letting us all down. There will absolutely be areas where we can go further, because we have already shown that we can. Whether that is by renewing some of the renewable energy auctions to get better value out of the outcomes for consumers, by evolving the way we are delinking gas from electricity markets to deliver better outcomes for consumers and the environment, or by reforming some of the planning costs that have been holding back the new nuclear and clean energy that we desperately need to get cracking with, we have already made progress.
There will absolutely be areas where we need to go further, and many hon. Members have made good contributions to highlight some of them. That could be thinking about how we can do more to take policy costs off electricity to speed up the electrification journey, or how we can deregulate better some of the innovate start-up technologies that will make some outcomes possible in ways that we might not even be able to imagine today, or thinking carefully about how we manage the industrial costs and implications of the journey to net zero, to ensure that we are doing everything we can to protect the fantastic industrial heartlands that our country has relied on for far too long, and which we should be preserving long into the future. Those are big important questions, but that is not the discussion and argument that has so often been thrown back from the Opposition Benches today. That argument has denied the implications of failing to meet the target, and it is deeply disappointing, because it lets down our constituents and all our collective futures.
Oral Answers to Questions
Claire Coutinho Excerpts(1 month, 3 weeks ago)
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Claire Coutinho (East Surrey) (Con)
I have a very simple question. Everybody in this House knows we will need gas for decades to come, so for once, can the Minister give a straight answer? Which is better for the environment: going to a country 1,000 miles away, fracking the gas, freezing the gas, shipping it and reheating it, or just piping it in straight from the North sea?
Michael Shanks
The very simple answer is that we are continuing to use the North sea—no one is switching off what we are producing in the North sea—but the amount that we are able to extract from the North sea has been in long-term decline. The right hon. Lady knows that because she was the Secretary of State who talked a lot about the need for a transition in the North sea—she recognised then that the North sea has been in decline. We have been a net importer for more than 20 years, so this is not a short-term position. The shadow Minister, the hon. Member for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine (Andrew Bowie), gave the game away a few minutes ago: the answer to this is how we build the industries that come in the future, alongside retaining oil and gas for many decades to come.
Claire Coutinho (East Surrey) (Con)
I would like to offer my condolences to the Secretary of State on the death of his mother. It is clear that she was a remarkable woman, clearly much loved by her family.
I have a yes-or-no question for the Secretary of State: can he guarantee that not a single solar panel put on a British primary school by his Government has been produced by Chinese slave labour?
Ed Miliband
First, I thank the shadow Secretary of State for her kind words about my mum. If you will allow me to say so, Mr Speaker, I feel incredibly sad to have lost her, but very lucky to have had 56 years with an amazing mum, who taught me values of kindness, warmth, love and justice. It is a reminder to me of what really matters most in our lives. I sincerely thank the shadow Secretary of State for the message she sent me.
On the question about the use of forced labour, we take this incredibly seriously. We inherited a regime from the last Government, which we applied in the early stages of what GB Energy was doing, but the shadow Secretary of State will know that, through the passage of the Great British Energy Bill, we have strengthened GB Energy’s commitment to this. Frances O’Grady is now the champion of dealing with slave labour. I can absolutely assure the shadow Secretary of State that we will do everything we can to prevent the use of forced labour.
Claire Coutinho
Well, there were words there, but there was no guarantee, so let me just remind the House that the Secretary of State has sold his entire agenda as being one of providing moral leadership to the rest of the world, but there is no moral leadership in sending British children to schools powered by Chinese slaves.
On 2 May, our electricity grid almost breached its frequency limit. That has the potential to cause nationwide blackouts. The Secretary of State’s plans are making it harder and harder to balance the grid—there is no denying that—so can he confirm who is legally accountable if we have a blackout, thanks to grid instability, and what repercussions would that person face?
Ed Miliband
I am afraid that the shadow Secretary of State is indulging in the worst sort of scaremongering to justify her anti-clean-energy agenda. It is incredibly sad what has happened to her. She used to believe in clean energy. Today, a report comes out from CBI Economics, showing 1 million jobs in net zero, and what does she do? She starts quibbling about the small print, and saying that the report does not represent the views of CBI, when the CBI chief economist is actually advocating for clean energy.
Energy Security
Claire Coutinho Excerpts(2 months, 1 week ago)
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Claire Coutinho (East Surrey) (Con)
I beg to move amendment (i), at the end of the Question to add:
“but respectfully regret that the Gracious Speech commits to banning the issuance of licences to explore new oil and gas fields; recognise that this proposal will have a particularly negative impact on Aberdeen, the North East of Scotland and the wider UK economy; believe instead the Government must approve the Rosebank oil field and the Jackdaw gas field, which would boost UK energy security; urge the Government to drop its opposition to new oil and gas licences and instead legislate for a presumption in favour of approving new licences, and permit the exporting of oil and gas technology overseas; further regret the cancellation of a third large-scale nuclear power plant at Wylfa; and further urge the Government to abolish the ‘carbon tax’ regime to avoid more refinery closures, protect the domestic supply of refined products, and reduce the tax burden on UK industry.”
This may be our last meeting across the Dispatch Box, because the Secretary of State is once again on manoeuvres. Considering that he is gunning for a promotion, let us review his record, shall we? He promised in the election that he would cut everybody’s energy bills by £300. What has he delivered? Energy bills are up by £200 thanks to his plans. He said that he would protect pensioners, but weeks into office he axed the winter fuel payment—a policy that many Labour MPs have cited as their worst political decision in power.
The Secretary of State promised that Great British Energy would lead to a mind-blowing reduction in bills. Yet, two years in, it has not taken a penny off household bills, but has given a six-figure salary to one of his mates. Now, we learn that Great British Energy has been putting solar panels, made by Chinese slave labour, on British primary schools—something that the Secretary of State promised to this House that he would not do. What is next? Oh, that’s right: the Secretary of State said that he could control the price of wind. However, his botched wind auction signed us up to the highest prices in a decade—way more than the cost of electricity that he inherited.
Promise after broken promise, bills up, pensioners betrayed, six-figure salaries for his mates and eye-watering contracts for wind developers—now, to top it all off, a so-called energy independence Bill that would shut down the North sea, in the greatest act of industrial self-harm in a generation. If that is what gets someone a promotion in the Labour party, Lord help us all.
Let us turn to the so-called energy independence Bill. For true energy independence, we need our own oil and gas, but the Bill enforces the wilful destruction of the North sea. We need our own petrol, diesel and jet fuel, but the Bill does nothing to save our refineries, which are being taxed into oblivion. We need an electricity system that keeps the lights on for British households and industry, but his plan will leave us at the mercy of foreign imports. That is not independence; it doesn’t even come close. It is an energy dependence Bill that would leave us weaker, poorer and more reliant on foreign regimes.
Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
The shadow Secretary of State said that for energy independence we need our own oil and gas, rather than investing in renewables. She will know that her Government paid £44 billion to subsidise our energy during the time of the Ukraine price spike. Will she tell us by how much our bills were reduced as a result of having our own oil and gas when the Ukraine crisis happened?
Claire Coutinho
First, let me say to the hon. Gentleman that bills came down £500 under me; they have gone up by £200 because of the Secretary of State’s plans. Secondly, let me tell him another hard truth. He should listen to this; he might learn something. Cutting off production in the North sea does not mean that we use any less oil and gas. Production is not linked to consumption. All it means is that we will import more of that gas from abroad. That is weaker and it makes us more reliant on imports.
Claire Coutinho
He used up his chance; he should have asked a better question.
There are some parts of this work that I welcome. The Fingleton review is impressive. I thank those involved and, as I have made clear before, we will support that work going forward. Nuclear is the only form of energy that can provide round-the-clock, totally clean power, and I will always support policies that make it as easy as possible to build.
There is a catch, however. The Secretary of State says he wants to ease nuclear regulations while, at the very same time, he has cancelled the project that they would be used on. By cancelling the third large-scale nuclear power station that I signed off, he has killed the nuclear pipeline. He is repeating his own mistakes. We are set to have yet another Labour Government who fail to start a single new large-scale nuclear power plant, and now we hear that Natural England is adding yet more delays to Hinkley Point C for little environmental gain. Is he fighting that? No. He is defending the status quo.
