Green Investment Bank

Joanna Cherry Excerpts

Wednesday 25th January 2017 Westminster Hall

[Joanna Cherry (Edinburgh South West) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Owen.

I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh West (Michelle Thomson) not only for securing the debate but for her sterling work on the Green Investment Bank, to which she has applied her usual business acumen and forensic skills. I rise to speak because the bank is headquartered in my constituency and, among other things, I am concerned about the 55 people employed there. The Minister has therefore kindly agreed to meet me to discuss the issue.

I want to say something about the background to the setting up of the Green Investment Bank which, across the group, employs more than 130 people, including renewables investment professionals and technical experts. The Business Secretary at the time, Vince Cable, chose Edinburgh as the headquarters for good reason. Edinburgh came top of a financial and technical assessment, as one might expect of the second most important financial centre in the United Kingdom and, when the bank was set up in 2012, he said:

“Edinburgh has a lot going for it, both in terms of its asset management and finance sectors…also its proximity to green energy activity”,

which—in my words, not Vince Cable’s—has been encouraged by the Scottish Government.

Interestingly, Vince Cable went on to say that choosing Edinburgh as the headquarters of the bank supported what he described as the “wider narrative” of binding Scotland into the United Kingdom in the run-up to the independence referendum. I am anxious therefore that the promises made by the Business Secretary in the coalition Government are delivered on for Edinburgh and that my constituents and those working in my constituency do not lose their jobs.

As my hon. Friend said, the Green Investment Bank is successful. In 2016 it started to make a profit. It is likely to deliver an annual return of 10%. The exercise of asset-stripping the bank, were that to happen, would result in a significant profit for any buyer at the expense of the United Kingdom taxpayer and of green investment throughout the United Kingdom.

The bank offers very real and attractive investment opportunities. It manages the world’s first offshore wind fund, with assets of more than £1.2 billion. Offshore wind is very much a huge part of Scotland’s future for energy production, and the fund attracts investors such as local authority pension fund managers, due to its long-term and stable investment. Five local government pension funds in the UK are investors in the fund, including Strathclyde Pension Fund, which is one of the two biggest local government pension funds. The chairman of Strathclyde Pension Fund has said:

“When you consider that when Pension Funds mature we are always looking to reduce our risk we do that by investing in our asset base with long term stable investments. We are convinced that”

the GIB

“invest in the right infrastructure assets which will lead to a stronger and greener UK economy.”

As I am sure the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) will discuss, the Green Investment Bank supports innovative energy efficacy projects in partnership with local authorities across the United Kingdom. It is a really useful bank, it is a modern bank, it is a successful bank and it is a bank that was established in Edinburgh as part of the project of binding Scotland into the United Kingdom. So let us make sure that it stays a successful bank, that we honour the UK taxpayers’ investment that has been made in it and that we protect the jobs it supports.