Onshore Oil and Gas

Kevin Brennan Excerpts

Tuesday 26th January 2016 Westminster Hall

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman is making a compelling point. There was a day, obviously, when civil servants of that type did not engage at all with the public. Did he consider inviting a Minister to explain things, given that Ministers are responsible for policy and have the skills he is talking about?

[Graham Evans]

No, I did not consider inviting a Minister. It was a Friday night in the north-west of England, on a wild, windy and wet night. I would not expect my right hon. and hon. Friends to support me. We constituency MPs are perfectly placed. We are experienced enough, and we know the public and the area. I chaired the meeting, and I believe it is the role of the MP to do that, and to reflect all the concerns that exist. The public agencies are there to reassure the public, because not all members of the public believe what politicians say, but I also had independent people there. There was an independent professor there, who was a sceptic, but also a local businessman who was an expert in property values, and representatives of Ineos, a good local employer and well known chemical company.

Those public meetings were a great success. Despite the suggestion of the hon. Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan), I would not expect a Minister to be at such meetings, but I would expect the public agencies to be there. My hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton made a good point, and we should have the expertise there to reassure the public. We are asked for guarantees; we cannot guarantee anything, but the whole point of the Environment Agency and Public Health England is to hold Government, the contractors and the companies to account.

I regard this as a first-world problem. We are a great manufacturing nation, and we need to keep it that way for high-wage jobs. When I became an MP in 2010 we had a wind farm application on Frodsham marshes, which went ahead. We also had four applications for energy from waste sites, otherwise known as incinerators, surrounding Weaver Vale. Two of those have planning permission, one is in operation and one is currently being built. Energy is clearly a thing of the 21st century in a constituency such as mine, which is part of Cheshire. Cheshire is regarded as a rural county, but it has expertise in engineering and chemicals.

The potential benefits of additional high-skill, high-wage engineering and manufacturing jobs and the increased security of our energy supply are too important to neglect. Hydraulic fracturing is an established technology and has been used in the oil and gas industries for many decades. The UK has more than 60 years’ experience of regulating the onshore and offshore oil and gas industry and is a world leader in the field. I believe that if the best engineering practices are used alongside a robust inspection system, fracking can be carried out safely in our constituencies. Engineering and chemical industries are a vital part of the northern powerhouse, especially if we want to ensure a high-wage, low-tax, low-welfare economy in the north-west of England.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

We have had a very interesting debate. I have certainly learned a lot by listening to contributions from hon. Members on both sides of the Chamber. I thank everyone for that and congratulate the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake) on securing the debate. He told us that fracking—I am sorry to use that term—was a big issue in his constituency. Nevertheless, he made the case in relation to clean air, strategic interests of our economy, the industrial supply chain and jobs, including in the steel industry, tax revenues and exports. He slightly deprecated Government intervention in the economy, I think, by giving examples of economic progress where that had not happened. Then he outlined a whole series of Government interventions that he thought were necessary for this industry to work appropriately in the context of his constituency, so I think that there is a balance to be struck in relation to what the Government’s role is in developing a new industry of this kind.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

The deprecation that I expressed was more about providing short-term subsidies that are then withdrawn, rather than thinking long term. The interventions that I suggest are long-term interventions that would control and regulate the industry.

[Kevin Brennan]

I understand that, although I think that there is a case to be made for saying that some of the subsidies that the Government have withdrawn could have been planned in a longer term way. We will leave that point, however, because is not the subject of our debate.

I praise my hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Angela Smith), as other hon. Members have done, for her speech and for campaigning assiduously, particularly on behalf of the steel industry and her constituents. She put the case very well. Whatever we may think about the industry, the House has taken a decision, although it may not be the one that we wanted. There are clearly opportunities for British manufacturing, so we have to take a pragmatic approach and plan accordingly. We need a strategic approach to ensure that UK plc and jobs in the UK benefit to the greatest extent possible from the development of the industry. My hon. Friend outlined the potential for the UK chemicals industry and for manufacturing in general. She made some good points about the pumps that would be required for the industry, about sand and cement and about the steel industry. I congratulate her on her contribution.

The hon. Member for Weaver Vale (Graham Evans) described a public meeting in his constituency. I understand the difficulty of getting the message across. Energy generation is one of the great “wicked issues” of politics. We all know the rule in politics: everybody wants cheap, plentiful, clean energy at the push of a button, but nobody wants it to be produced anywhere near to where they live. Those two things, as we all know, are incompatible. We are required to wrestle with such wicked issues every day as constituency MPs, Ministers and leaders in our community and across our country. The hon. Gentleman was quite right to point that out.