By the end of this Parliament we will still be waiting for a decision as to whether small modular reactors will go ahead, by 2030 there will be less nuclear online than there is now, and in 2035, which is 10 years away, the Government still will not have started any new large-scale nuclear power plants in this country. That is the same old stop-start approach that killed the industry to begin with. If that is what the Secretary of State calls being ambitious for nuclear, he needs to give his head a wobble.
Lizzi Collinge (Morecambe and Lunesdale) (Lab)
My constituency has the Heysham 1 and Heysham 2 power plants. The reason why nuclear power will possibly go down is because plants are coming to the end of their lives and the right hon. Lady’s Government did nothing about that for 14 years. Why did she not deliver when she was in government?
Claire Coutinho
Let me tell the hon. Lady. Under the last Labour Government, which the Energy Secretary was part of—[Interruption.] Let me explain. Not a single new nuclear power plant was started. When we came into power in 2015 and got control of the energy brief, there was one nuclear welder left in the country. It is the stop-start approach that kills the nuclear industry. Here is the problem: the Government have killed the pipeline again. These are the same old mistakes, and I am raising them because we are getting into the same trouble again—[Interruption.] The Ministers say that those were not mistakes and that it was not a mistake not to start a single new nuclear power plant. That is what they think, on the record.
On to the North Sea. Andy Burnham, who is hoping to be Labour leader, talked yesterday about reindustrialisation. Meanwhile, today the Secretary of State is asking his Back Benchers to vote to shut down the North sea. This is the single greatest act of industrial self-harm we have seen in a generation. Only a complete wacko would respond to a supply shortage by shutting down their own oil and gas industry. We are in the absurd position of the Labour Chancellor thanking Canada and Norway for increasing their oil and gas production while her own Government are shutting down British production. And why? It is so we can be more reliant on higher-emission gas from Qatar or the US and so we can send billions of pounds to Norway to import gas from the very same basin that we could be drilling ourselves. The Government are calling this energy independence. Have they lost their mind?
Andrew Lewin (Welwyn Hatfield) (Lab)
The right hon. Lady talks of absurd positions. I did a little research before the debate today. I went back to 21 May 2024, just before the last general election, and in this House, in her capacity as Secretary of State, she said that she believed in net zero. She said:
“We are on track to reach net zero by 2050, and we will do so in a way that brings the public with us.”—[Official Report, 21 May 2024; Vol. 750, c. 724.]
Her position now is that she does not believe in net zero, and does not believe that it is desirable or achievable. Is that not absurd?
Claire Coutinho
People change their minds when they look at facts—[Interruption.] I am not hiding from this. I think the hon. Gentleman needs to look at the overall record of the things I said in government. The first thing I said when I went into position was that we cannot impoverish ourselves in the name of net zero. I started a true costing of renewables in the Department, because we did not have a proper costing of energy. Who cancelled that work? It was the Secretary of State. I backed the North sea; I signed off Rosebank; I legislated to protect those North sea licences. Who is turning all of that around? The Secretary of State. We all know the real reason that he is doing it. He is shutting down British oil and gas to show climate leadership. He put that in the King’s Speech. Let us be crystal clear, though. What he is saying is that he is willing to turn his back on British industry, even though we will not need any less energy. We will rely on higher-emission imports from abroad because he cares more about the climate bureaucrats than about the jobs of British workers. That is what climate leadership means to him.
Where exactly is this meant to be leading us—bankruptcy? Where does it end—cheering as the lights go out as the last factory in Britain closes? That is what the Secretary of State’s North sea and carbon tax policies are doing. They are simply offshoring British emissions to the coal-powered refineries of India, the diesel tankers bringing us gas from the US and Qatar, and the factories in Trinidad from where we are now getting our ammonia. That does not help the climate and it does not help British workers.
Alison Griffiths (Bognor Regis and Littlehampton) (Con)
Businesses in Bognor Regis and Littlehampton need stable and affordable energy to grow and invest, so does my right hon. Friend agree that our “get Britain drilling” Bill is vital not just for energy security but for our future economic security?
Claire Coutinho
The North sea is a vital part of our industry. It provides us not only with the gas that we need for energy security but with the feedstock that feeds into our chemicals and plastics industries. There is a whole supply chain of other industries that rely on the North sea and on our having a successful industrial base. If we lose just one of those foundational industries, it is like dominoes: the rest will go. If we keep offshoring British emissions, it will not help the climate and it will not help British workers. Do the Government understand how bad it looks when they make speeches patting themselves on the back here in Westminster while hard-working Brits out there lose their jobs so that we can import more goods with higher emissions from abroad? That is why the vote on the North sea today should be a litmus test for them. Do they reject decarbonisation by deindustrialisation or not?
Claire Coutinho
I will just make a bit of progress.
Now let us talk about electricity. A key part of the Secretary of State’s plan is to make us more reliant on electricity imports. He does not like to talk about it, but at the height of winter, when we need it most, we will be importing twice as much electricity by 2030 as we did when this Government came into office. What does that mean? It means relying on the goodwill of France and Norway to keep the lights on in Britain. I remind the House that we are now in a situation where France is on the edge of a debt crisis, with the National Rally topping the polls. Does the House really think it prudent to hand over the keys to our electricity security to Marine Le Pen? Let us be honest, that is the Secretary of State’s plan. Whichever way we look at it, this is not an energy independence Bill. It is an energy dependence Bill that makes Britain beholden to Marine Le Pen for our electricity, to Xi Jinping for our solar panels and to Donald Trump for our gas. The Government’s plan is for energy scarcity, but what we need is energy abundance. That is why our plan would be to double down on nuclear, to axe the carbon tax to save British industry, to get Britain drilling and to make electricity cheap.
Dave Doogan (Angus and Perthshire Glens) (SNP)
The right hon. Lady paints a picture of the stark consequences of the Labour party’s policy for a total proscription on new oil and gas licences. Can she advise us what the future will look like for the United Kingdom without access to oil and gas from the North sea basin?
Claire Coutinho
I know that the hon. Gentleman’s party has changed position on this recently, and I welcome that change. As I have said, the North sea is a foundational industry. It is not just about the oil and gas it provides. It is not just about the tax revenues. It is not just about the jobs that exist within that industry. It is about all those other industries it supports, including the chemicals and plastics industries. By the way, even the renewables industry supports more drilling in the North sea, because it needs the specialist rigs, the undersea technologies and the exact same workers. There are so many industries and wider economies that the Government are killing just because of the ideological bent of this Secretary of State.
Claire Coutinho
I will make a bit more progress.
Here is the fundamental bind that the Labour party is in. It does not matter who its next leader is—they will all fail. Its supposedly popular leadership contenders will become unpopular very quickly when they cannot keep their promises. It happened to us in government. It is happening to Labour now. It is happening to Reform at council level. It will happen to whoever is in government next unless they face up to the trade-offs that get us better growth.
Growth is the antidote to so many of our problems, but to deliver it, we need two things: cheap, abundant energy and economic freedom. By shutting down the North sea, cancelling nuclear projects and keeping a distorted electricity market in place, the Government are making energy scarce and expensive. Being part of the EU does not solve that problem. The EU leaders themselves rail against their own energy policy. Reindustrialisation is just a meaningless slogan unless we back the North sea, axe the carbon taxes that are killing British industry and cut the cost of energy. If none of Labour’s contenders has the courage to say anything about these issues, nothing will change.
Alongside cheap, abundant energy, the most important ingredient for growth is economic freedom, but the Labour party openly stands for more state control, more tax and spend, more red tape on employing people, more expensive energy, less AI, fewer profits and more subsidies. It has been on this path for two years now, and what do we have to show for it? Higher inflation, weaker growth and soaring unemployment. Why would anyone want more of this? Families are working harder and harder and getting less and less at the end of the month. And if people want full-fat socialism, why would they choose Labour when they have the boob whisperer offering them bigger and better?
Our whole system is flooded with caution. Nobody is incentivised to take any risks.
