Mining: Health and Safety

Lindsay Hoyle Excerpts

Tuesday 28th March 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Skinner]

No, because you won’t—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order.

[Penny Mordaunt]

I will move on to the other points that the hon. Member for Livingston has raised. Quite rightly, she touched on what Departments can do through their policies to encourage good practice, and to encourage other countries to take health and safety as seriously as we do. In my Department, which is responsible for the Health and Safety Executive, considerable opportunities come with the HSE’s ambition to export its good practice, and that is important. I will certainly ask my counterparts at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy to write to the hon. Lady about specifically how it is developing its energy strategy to take into account the very valid points that she raises.

On the matter of regeneration for affected communities, I may be in danger of agreeing with the hon. Member for Bolsover (Mr Skinner). One thing that was not done well in the past was securing the regeneration of areas where industries on which entire communities had depended were collapsing. Where that happens, swift intervention and investment are required.

One of the privileges of my first ministerial post in the Department for Communities and Local Government was working with local enterprise partnerships on getting particular investment into such areas. Part of the recipe for success in rebuilding those areas was mining heritage. Many projects, whether they were about creating business parks around energy or creating a tourist offer, would come back to an area’s mining heritage. That ties in very well with the important points that the hon. Lady has made about heritage. We need to remember that heritage and give it the status that it should have as part of our nation’s history. I will also ask the Department for Communities and Local Government to write to the hon. Lady to update her on the specifics of the growth funding that has gone into former coal mining areas.