I believe that Ministers might have a more direct role than the hon. Gentleman seems to think in taking the message to the public. That is part of Ministers’ responsibility, and they should not duck away from taking on difficult issues. In my experience, when Ministers take such responsibility, in the longer term they produce results for the Government in question—not that it is my duty to give them advice on how to win elections. I certainly think that Ministers have a direct role, although I appreciate that the Minister might not wish to spend his Friday nights in the way in which the hon. Gentleman described.

The hon. Member for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine (Stuart Blair Donaldson) gave us an interesting insight, in his brief contribution, into the fact that the industry had its place in the 19th century. Shale was exploited in his constituency in the 19th century, so it is not a new concept.

The hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish) told us about his experience in Europe, and told us not to blame him for the bad things that have gone on there. Yesterday, other hon. Members and I attended a dinner with the aerospace industries. Since the start of the European collaboration that is Airbus, the European share of the commercial airline market has gone from 18% of the world market to 50%. It was made absolutely clear to us last night that that would not have happened without European co-operation and our membership of the European Union, so it is not all bad.

The hon. Gentleman described his friend the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton as brave, and I am sure that he is. I am sure he would be equally brave if his majority were 456 rather than 19,456. He is quite right that it is always tough to have to wrestle with concerns from one’s own constituents.

The hon. Member for Warrington South (David Mowat) made, as ever, an informative and expert speech. He pointed out—this is the elephant in the debate—that the current wholesale price makes it substantially more difficult for the industry to get going than might otherwise be the case. He made a well-informed and interesting speech, in which he pointed out the potential for other industries.

We had a speech from the SNP spokesperson, the hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman), who laid out her party’s position. I wish my hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (Tom Blenkinsop) had made a speech. He made many interventions, all of which were interesting and, as ever, informative. We slightly missed out, but he did give us the benefit of his interventions.

It is my responsibility to set out our position as a party. We have already laid out the conditions that we wanted to see in place before the industry developed further, to ensure the implementation of the protections that hon. Members have expressed concern about. I will not go into great detail on that, because we have not got time. Given that the UK will rely on gas, on any estimate, until at least the 2030s and possibly beyond that—we are very reliant on imported gas from Norway and Qatar, as was pointed out during the debate—we support exploratory drilling, but it must not be at any cost. We made that clear in the amendments we tabled last year to the Infrastructure Bill. Despite conceding some of those points during the debate, the Government have somewhat reneged on them since the general election. We laid out a large number of conditions that we thought were necessary before exploratory drilling could go ahead. I will not list them now, because of the time, but they are well established on the record. That remains our party’s policy.

We have criticised the Government for allowing communities to decide whether they want onshore wind farms but not extending the same community involvement to this industry. There are questions about the appropriate level of local concern over a strategic industry of this kind. In relation to onshore wind, the Government have rather undermined their argument about the industry by the position that they have taken. I will not press any further on that point.

The development of this industry offers great opportunities for manufacturing industry in this country. One might call it “manufracturing”, as some have done. The Government must acknowledge that unless they bring forward an active industrial strategy, those opportunities will not be realised. We have heard about opportunities that have been missed with other industries, including offshore wind, because of a failure to understand and exploit the supply chain opportunities of a developing industry. There is a great danger that the same thing will happen in relation to this industry as it develops, unless there is an active industrial strategy. That must be driven by the Government being prepared to pull every lever at their disposal and bring all the appropriate parties together in the same room, as the previous Government did, for example, with the creation of the Automotive Council. In fairness, that was carried on beyond 2010 and is still in existence. It has brought tremendous benefit to UK manufacturing by getting industry and interested parties together and encouraging them to understand that there is a commonality of need, even where people are in competition with each other, for the sector.

[Tom Blenkinsop]

On the subject of an integrated industrial strategy, the comments of the hon. Member for Warrington South (David Mowat) about the east coast of America are quite interesting. The Obama Administration underwrote a lot of those projects with stimulus funding, which is part and parcel of the Obama Administration’s industrial strategy.

[Kevin Brennan]

On this side of the Atlantic, we tend to think that the USA is a laissez-faire society, but when we go there and see the reality of policies, not only at federal level but at state level, we soon find out that the picture is very different from our assumptions. Next time, I hope that my hon. Friend will prepare a speech, because we will not let him intervene so many times, no matter how interesting his contributions are. We look forward to hearing from the Minister about what he will do to make sure that the Government pull every possible lever.

[Mr George Howarth (in the Chair)]

Order. Before I call the Minister, I advise him not to take the Opposition spokesman’s suggestion of addressing us, as Queen Victoria accused Gladstone of doing to her, as though we were a public meeting.