That is what is making us poorer. The truth is that the personalities in the Labour leadership race do not matter. Unless we get cheap, abundant energy, remove the legal straitjackets and onerous taxes, and fix the broken regulators and the sluggish machine of government to set the economy free, nothing is going to change.
If Labour Members think that Andy Burnham has the answers, let me tell them this. Andy is like the fun uncle who sits on the sidelines saying whatever he wants without anybody holding him accountable: “Let’s have ice cream for dinner! Let’s go to the zoo next week! Let’s nationalise everything! Who cares about the bond markets? Let’s rejoin the EU!” He has said whatever he liked because he has never had to pick up the bill. Now that he is actually looking at being in charge, he is having to go back on all those promises. Members should ask him this: how is he going to fund his nationalisation plans? He wants to stick to the fiscal rules. Is he really saying that he is going back to taxpayers, who already face the highest tax burden in history? When he talks about reindustrialisation, they should ask him whether he supports the Secretary of State’s plans to shut down the oil and gas industry—the biggest act of industrial self-harm committed in generations. If Andy Burnham wants more powers at a local level, amen to that—I could not agree more—but Labour Members should ask him how he can argue for economic freedom in one breath, while in another dictating to people what tumble dryers or cars they have to buy.
If Labour Members really cared about growth and reindustrialisation, they would axe carbon taxes, get Britain drilling, double down on nuclear and make electricity cheap. In short, they would put the national interest ahead of the Secretary of State’s ideology and vote with us tonight.
The Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero (Ed Miliband)
It is a privilege to speak in support of this Gracious Speech. This debate takes place in the shadow of the second fossil fuel shock in four years. Families and businesses across the country are deeply concerned about the impact of the Iran war on the cost of living—a war which this country did not start and this Government chose not to join, but which is having significant effects here at home, just like when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 and energy bills rocketed, and the British people and firms paid the price.
The argument at the heart of this Gracious Speech is that there is one overriding lesson of these two crises: while we remain exposed to the fossil fuel rollercoaster, we are deeply vulnerable as a country. Our sovereignty, our security and the British people’s living standards are undermined by this dependence and exposure, for a simple reason: we do not control the price of oil and gas, which is set on international markets. It is different from what it was like in the 1970s when we had fossil fuel shocks. There is an answer staring us in the face: energy independence through clean home-grown power that we control—clean home-grown energy that comes from our own wind, sun and nuclear resources that cannot be disrupted by foreign wars, that cannot be controlled by the whims of petrostates and dictators, and that means that our national security and energy security cannot be held hostage.
One commentator put it incredibly well in 2023, after Russia invaded Ukraine:
“Moving to home-based, clean power mitigates risks to bill payers, now and in the future”,
protecting consumers from
“volatility in international fossil fuel markets.”—[Official Report, 16 November 2023; Vol. 740, c. 53-54WS.]
I agree with that commentator—it was the right hon. Member for East Surrey (Claire Coutinho), the shadow Energy Secretary, in Hansard on 16 November 2023. I agree with her. The problem is that she no longer agrees with herself. Where the evidence says we need more renewables, not less, she opposes them. Where the evidence says we should electrify as much as we can, she says we should abandon support for people to get heat pumps. Where the evidence says electric vehicles can protect consumers, she opposes action for their take-up—not because the facts have changed, not because the evidence has changed, but because she has jumped on the anti-clean energy, anti-net zero bandwagon. I am very happy to give way to her, so that she can tell the House whether she agrees with herself.
Claire Coutinho
I will very happily ask the Secretary of State the question—[Interruption.] Well, he said he would happily give way; he does not look so happy now. In government, I started work on the true costing of renewables, because the Department does not have an accurate costing of energy—it does not have an accurate costing of clean power 2030. Why has he not published one?
Ed Miliband
It was not worth giving way after all. The shadow Secretary of State cannot answer the question.
Ed Miliband
I will not give way for a minute.
The shadow Secretary of State comes to the House with a plan which will not take a penny off bills, which will not give us energy security and which rejects the things she used to believe.
Ed Miliband
I am not going to give way again.
This is the difference with Labour: we are learning the lessons of the fossil fuel crises we face, and we are acting.
Oral Answers to Questions
Claire Coutinho Excerpts(4 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Claire Coutinho (East Surrey) (Con)
This Government are taxing people up the wazoo and piling cost after cost on to their energy bills. People on £30,000 or £40,000 a year, who are not well off, are being hammered to pay for welfare when they are already working all hours to support their own families. Now we hear that the Government are about to go back to the taxpayer again to subsidise those on welfare, but their first port of call should be to adopt our cheap power plan. It would cut electricity bills by 20% for everybody by cutting green taxes and levies, and it would not cost the taxpayer a penny. Why will they not do that?
Ed Miliband
The Conservatives’ plan is totally incredible, and the shadow Secretary of State knows it. Their plan on renewables is just to tear up the contracts. They had 14 years to do it, and they did not do it. Why? Because they know that they cannot. I have to say, it is quite extraordinary that her position is now to abolish the windfall tax, which has raised £12 billion since it was introduced in 2022. The difference between us and them is that we are willing to tax the oil and gas companies to help ordinary families.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero (Chris McDonald)
My hon. Friend is right to point out the importance of finishing companies. I know that some spinning and weaving businesses are included in the supercharger, but finishing is often not, even though it is done in the same factory. Clearly, whether they are waterproofing sou’westers or fireproofing mattresses, these businesses are important. I would be happy to meet my hon. Friend to discuss the upcoming supercharger review and what options there may be for those businesses.
Claire Coutinho (East Surrey) (Con)
Will the Secretary of State be honest and tell the country why he is ideologically obsessed with shutting down the North sea? Is it because he does not think we need the £25 billion of tax revenue it would generate? Is it because he prefers to import gas with higher emissions, or is it because he has never bothered to speak to the thousands of workers who are losing their jobs right now because of his policies?
Ed Miliband
I am not. As I said earlier, we are using existing oil and gas fields in the North sea for their lifetime, and we have introduced tiebacks for existing fields. While the right. hon Lady comes here month after month with proposals that will do nothing to cut energy bills for people, this Government are actually taking action: reducing the energy price cap next week; making plug-in solar available to all families; the warm homes plan to drive down bills; and crucially, a renewable power auction, which she said that we should cancel, to help 12 million homes.
Claire Coutinho
RenewableUK, the unions, Tony Blair and the Secretary of State’s own handpicked chair of Great British Energy—the biggest advocates for an energy transition—have said that he has got this wrong. Is his ideology so rigid that he is incapable of admitting when he has got things wrong and that he will put us on a pathway to higher emissions and fewer British jobs?
Let us try again. Can the Secretary of State be clear with the House? He knows that we will need gas for decades to come, so why does he prefer to import dirtier gas from abroad than to use the gas that we have in the North sea?
Ed Miliband
I do not. We continue to use the North sea, and ours is a pragmatic position. But there is a wider lesson that the House has to focus on. Is the lesson of this crisis—a fossil fuels crisis—to double down on fossil fuels, or is it to drive forward with clean energy? We believe clean, home-grown power that we control is the answer.
Oil and Gas
Claire Coutinho Excerpts(4 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Claire Coutinho (East Surrey) (Con)
I beg to move,
That this House calls on the Government to remove the Energy Profits Levy, end the ban on new oil and gas licences and approve the Rosebank and Jackdaw fields to increase secure domestic energy supply; recognises that the North Sea provides half of the UK’s gas supply, supports 200,000 skilled jobs across the UK and generates billions of pounds in tax revenue; further recognises that three quarters of the UK’s energy needs are met by oil and gas, that the UK will continue to use oil and gas for decades, and that the North Sea is the UK’s most secure and lowest-carbon source of oil and gas; notes that without action to make the sector more investable, the UK risks importing 82% of its gas by 2035 at higher cost and with higher emissions; and further notes that independent analysis by Stifel shows that the Energy Profits Levy will cost the Treasury more than it raises and that reforming it would generate an additional £25 billion in tax revenues within 10 years.
