Green GB Week and Clean Growth

Diana Johnson Excerpts

Monday 15th October 2018 Commons Chamber

[Claire Perry]

My hon. Friend has already made a powerful case for investment in geothermal. In many constituencies, we have old mine workings and we have some pockets with natural currents of geothermal—the hon. Member for Southampton, Test (Dr Whitehead) has worked hard on that in the past. We do have some opportunities to extract relatively warm water and to use it for district heating. Indeed, one of the announcements I made today was about how we are going to bring forward some of the competitions to improve the way we collect waste heat and potentially reuse it. The projects in hon. Friend’s constituency are interesting, and I am sure he will continue to make strong representations about them.

[Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)]

In terms of joined-up Government, I wonder whether the Minister has had an opportunity to discuss Clean GB Week with the Transport Secretary, who seems to be merrily cancelling rail electrification schemes in favour of polluting bimodal trains.

[Claire Perry]

I think that is a little unfair, because the bimodal trains that have been put in place have substantially lower CO₂ emissions than the diesels they are replacing. The hon. Lady will know better than most the economic benefit that can come from this clean growth transition, because she has the new Siemens wind turbine factory in her constituency, creating many relatively well-paid, highly productive jobs, and we want to see a lot more of that.

In terms of the transport industry, I am very struck that, in Europe, we are able to push at the maximum envelope for ambition because of our “Road to Zero” strategy. We are pushing the envelope when it comes to transport emissions.