Oral Answers to Questions

Edward Miliband Excerpts

Tuesday 10th November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Alok Sharma]

My hon. Friend is a great champion of manufacturers in his constituency. As he will know, the Government are committed to helping businesses to reduce their costs through resource and energy efficiency. We have established a package of compensation exemptions from electricity costs worth more than £470 million, which will of course benefit businesses in energy-intensive sectors such as ceramics, which is a particularly important industry for Stoke-on-Trent.

[Edward Miliband (Doncaster North) (Lab)]

One obvious way to help our manufacturers is with a green stimulus equal to the scale of the economic emergency that we face. President-elect Biden has pledged $2 trillion for such a stimulus; the French and German Governments have pledged tens of billions of euros; and Britain has pledged just £5 billion. Will the Secretary of State tell us when this Government are going to show the same scale of ambition—not in 10 years’ time but now—to create hundreds of thousands of jobs in this country?

[Alok Sharma]

The right hon. Gentleman may have been reading the Conservative party manifesto, because we have been clear that we have an ambition to create 2 million green jobs by 2030 and have already set out some of the measures, including £2 billion in green homes grants to support 100,000 green jobs. The Prime Minister has also announced that we will be boosting the Government’s target for offshore wind by 2030 from 30 GW to 40 GW, thereby bringing additional jobs to the sector. We will set out more plans over the coming weeks.

[Edward Miliband]

I thank the Secretary of State for that answer, but the rhetoric does not match the reality. Look at what other countries, including France and Germany, are doing, and look at the scale of what we are doing. He mentions offshore wind; let us take that as an example. As he says, the Government want to see 40 GW of offshore wind by 2030, but to ensure that the jobs in manufacturing the turbines are created here, we need the ports and supply-chain investment. The amount that the Government have pledged—£160 million over 10 years—is woefully inadequate. What is the Secretary of State’s estimate of the public investment required to meet his own target that 60% of the content of the offshore wind industry should be British—a target he is missing badly? Will the Government now fund and support the scale of investment required?

[Alok Sharma]

We are making funding available to upgrade ports, as the right hon. Gentleman said. I hope he would acknowledge that, as a result of the Government’s work on contracts-for-difference auctions, we have the biggest offshore wind industry in the world, which has driven down prices significantly and made offshore wind viable. We will continue to work to support those jobs, and we are talking about tens of thousands of extra jobs in the sector by 2030.