What do RenewableUK, Scottish Renewables, Greg Jackson from Octopus, the chair of Great British Energy, the unions and the Tony Blair Institute all have in common? They all think that the Labour party has got this wrong; they all think that we should make the most of our oil and gas in the North sea. They are some of the most powerful advocates for clean energy in this country, they are the great and the good of the Labour left, and they all get that shutting down the North sea is an act of economic self-harm—an unforgivable own goal when it comes to Britain’s energy security. The question is: why does the Labour party not get that? Let us go through the arguments, one by one.
First, the Secretary of State has argued that the North sea does not help our energy security because all the oil and gas gets sold abroad. That is rubbish. We use all the gas that we drill in the North sea. It makes up about half our supply. If we do not use our own North sea gas, by 2035, we will be three times more reliant on foreign imports of liquefied natural gas. That is much dirtier foreign gas. Why would we use that when we could use our own? The argument that it does not affect our energy security is pure misinformation from the Secretary of State, and MPs in the House today would be unwise to repeat it. Even the Climate Change Committee acknowledges that we will still need oil and gas for decades to come. If we are going to need them, we should get as much as possible from Britain. That is just common sense.
Secondly, Labour says that maximising our own resources in the North sea makes us more reliant on fossil fuels. That is total rubbish. Producing our own oil and gas has no connection with our consumption of oil and gas. The biggest barrier to electrification is not our oil and gas industry; it is the Labour party, making electricity more and more expensive by piling levies and taxes on to people’s bills. Using electricity to heat our homes or drive our cars can help make us resilient during a price spike, but the problem is that our electricity is too expensive. The Secretary of State, by piling cost after cost on to people’s electricity bills, is making the problem worse.
Richard Tice (Boston and Skegness) (Reform)
Does the right hon. Lady agree that the simple thing to do to bring down bills is to scrap net stupid zero, so that we can scrap all the carbon taxes and all the green levies, and all our consumers and households would be better off?
Claire Coutinho
We do need to take some of the green taxes and levies off electricity bills. The problem is that if the Government keep making electricity more expensive, no one will want to use it. That is why our policy is the opposite of theirs. We believe that we should make electricity cheap by taking off green taxes and levies, and that has nothing to do with the North sea. Drilling in the North sea does not stop anyone buying an electric car. It does not stop us building nuclear, of which I am a strong advocate, and nor does it stop us building wind or solar for that matter. The Government say that drilling in the North sea leaves us tied to fossil fuels, but why? They need only look to Norway to see that that is not true. It makes the most of its own oil and gas resources, but lots of people drive electric vehicles there. Let us hear none of that argument today.
Thirdly, the Government say that drilling will not help reduce costs for ordinary people. That is economically illiterate rubbish. We are paying tens of billions of pounds to import oil and gas from Norway from the exact same basin we could be drilling ourselves. Destroying our oil and gas industry means some £25 billion in lost tax revenue for the public finances over the next decade. The Government say they are taxing the wealthy. Are they in the real world? They are taxing anybody with a pulse: pensioners, middle earners, small businesses, farmers, drivers—if they breathe, the Government are taxing them, and people are suffering. The Government could instead be getting that tax revenue from a thriving industry.
Sarah Coombes (West Bromwich) (Lab)
Is it not true that the number of jobs in the North sea oil industry halved in the last decade when the shadow Secretary of State’s party was in government?
Claire Coutinho
The hon. Lady might like to know that oil and gas jobs have been stable for the past six years, but we are losing 1,000 jobs a month because of the Government’s policies. I know that because I have been to Aberdeen; perhaps she would like to do the same.
We also saw yesterday that the markets are charging us 5% for our borrowing. That is because they think we borrow too much and earn too little. There is an easy way for the country to earn some more money: we can make the most of our own resources and back the North sea, which would drive down costs for everyone. It is unfashionable at the moment to talk about balance of payments, but if we keep sending billions of pounds abroad and rack up the credit card bill, that causes costs for everybody.
Fourthly, on climate, Labour will say that drilling our own oil and gas in the North sea is “climate vandalism”—I am quoting the Secretary of State—but that is patent rubbish. Every drop of gas that we do not drill ourselves, we import from abroad instead. The liquified natural gas that we import has four times the emissions of gas that we could get from the North sea. LNG, for those who do not know, has to be frozen to minus 150ºC, shipped in diesel-chugging tankers, then heated up here. That is why it has much higher emissions overall. The Labour party says that it cares about that and that climate change is the biggest threat to our national security—its words, not mine—but it has a choice today: we can be three times more reliant on that dirtier LNG shipped across the Atlantic or shipped in from the middle east, or we could use our own gas with four times fewer emissions. Do the Government prefer virtue signalling and higher emissions under the Secretary of State, or more jobs and lower emissions under our plans to back the North sea?
Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)
Does my right hon. Friend, like me, feel sorry not only for all the consumers up and down the country who see billions of taxes that could be paid if we just produced more oil and gas here—that could be used to lower their taxes when they fill up their cars and travel to work—but for the two Ministers on the Front Bench, the hon. Members for Inverclyde and Renfrewshire West (Martin McCluskey) and for Rutherglen (Michael Shanks)? Neither of them is an idiot, but they have been captured by an ideological Secretary of State who is literally making them swear that black is white.
Claire Coutinho
The two Ministers are Scottish MPs. They have been to industry, and they know what people in those areas are saying. They know the jobs that are being lost. It is so blindingly obvious that we should use things that we make in this country, rather than using dirtier imports from abroad. The question they need to ask themselves is, why is it that their Secretary of State cannot see the truth?
Fifthly, the Government say that new fields will take too long to get up and running. That is dangerous, short-termist rubbish. Jackdaw and Rosebank could be up and running by Christmas. They have been sat on the Secretary of State’s desk gathering dust. The Government are hiding behind the process. I was part of the process, and it is in the Secretary of State’s gift—it is up to him to make the assessment. We are in an energy crisis, and he could speed things up if he chose to do so. Jackdaw alone could produce enough gas to heat more than 1.5 million homes. Labour’s Chancellor commended Norway and Canada for drilling more—[Interruption.] That is what she said last week. She said that
“every country has got to play their part”
by generating more oil and gas. Government Members should ask themselves why their party position seems to be to support the oil and gas industry anywhere but Britain.
Ms Polly Billington (East Thanet) (Lab)
Does the right hon. Lady agree with her shadow Energy Minister, the hon. Member for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine (Andrew Bowie), when he said:
“Look, nobody’s saying that net zero was a mistake. Net zero in the round was the eminently sensible thing to do. We need to decarbonise and we need to have an ambitious target to aim for”?
Claire Coutinho
I would thank the hon. Lady, but I do not think it takes much effort to read out a Whip’s question. The question she needs to answer is why she is supporting a policy that will increase British emissions. She is supporting a policy that means we are importing goods with higher emissions.
I have laid out five bad arguments that have been thoroughly disproved by people outside this Chamber whom the Government supposedly respect. Those five bad arguments spun by the Secretary of State should be consigned to history. What the North sea can give us is what it has been doing all along: stronger energy security, a stronger environment and a stronger economy. Are those not things that we want the next generation to have? The question that the Government need to answer is this: what reason do RenewableUK or their very own chair of Great British Energy have to back the North sea if it does not give us those very things? Maybe—just maybe—it is time for the Government to admit that their Secretary of State has approached his role with a dangerous, blinkered ideology, rather than being interested in the national interest. Perhaps even they realise that they are once more being marched up the hill on the wrong side of history and on the wrong side of public opinion, when we all know that there will be an inevitable U-turn from the Prime Minister and the Chancellor in a few weeks’ time.
It is mad at the best of times not to want to make the most of our own resources. The idea that one should ban industry if it does not change prices in this country is, let us be clear, an argument to shut down all business in this country. There are benefits to making things in Britain: jobs, tax revenue and self-reliance. The Labour party used to understand that.
Sir Alec Shelbrooke (Wetherby and Easingwold) (Con)
On that point about security and growing energy at home, I am sure that my right hon. Friend shares my concern that in the push for renewables, we are entirely reliant on the processing being done in China on the other side of the world. The Government talk about not being reliant on petrochemical dictators, but they seem perfectly happy to be reliant on renewable dictators.
