Green Investment Bank

Clive Lewis Excerpts

Wednesday 11th January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hurd]

I agree with my hon. Friend’s opening comments about saluting what has been a great success story of the coalition—let us maintain the season of good will—but Conservative-led Government. It was the right thing to set up; it was we who did it; and it has been a great success, having mobilised £8 billion of private capital into a critical area of infrastructure, according to the last figures. I can, however, assure him—he is far too experienced to be drawn or influenced too much by media speculation—that we are not being naive in this process. We have set clear criteria for the sale. We have run a genuinely competitive process, and we are now evaluating the proposals before us, through the lens of the criteria we have set, which include value for money and reclassification. We are selling a going concern, and what we want to hear about are forward plans for a dynamic, ongoing concern seeking to mobilise more private capital into the green economy. He knows as well as anyone in the House that we need to mobilise a lot of private sector capital to get the clean energy we need.

[Clive Lewis (Norwich South) (Lab)]

I hope the Minister would agree that the GIB is a great British success story—he has already said as much—but let us put the record straight: it is also a Labour success story, having first appeared in our 2010 manifesto, and I am glad that the coalition Government took it up. If it is a success story, however, why are they selling it off? Is it simply a case of “public good, private bad”? That is what we think on the Opposition Benches, but Conservatives think it is “private good, public bad”. I am telling the House, quite simply, that from the assessment of Macquarie and what we have seen of it, we see that it has a history of asset stripping, so how exactly will the Minister protect this valuable public institution from having its assets sold off? That is a very fair question.

We know that the Government had planned to hold a share in the bank, which would have helped to maintain its green purposes, but new evidence has shown that Macquarie has already set up new companies that will control the GIB’s major assets. Will the Minister elaborate on the purpose of those companies and what oversight the Government will have of them once the sale goes through? The Prime Minister told us that the industrial strategy would be at the heart of her Government, yet the Government are now selling off an institution that has succeeded, from scratch and against the odds, in attracting capital for our green infrastructure on commercial lines. The Minister has already been outmanoeuvred by Macquarie bank and, frankly, we do not have much confidence that it will not happen again. Will the Government agree to stop the sale of the Green Investment Bank today until such time as its green purpose and core assets can be genuinely protected? If the Minister will not, does he accept that the GIB’s fate rests on his shoulders?

[Mr Hurd]

I will pass over the bizarre claim that the GIB is a Labour success story by virtue of its simply being mentioned in a 2010 manifesto, with nothing done for 13 years in government prior to that. This meant that in 2010, we started with far too low levels of clean energy in this country—a situation transformed by the coalition Government.

Again, I caution Members against making assumptions on the basis of speculation in the media, and I am not going to comment on that or identify any bidders.

The hon. Gentleman reflects the different view across the House about the benefits and values of the private sector. He should be aware, holding the position that he does, that we need to mobilise a huge amount of private capital. It is private capital, not public capital, that is going to make the difference when it comes to the big shift in infrastructure. What he misses is the critical role that the state has played in setting up the GIB to correct a market failure.

The fact that we have run a competitive process and that private sector bidders have come up and said, “We want to buy this as a going concern because of its green specialism,” indicates that the market failure has, to a large extent, been corrected. The fact that this institution has mobilised billions of pounds of private capital into this critically important area of infrastructure is a success story. Our whole instinct now is that because we want it to do more, it will do more and be an even more successful institution in the private sector as a going concern.