ExxonMobil: Mossmorran

Gareth Snell Excerpts

Tuesday 18th November 2025 Commons Chamber

[Chris McDonald]

As I pointed out earlier, the business has suffered from a lack of competitiveness for the last five years, in part due to the relative lack of competitiveness of UK energy prices, and it is important to point out the things that we have done and are doing to address that. We have the energy-intensive industries support scheme and the supercharger scheme, which is providing up to 90% relief. We also have the British industrial competitiveness scheme, which will reduce prices for over 7,000 businesses by £40 per unit of power over a period of time. Of course, with this business, the energy input was gas. We are competitive on gas with Europe, but the issue has been the much cheaper gas prices in the US; the ethylene imports coming into Europe are primarily coming from the United States of America. On that basis, as an exporting business in the UK, the competitiveness issues are fundamentally why the business does not see a future in the plant.

[Gareth Snell (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

I think any of us who represent an industrial constituency cannot help but feel a tinge of sympathy for my hon. Friend the Member for Cowdenbeath and Kirkcaldy (Melanie Ward) this evening. We have all seen factories and manufacturing businesses in our constituencies close. While I accept what the Minister says about the fact that we are competitive on gas price with Europe today, the reality is that the gas price today is significantly higher than it was three, four or five years ago. Often the products that are being made in these places cannot absorb those overheads, which makes us uncompetitive on the world market. We have to look at how we can subsidise those costs here.

On industrial electricity, we are out of step with the rest of the world and we need those prices to come down. The Minister mentioned the British industrial competitiveness scheme, but that will not come online until 2027. He mentioned the energy supercharger scheme, but that does not include whole swathes of industry, including ceramics. Is there anything that the Minister can do in the short term to ensure that we end up with help today for those sectors that need it, so we can prevent future closures of big manufacturing sites?

[Chris McDonald]

I know that my hon. Friend is particularly concerned about the ceramics sector, but his comments could read across to other energy-intensive sectors. I said that once quality costs have been taken into account, UK gas prices are competitive with the rest of Europe, but in the sector that he mentions, many of those imports come from Turkey. In some other sectors in the chemicals industry, the issue is about over-capacity, over-supply and the dumping of products in the UK that have been produced in the far east—there are quite a number of issues, and I continue to work on all of them across the heavy industry sector to ensure that we can improve the business environment as a whole.