Claire Coutinho
My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. In the trade wars that we saw last year, China limited the export of several rare earth minerals that are critical components in the renewable supply chain. An energy system that is dominated by renewables is one that is completely reliant on China, and that is why we think it is the wrong approach. It is mad at the best of times not to want to make the most of our own resources, but in the middle of a supply crisis, it is completely unforgivable. Yet that is exactly what Labour MPs will vote for today. They are on the wrong side of history on this one. They should put their disastrous Secretary of State’s zealotry to one side, fast-track Rosebank and Jackdaw, reverse their disastrous bans and taxes, and put our energy resilience over their narrow political interests by backing the North sea.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
I thank the shadow Minister and the Conservative party for bringing this subject forward. My constituents tell me very clearly, “If we have oil, let’s dig it, let’s drill it and let’s make sure that we get the opportunity from it.” Is it not ludicrous for the Labour party to let Norway get all the assets from the drilling and let us get nothing, when it is coming from the same bed? For the Labour party to have that policy is ludicrous. It goes against the will of the people and against the will of us those of us on the Opposition Benches of this Parliament. I think the Minister should take a review of this decision.
Claire Coutinho
I think those are the strongest words I have heard from the hon. Member in my entire time in Parliament, and the Government would be wise to heed them. At the moment, we share the same basin with Norway. Last year, Norway drilled 46 new wells and made 21 new discoveries, while we drilled zero wells for the first time since 1964. This is exactly the same basin. There is not a geological difference; it is a political line drawn down the middle. It is quite clear that it is the approach of Labour and the Secretary of State that is driving the industry into the ground.
Stephen Flynn (Aberdeen South) (SNP)
One reason that Norway is so successful is the certainty that is applied to its tax regime in respect of oil and gas drilling. The Conservatives’ motion, as I read it, seeks to remove the energy profits levy. As a point of clarity, can the right hon. Lady be clear with the House as to whether she would want that to be replaced by the oil and gas price mechanism, as suggested by so many in the industry in Aberdeen?
Claire Coutinho
I know that the right hon. Gentleman’s party has a chequered past in backing the North sea, but I would be happy to work with anyone to look at how we can support the industry.
My position is clear. At the moment, we are taxing companies at a marginal rate of 100%, we are banning new licences—the only country in the world to do so—and we are making ourselves more reliant on dirtier gas from abroad, when we could be using our own resources and taking in £25 billion of tax receipts. That is why I urge the Labour party—the party that used to be the party of workers, the party of industry and the party that understood aspiration in this country—to put itself on the right side of history and vote for the motion today.
Pippa Heylings (South Cambridgeshire) (LD)
We need to be clear that this energy crisis is, in effect, an oil and gas crisis and shows us yet again just how dangerous our overdependence on fossil fuels is. Just as with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the middle east conflict shows how a single geopolitical escalation can send energy prices soaring, leaving households and businesses here in the UK exposed to shocks beyond their control. History is now in danger of repeating itself: families struggling with higher gas, petrol and food prices while energy companies’ profits surge. Forecasts from Cornwall Insight suggest that, if the conflict continues, energy bills could rise by £332 this July—a £332 Trump war tax on our energy bills.
Yet what do we see in the Conservative response? More drilling, more dependence, more of the rollercoaster of volatile fossil fuel prices. Alongside Reform UK, the Conservatives who are here today to mislead the public on the need to “Drill, baby, drill” are the same ones who were gung-ho in urging the Prime Minister to join Trump in the illegal war that caused this very crisis.
Claire Coutinho
Can the hon. Lady explain why the production of oil and gas makes us more reliant on the consumption of oil and gas? Will she consider the example of Norway, which, despite exporting oil and gas, and getting tax revenue from it, has high electric vehicle penetration? Why does she conflate these issues?
Pippa Heylings
I believe that the Minister answered that question. Norway has a very different system, and it made different decisions about consumption, based on the faster and greater adoption of techniques and heat pumps. The dither and delay under the previous Conservative Government meant that we did not move forward and reduce consumption.
The truth is that expanding oil and gas production in the North sea—a mature basin from which we have already extracted 93% of resource—would do nothing to cut people’s energy bills, because any oil and gas extracted is sold on international markets to the highest bidder. Nor would it influence global prices, given that the UK can contribute only a tiny fraction of the global supply, even if new licences were granted. It would neither cut bills nor increase the security of supply.
Research by Uplift shows that fields licensed by the previous Conservative Government over 14 years have produced just over a month’s worth of gas to date. Energy security is national security; as long as we rely on fossil fuels, we rely on foreign dictators and petrostates. Trump’s national security report was clear: he will use his gas to project power, turning it on and off at will. The Conservatives and Reform have shown that when Trump says “jump”, they ask, “How high?” That is not energy security; it is energy surrender.
Anneliese Dodds (Oxford East) (Lab/Co-op)
I will start by thanking the North sea oil workers now and in the past. I recently read the book “Black Eden” by Richard T. Kelly—perhaps others have read it, too. On just about every single page, I was reminded of people I know, or people I knew in my childhood in Aberdeenshire—the incredible innovators, the divers who risked their lives every single time they entered the water, and the workers on the rigs spending weeks away from their families. They deserve our thanks and recognition. What they do not deserve is histrionics, slogans rather than a plan and to not be taken seriously. They have not been taken seriously by the Opposition motion today.
The Opposition motion misrepresents the industry that North sea oil workers are in. It fails to set out a path towards sustainable employment for them and for their kids and grandkids—and, by the way, they do care about their children’s employment in Aberdeen. It also ignores the need to get energy bills down, let alone to tackle the climate emergency. The claims made in the motion that these measures would somehow boost employment and reduce bills are farcical.
Claire Coutinho
Since I went to Aberdeen recently to talk to workers and to grandparents and their children, I would like to ask the right hon. Lady, when was the last time she spoke to workers in Aberdeen?
Anneliese Dodds
Well, I can answer that very quickly, because many of them are in my family and among my friends. The shadow Secretary of State said before that she had visited Aberdeen. I found it extraordinary that when the Liberal Democrat spokesperson, the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Pippa Heylings), mentioned the fact that jobs in oil and gas extraction fell by a third between 2014 and 2023, she would not even acknowledge it—she looked stunned. Well, I can tell her that for workers in that area, those job losses were painful. Every bust has been painful, and she should acknowledge that, rather than pretending it did not even happen. People who are working in that industry deserve a proper strategy for their future, not magical thinking and empty sloganeering.
Carla Denyer (Bristol Central) (Green)
There is simply no case for opening new oil and gas wells in the North sea, for approving Rosebank and Jackdaw, or for removing the windfall tax from oil and gas companies. It is inaccurate, irresponsible and immoral for the shadow Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for East Surrey (Claire Coutinho), to suggest otherwise in her motion. Expanding North sea drilling will do nothing to support UK energy security or jobs, as the Lib Dem spokesperson—the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Pippa Heylings)—and the right hon. Member for Oxford East (Anneliese Dodds) laid out very clearly in their speeches.
Carla Denyer
Those Members answered the challenges from the shadow Secretary of State, so I will move on, given the limit on time.
Given that the measures proposed in the motion will not secure our energy supply, protect jobs or bring down bills, what will drilling more oil and gas from the North sea do? It will undo so much progress we have made in cutting greenhouse gas emissions. We are proud to have ended polluting coal power in the UK—indeed, I thought the shadow Secretary of State was proud of that—but allowing Rosebank would be the equivalent of running 56 coal-fired power stations for a year, undoing all that good work. Drilling more oil and gas from the North sea will also make some people a lot of money, including those on the Reform and Conservative Benches who take dirty money from fossil fuel donors.
Carla Denyer
No, I will not, thank you—I will carry on. [Interruption.] Fine, I will give way.
Claire Coutinho
I thank the hon. Lady for giving way. Could she explain why the biggest advocates for climate transition in this country—RenewableUK, Greg Jackson from Octopus and the chair of Great British Energy—say that she is wrong?
Carla Denyer
I beg the right hon. Lady’s pardon, but they say I am wrong about what?
Claire Coutinho
They say that the hon. Lady’s position on the North sea is wrong, and that we should keep drilling there.
