Jackdaw Gas Field

Lord Redwood Excerpts

Tuesday 27th October 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Curran (Lab)]

Yes, and of course the noble Lord will take the opportunity to put such matters on the record, because he knows that Jackdaw did not prejudge any other application and it will be looked at on its merits. I agree with his fundamental assertion and the generality that it is possible to still extract gas from the North Sea but also maintain our climate commitments, and we should not lose our energy on tackling the climate crisis. We have a responsibility here to tell the British public about what is happening and the potential difficulties and challenges that we face after this summer—we should all be alert to that. I share the noble Lord’s challenge to the Conservatives, who I think we are just about to hear from.

[Lord Redwood (Con)]

It was a great decision on Jackdaw. I see in the Statement that the Government want to decommission existing facilities at speed. Would it not be better to keep them and work with the industry to get more of our oil and gas out? That would be much lower CO₂, particularly than importing LNG.

[Baroness Curran (Lab)]

Decommissioning is an important issue to raise. The noble Lord will know that we have asked Shell to submit its decommissioning programme for the Energy Secretary to consider. The next stage of the Brent decommissioning process has been under review since 2017. A final decision will be made only once all relevant evidence, representations and legal requirements have been considered, so we are taking pragmatic steps to unblock long-standing decision processes such as this—but the noble Lord makes an important point about the importance of decommissioning.