Carla Denyer
My reliance is on the evidence, which shows that 93% of recoverable oil and gas in the British parts of the North sea has already been extracted. Whatever does remain will be sold on the international market to the highest bidder, as many Members have already pointed out. If the proposals in the shadow Secretary of State’s motion were implemented, they would do nothing for energy security and nothing for jobs.
Oral Answers to Questions
Claire Coutinho Excerpts(5 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Claire Coutinho (East Surrey) (Con)
Thank you, Mr Speaker, and it is great to see you back on your feet.
Last week, the Labour party voted to increase the carbon tax, which increases costs for households and industry, and those costs have already doubled because of its policies. It is absolutely shameful for the Government to say that they have had no impact on the carbon tax whatsoever. It now accounts for over 10% of household electricity bills, and the rise is in effect a £5 billion a year tax on the British economy. Can the Minister explain why the Labour party wants to tax our industrial jobs out of existence, leaving Britain reliant on dirtier imports from abroad?
Chris McDonald
I am not sure if the shadow Secretary of State is conflating the various carbon taxes with the emissions trading scheme, but to be clear: the Government do not set or comment on the value of the carbon in the emissions trading scheme. That is a matter for the market. It is of course a policy on which the previous Government were very keen, because it drives the most efficient forms of decarbonisation. Ultimately, it places a price on carbon emissions that ensures private capital floods into the right places to decarbonise, as we have seen so successfully with the power sector in the UK.
Claire Coutinho (East Surrey) (Con)
Last year, the Secretary of State signed a secret energy deal with China, which he has refused to publish. This is simply unheard of. We have heard repeatedly from intelligence services that China might seek to disrupt our energy system, so it is crucial that the public get to see what he has signed us up to. Will the Secretary of State commit to publishing the full text of his secret energy deal with China, and if not, will he tell the House what it is that he is trying to hide?
Ed Miliband
May I give the right hon. Lady a piece of advice? Wacky conspiracy theories that she gets on the internet are no substitute for a proper policy.
Claire Coutinho
That is frankly another patronising non-answer from the Secretary of State. I am not sure whether he got the memo, but his party is fed up with the sexist boys club. What is crucial is that the public have lost faith in the Labour party. This is a serious moment. Does he accept that when he stands at the Dispatch Box and tells the public that by his calculation their bills are falling, not rising, they simply do not believe him? Does he also accept that when he does not set out what any of his plans—such as doubling the carbon tax or clean power 2030—will do to bills, he makes a mockery of his party’s pretence that it cares about the cost of living? Does he not reflect on all this—the £300 nonsense pledge, the Great British Energy fig leaf—and realise that when it comes to loss of trust, he is not their salvation but their problem?
Ed Miliband
We will take no lectures from the right hon. Lady on the cost of living crisis, because her Government presided over the worst cost of living crisis in generations. Let me tell her what we are doing: £150 off bills; the warm home discount extended; the warm homes plan. We have done more in 18 months to cut bills for people than they did in 14 years.
Offshore Wind
Claire Coutinho Excerpts(6 months, 1 week ago)
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Claire Coutinho (East Surrey) (Con)
I thank the Secretary of State for advance sight of his statement.
What the Secretary of State has done today has given a massive boost to the profits of multimillion-pound energy companies, but will be paid for by consumers through their bills. What do the prices show us? First, wind power is not getting cheaper as promised. These are the highest prices that we have seen in a decade. Today’s strike prices, in a like-for-like comparison, are much higher than last year’s prices. If we use the Secretary of State’s own figures on the worth of the contract extension—he extended it to 20 years—the prices are 24% more expensive than last year’s. That is an enormous year-on-year increase, which is much higher than inflation.
Can the Secretary of State explain why building a wind farm has suddenly got so much more expensive? Well, I can. It is because by setting himself completely unrealistic targets, he advertised to multimillion-pound wind developers that he would be buying whatever they were selling, no matter the cost. He flexed all the rules, he extended their contracts, and he gave the wind developers everything they wanted, and they repaid him with the most expensive prices for wind power that we have seen in a decade.
The Secretary of State wants us to celebrate the fact that he bought a bumper round—in his own words, the “biggest in history”. Let us take his key argument on levelised cost of electricity. If he had looked at or replied to any of the letters that I have sent him, he would know that I did not agree with using a LCOE to compare wind power and gas power. He will know that I started—[Interruption.] He might want to listen to this; he might learn something. He will know that I started a full systems cost, which he cancelled, even though I urged him to continue it. That is because the full cost of these contracts to the consumer is £95 in today’s money, plus inflation and the extra costs that come with wind, such as turning off the turbines when it is too windy, having a back-up gas plant when it is not windy enough, and connecting the turbines to the grid. He has underplayed the true cost of wind in people’s bills. By the way, it is not just me saying that this is how we should look at cost; wind developers say the same. Sir Dieter Helm and senior economists say that we should look at the full systems cost.
When the Secretary of State talks about the comparison with a new gas power plant, he is wilfully ignoring the fact that he needs to build new gas plants anyway. What does he think will power the country on wintry days when the sun does not shine and the wind does not blow? Even his own plans acknowledge that it is gas power. In his plans, he will build the same amount of gas plants anyway, but he will just run them 4% of the time. Would anyone here buy a house that they use 4% of the time? Well, I guess out of all of us, it is probably the Secretary of State who would.
Here is the problem: the Secretary of State is having to build more and more capacity, lots of which will sit idle most of the time, which means higher costs for a less productive energy system. These are all costs that the Secretary of State is choosing to ignore, but even if we use the figures that he is quoting today, which underplay the cost of wind, the truth is there. If we take out the carbon tax that he is choosing to impose, the cost of a gas power plant running fully is roughly a third cheaper than offshore wind. That is written in black and white on page 33 of the report, if hon. Members would like to check. He is hoping that Labour Members will not read what he has published today, but I hope that they do, because it should be facts, not ideology, that drive the decisions that we make for our energy system.
People out there are at breaking point. They get up every day, they go to work, and everything they earn is being eaten up by Labour’s taxes and their bills. Last time we spoke across the Dispatch Box, the Secretary of State tried to tell me that people’s energy bills are going down, not up. Nobody out there believes him. Energy bills have gone up five times under him because of his policies, and now he is celebrating this botched wind auction that has seen him sign up to the highest prices for wind power for a decade—prices close to 20% higher than the cost of electricity.
The question is: how on earth can the Secretary of State bring bills down with these higher prices? That is what people were promised. This will be the private finance initiative of the energy system, and it will be in place long after he has gone from this place. I warned him that if he set himself completely unrealistic targets, the wind developers would have him over a barrel, and that is what has happened. He talks about fossil fuel spikes, but he does not talk about the ongoing de-industrialisation of this country because of uncompetitive electricity prices—prices that he is locking us into for two decades.
I have three simple questions for the Secretary of State. Will he finally publish a full systems cost of clean power 2030? Will he confirm that he will still need to build gas power plants for dispatchable power? If that is not his policy, what will keep the lights on when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine? Does he have a forecast for the constraint payments, and how much does he expect to pay wind developers to turn off when it is too windy?
Ed Miliband
The right hon. Lady says from a sedentary position that gas is falling, but she is just making a gamble. At the time of the greatest geopolitical instability in a generation, she is gambling on stability. I am not going to make that gamble. We will have home-grown clean power, and we are going to take back control.
Oral Answers to Questions
Claire Coutinho Excerpts(6 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Claire Coutinho (East Surrey) (Con)
Happy new year, Mr Speaker.
This is just nonsense on stilts from the Secretary of State, and we know this because the biggest AI company in the world has said that it will need gas power to succeed in Britain. If a company wants to build its own gas plant here, at no cost to the British taxpayer, the warped green ideology of this Secretary of State, who is obsessed with domestic emissions above everything else, will block it. Those emissions will still exist, as that company will start somewhere, just not here in Britain. Does he agree that that is a completely mad reason to block the growth we need in Britain?
Ed Miliband
I do not really understand what the question was about, but we are in favour of AI and we are working with our colleagues on AI. I have to say that I am glad the right hon. Lady rose to speak on this question, because she has been rumbled by the figures I produced; they came out when she was the Energy Secretary. She goes around saying how much more expensive renewable power is, but the figures that she produced show that renewable power is cheaper to build and operate than gas-fired power stations. She used to believe that, until she jumped on the latest passing bandwagon to suddenly be a net zero sceptic.
Claire Coutinho (East Surrey) (Con)
It is freezing cold outside, and people are worried about their energy bills, yet on top of all the other costs the Secretary of State has lumped on to people’s bills, it is reported that he is about to tax people with gas boilers to pay for people having heat pumps. Can he definitively rule this out for the rest of this Parliament: no new taxes on people heating their homes?
Ed Miliband
I can absolutely rule out that we are going to introduce new levies to the energy system in the warm homes plan. Those reports are complete nonsense. I can tell the shadow Secretary of State that the warm homes plan is going to turn the page on a decade of the Conservatives’ failure, because we are going to invest where they did not, we have a plan where they did not, we will have proper oversight and regulation where they did not, and we will tackle the cost of living crisis they caused—
Mr Speaker
Order. Secretary of State, we are on topicals. I know you want to get carried away, but, please, the new year does not allow for it.
Claire Coutinho
The rumours are that the Secretary of State is pitching himself to be the next Chancellor. He did not rule out taxes on people heating their homes for this Parliament, he is shutting down the North sea, there is a disastrous EU energy deal and a secret deal with China, the industry is fleeing in its droves and energy bills have risen five times on his watch. Does this not show that he has to be the only person in the country who could do a worse job than the current Chancellor?
Ed Miliband
Dear, oh dear, oh dear. What can I say to that, Mr Speaker?
Budget Resolutions
Claire Coutinho Excerpts(7 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Ed Miliband
I will not, for a few minutes. The result is new jobs building wind turbines at Siemens Gamesa in Hull, new jobs making transformers in Stafford, new jobs making heat pumps in Derby, and new jobs at Sumitomo’s new factory at the Port of Nigg—some of the 400,000 additional clean energy jobs that we expect our mission to support by 2030. That is the difference.
What is the Conservatives’ policy? They want to rip up the Climate Change Act 2008 and abandon net zero by 2050, which was their legacy. As a result, they have been roundly condemned by British business. Energy UK says that abandoning that target will scare off investors. The Confederation of British Industry says that it is a “backwards step”, because the Climate Change Act is
“the bedrock for investment flowing into the UK”.
Baroness May—they do not like to talk about her—called it a “catastrophic mistake”. And get this: even Boris Johnson —rarely have I quoted Boris Johnson—says that
“in my party, it’s all about bashing the green agenda, and personally I don’t think we’ll get elected on…saying what rubbish net zero is.”
Normally—I have experience of this—Oppositions stick by what they did right in government, and trash what they did wrong. The right hon. Member for East Surrey (Claire Coutinho) is pursuing a novel approach to opposition: trash anything that they did right, and double down on everything that they did wrong. Nowhere is that more true than in our dependence on fossil fuels.
At this point, I express my sincere thanks to the right hon. Lady’s colleague on the Front Bench, the hon. Member for South Suffolk (James Cartlidge), who sadly is not here. Last week, I was talking about the causes of the energy bills crisis of 2021. He shouted out—I checked Hansard—“Because Putin invaded Ukraine!”. Obviously, he is one of the finest minds on the Opposition Front Bench, and he is right about that, but he has given the game away. This relates to affordability and this Budget debate. The lesson from the worst cost of living crisis in generations is this: it came about because Putin invaded Ukraine. What was the cause of higher bills? Why were we worse hit than many others? Because we were so exposed to fossil fuels. It was not the price of renewables that soared; it was the price of gas, including from the North sea, priced and sold on the international market. That is what happens when we do not have clean, home-grown power, and when we are at the mercy of petro states and dictators. What is the strategy of right hon. Member for East Surrey now? To double down on the Conservatives’ failure. She literally says that we should cancel the allocation round 7 auction.
Ed Miliband
Yes, the right hon. Lady says. The Conservatives are the people who lost it all in the fossil fuel casino, and now they say, “Let me just have one more go at the roulette wheel. This time it will be different. Cross your fingers and hope for the best.” Let us think about this. What are they betting on? In today’s world, at this moment of all moments, with the world at its most perilous for generations, their policy is to cross their fingers and hope for everlasting peace in the world and no geopolitical instability.
Claire Coutinho (East Surrey) (Con)
That was a fine performance, but anyone listening to it out there will think that the Secretary of State is in cloud cuckoo land. The Government have taxed working families up the wazoo. They have taxed tens of thousands of people out of their jobs. They are clobbering them left, right and centre with rising bills, and for what? It is not for growth—no, there is none of that coming—but so that they can go on a welfare spending spree.
In the election, Labour promised the public that it would not lift the two-child benefit cap, just like it promised that it would not raise taxes on working people. It has broken promise after promise, and it has fudged the reasons why, to say the least. In this debate, the Government want a thank you from the public because they have handed them back a tiny fraction of the money that they took from them. I can tell you that the public are thinking of a phrase that ends in “you”—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
Order. The shadow Secretary of State knows not to use the word “you” when she is obviously not referring to me.
Claire Coutinho
The public are thinking of a phrase that ends in “you”, but the first word is not “thank”. The Government want to talk about the cost of living, but they are clobbering low and middle earners with tax rises and higher bills. That is why the majority of the country says that this Budget will leave their family worse off. The majority of the country has also said that they think the Budget is unfair. The Secretary of State talked about fairness, but the public do not feel that it is fair, and they are right. All the things that hurt disposable income are up: inflation, bills and taxes are up. The things that help—growth and employment—are down. Household disposable income has been revised downwards because of this Budget.
Ms Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)
The shadow Secretary of State wants to talk about fairness. One of the practical consequences of retaining the two-child cap was that in order to be exempted from it, 3,000 women had to declare to a Department for Work and Pensions official that they had been raped. [Interruption.] An Opposition Member is saying “wind up”. Will the shadow Secretary of State clarify why she thinks that measure would be fair?
Claire Coutinho
The hon. Member makes an impassioned case, but why did Government Members not make it at the election? Why did the Government remove the Whip from seven Labour MPs who voted against keeping the cap last year? Why did the Government make all Labour MPs vote to keep the cap, including the Secretary of State? That is the question that Members need to ask. The Government want to be known for having helped people with the cost of living. They must think that the public are stupid. Everyone out there can see that everything that the Government are doing is making the cost of living worse. They do not understand the basics, and the situation is apparently so bad that No. 10 has been giving Back Benchers lessons about Government debt. Given that we have seen Labour Back Benchers cheer at two job-killing Budgets, perhaps the Government need to expand the curriculum.
Wendy Morton
Is it not the truth that we have in front of us not the Budget of the Chancellor, the Prime Minister or the Cabinet, but the Budget of the Back Benchers?
Claire Coutinho
My right hon. Friend is right, and here is the problem: this Budget might have made the Back Benchers happy, but it is not the Budget that they promised at the election. Let me help them. To start with inflation, we left Labour with inflation back under control at 2%. That took difficult decisions, which needless to say Labour opposed, but it was important to do that because inflation hurts: it picks the pockets of families who find themselves working just as hard but able to afford less and less. However, under Labour, inflation has doubled thanks to the choices it made at the last Budget.
We have now broken away from our international peers—Labour Members can check the graphs—and we have significantly higher inflation than Europe and the United States. In fact, we have the highest inflation of any major economy, and the OBR has said that, compared with March, it now expects inflation to be higher for longer. Why? It is because Labour has chosen to make the cost of energy and the cost of food more expensive, and to pursue policies that will push up rent. People’s weekly shop is up because of Labour’s choices: taxes upon taxes—a jobs tax, a packaging tax, a family farm tax. These are Labour’s choices, and they mean that the average family will pay almost £300 more for their groceries this year. With Labour’s war on farmers, is it any surprise that a pack of mince, a family staple, is up 40% this year alone?
Let us take housing: rent is going up by £700 this year for the average renter. Labour does not understand that a lower supply of homes to rent means higher rents, yet it is written in black and white in the OBR document that its new housing taxes risk
“a steady long-term rise in rents”.
Labour’s choices mean that the cost of going away on a family holiday will set people back up to £400 extra because of its flight tax. Those choices mean that food will cost £300 more, rent will cost £700 more and holidays will cost £400 more—that is £1,400 more and I have not even got to energy bills or taxes yet. On energy, where do we even start?
Peter Swallow (Bracknell) (Lab)
The right hon. Lady has repeatedly suggested that energy bills are going up—[Interruption.] If she does not believe me, perhaps she will believe Martin Lewis, the money-saving expert, who tweeted earlier today:
“I’ve just got the new predictions for the April Price Cap, which is a cut in cost of 4.2%. Without the Budget changes, it would be predicted to be rising 3.5%.”
Will she correct the record and explain why she does not support the work that we are doing to cut energy bills?
Claire Coutinho
I will come to what Martin Lewis says about the hon. Gentleman’s party’s policies in a second.
Labour promised £300 off energy bills, but bills have gone up by £200 instead. Going by his own election promise, the Secretary of State owes the public a £500 cut. Why have those bills gone up? It is because of the costs introduced by the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero. Hon. Members do not have to take my word for it—they can just listen to Martin Lewis, who says that wholesale prices have plummeted but energy bills are up because there are countless costs landing on those bills thanks to the Secretary of State—[Interruption.] The hon. Member for Bracknell (Peter Swallow) wanted to talk about Martin Lewis a second ago but he does not want to hear about him now.
Among those costs are the cost of backing up wind farms and switching them off when it is too windy, all the grid costs that are multiple times higher because of the system that Labour is creating, the warm home discount that everyone is paying for through their bills, the carbon tax that has gone up by 70% this year, and the tax on gas to pay for hydrogen that is coming in January. I am not sure whether Labour Back Benchers know about all these costs, but they add up to hundreds of pounds extra. No wonder the Secretary of State never did a costing; he did not want anyone to know the truth. He is piling hundreds and hundreds of pounds on to energy bills, and now he wants a round of applause for this £150 off them.
Paul Waugh (Rochdale) (Lab/Co-op)
On that point, will the right hon. Lady give way?
Claire Coutinho
Let us talk about that £150. If someone has a gas boiler, the figure is £130. I remind the Secretary of State that that is almost everybody in the country. Oh yes, and if they pay tax, the amount has not come off—it has just been moved from their energy bill to their tax bill. Most importantly, that amount does not even touch the sides of what this Secretary of State will cost people in the end. Like so much of what Labour says, it is just sleight of hand. The real question is this: since the election, have bills gone up or down? The answer is up.
The Secretary of State should be honest that this policy was never part of his plan. It is not part of Great British Energy or clean power 2030—all the things that he promised would lower bills. In fact, it is a tacit admission that he has failed. The centre knows that his plan cannot lower bills. In fact, if the reporting is correct, the Secretary of State fought against the policy, but he has been forced into it, because his promise to cut bills by £300 has become a national embarrassment to them all. It is taxpayers who are bailing him out to the tune of £7 billion.
Lloyd Hatton (South Dorset) (Lab)
Does the right hon. Lady not share the concerns already articulated by the Confederation of British Industry that simply to scrap the Climate Change Act and the important work of this Government in pursuing net zero targets would be a “backwards step”? That would actually be to the detriment of people’s energy bills and inward investment into our economy and would kill off jobs. Those are the words of the CBI, after all.
Claire Coutinho
We can exchange quotes, but the hon. Gentleman might want to—[Interruption.] Let me respond. He can go and check the quotes of the most respected energy economist in the country, Sir Dieter Helm, who says that the Government’s plan is locking people into higher bills for longer. One of the fundamental problems we have in this country is that energy costs are too high, and the Secretary of State is locking people into those higher prices for longer. If the Government truly want to cut bills for everyone, they should use our cheap power plan.
Do you know what is extraordinary, Madam Deputy Speaker? The Government have come up with a package that costs the Exchequer more, cuts bills by less and does nothing to cut energy bills for struggling businesses. Food bills are up. Rents are up. The costs of holidays are up. Energy bills are up. That is cost after cost after cost because of the Government’s policies, and they want a round of applause for moving a fraction of those costs off energy bills and straight on to people’s tax bills. Only people with the Labour party’s grasp of numbers could think that that is a good deal. The Secretary of State says that there is an affordability crisis, but he does not explain the cause; the Government are the cause. That is before we even get to tax.
Taxes on student loans, taxes on income, taxes on saving, taxes on housing, taxes on driving, taxes on pensions, and even taxes on taxis—if Labour could, it would tax the air that we breathe. Taxes are rising more in this Parliament than in any since the 1970s. The freeze in income tax thresholds means that the average worker on £35,000 a year will lose £1,000 in tax by the end of the decade. That is an extra two weeks they will be working, not to feed their family but to pay for Labour’s benefits bill.
Let us be clear. When the Government say that they are asking for a contribution, they are not asking, are they? It is not like anyone can say no. I do not know whether there has ever been a more irritating formulation of words than that phrase, which we have heard so much over this weekend.
There will be so many people out there who will look at this Budget and think, “Why do I bother? Why do I get up at 5.30 am? Why do I work overtime? Why do I barely see my family? Why am I going to pay more tax for people on benefits who are not working those hours?”
Kevin Bonavia (Stevenage) (Lab)
The right hon. Lady says that people will pay for people on benefits, but some 60% of those people on benefits are working. Does she not agree that we are supporting people into work?
Claire Coutinho
Let me make this point to the hon. Gentleman. The average person on benefits in work is working 20 hours, sometimes less. Why should a family with kids who are not well off and are working 40, 50 or 60 hours a week be worse off than a family on benefits working far fewer hours?
I quit a job in the City to go to work for the Centre for Social Justice and work with people fighting poverty, and I have worked with struggling families in some way since I was 16. It is not compassionate to make welfare pay more than work. It is not a helping hand; it is a trap.
The Government should also talk to the many couples who have put off having children or stopped at one or two children because they cannot afford it. Younger brothers and sisters simply will not be born. Those missing children are a personal tragedy for every couple who are having to make that choice, but there will be more of those decisions, because the Government are loading more and more costs and taxes on to hard-working families.
Lloyd Hatton
Can the right hon. Lady explain to the House what it would mean for the 1,360 children in her constituency, and the nearly 1,700 children in my constituency, who would remain in levels of relative poverty if we chose to pursue the two-child benefit cap for many more years, as she is suggesting?
Claire Coutinho
We have a fundamental difference in belief. Labour Members believe the best way out of poverty is welfare; I think the best way is jobs and growth, but the Government are killing those things.
The problem with the Labour party, as we can see from its policies, is that it clearly thinks the only answer to the cost of living is redistribution, even past the point at which there will be no one left to redistribute from. Conservative Members know that jobs, low taxes and low costs improve the quality of life, but the Government are killing those jobs—every month under them, parents are losing their jobs. What do Labour Members think the cost of living is like for those families who have lost their salaries under this Labour Government? There are 170,000 fewer people on the payroll since the election. Young people cannot get a foot on the jobs ladder—because of this Government, the cost of hiring a young person has gone up by £4,000. They say they are raising the minimum wage, but they are crushing businesses’ ability to pay for it. The result is hiring freezes and redundancies, and for all those people just above the minimum wage who are also struggling, there will be no money left for wage progression. The best way to improve living standards is growth, but this was not a Budget for growth; it was a Budget for Labour Back Benchers. That is why it did not contain a single growth measure.
Labour’s entire approach to the economy has been to raise the cost of basic goods, to raise taxes, and to crush wages and employment. The Government are expecting a shrinking group of hard-working taxpayers to pay for more redistribution, to cover the costs that they are choosing to impose on the public. In the words of one Labour Cabinet Minister, this Budget has been a “disaster”. Those are not my words—according to a No. 10 source, they think they are the words of the Secretary of State. Labour will not be known as the party helping people with the cost of living; it will be known as the party that has broken its promises to working people, broken its promises on tax and on bills, and broken the social contract that sees work pay more than welfare.
Several hon. Members rose—