Energy Security

Lloyd Hatton Excerpts

Tuesday 19th May 2026 Commons Chamber

[Jessica Toale (Bournemouth West) (Lab)]

Last November, the Children’s Minister and I visited St Joseph’s Catholic primary school in Poole. We were there because the school was one of the first to benefit from the roll-out of solar panels under GB Energy. We met members of the Eco club, who excitedly showed us how much energy the panels were generating and how much energy the school was consuming. We joined a classroom lesson and jogged on the spot with the kids to generate CO₂ and monitor the levels so that they could practically learn about heating, cooling and ventilation. We watched them design new energy efficiency and greening measures, and they told us with pride how the solar panels enabled them to give back to their community by supplying power to EV chargers in the car park.

Children care deeply about protecting our natural environment and preserving it for future generations. They understand the need for bold action to do so better than some of the adults in this Chamber. Not only were the solar panels a valuable learning tool inspiring them, but the school was saving money—about £8,500 a year—enabling it to plough resources back into teaching. That speaks to something wider.

For many people, the promise that hard work delivers security, home ownership and a decent quality of life increasingly feels out of reach. That frustration is real, and we see that acutely on energy. Local residents and businesses in Bournemouth West tell me that heating their homes, fuelling their cars and sustaining their energy costs is becoming increasingly unaffordable. Families are tired of living at the mercy of global energy shocks that they cannot control. Every instance of international instability is felt in food bills, household bills and the anxiety that families feel when sitting around their kitchen table at the end of the month.

That is why I am proud of the number of measures that we have taken as a Government. We have measures in the Budget to bring down bills by £150, the energy price cap, action on heating oil, a warm homes plan, which is bringing the biggest ever public investment in homes, and record investment in clean, home-grown power. We have the energy independence Bill—a cornerstone measure in the King’s Speech—to accelerate investment in clean, home-grown energy, strengthen consumer protections and bring down bills over the long term. Let me make a point clearly to Members on the Front Bench: towns such as Bournemouth and Poole stand ready to help to deliver that transition.

It is an immense source of pride for me to represent a constituency that is full to the brim of extraordinary talent, creativity and innovation. We have outstanding colleges and universities and skilled workers. A great example of that is Bournemouth & Poole college’s green energy centre, which is building the skilled workforce of the future. We have natural assets on our coastline and communities eager for investment. There are huge opportunities through the Dorset clean energy super cluster, which is based in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset (Lloyd Hatton).

The transition to clean energy must not simply happen to places such as Bournemouth and Poole; it must include them. Creating a new generation of skilled workers and the opportunity for well-paid jobs in areas that have for too long been overlooked for investment is about making an economy that works again for people who feel like it has stopped working for them.

[Lloyd Hatton (South Dorset) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. Does she share my view that the really important thing about the pieces of legislation outlined in the King’s Speech is that they will start to drive growth and green job creation into parts of the country that have been left behind for too long and have not felt the benefits of growth and job creation?

[Jessica Toale]

I agree with my hon. Friend. What he did not say is that we would very much welcome Ministers visiting Dorset to support the Dorset clean energy super cluster.

Ultimately, this is why I support the King’s Speech: while others offer anger, division and easy answers—or simply change their minds about important issues—the Government are choosing a path that will deliver long-term reform, economic resilience and national renewal. That work will take time, but we cannot rebuild prosperity on short-termism. This King’s Speech is an important step towards building a more secure, more resilient and more hopeful future for communities like mine in Bournemouth West and across the country.

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[Lloyd Hatton (South Dorset) (Lab)]

As today’s remarks have focused on key national infrastructure, I thought I would speak briefly on the clean water Bill outlined in the King’s Speech. The water sector is another essential piece of national infrastructure that is long overdue for reform.

Like many in this House, I welcome the clean water Bill with open arms. As I see it, the Bill is our best opportunity to create a water sector that puts bill payers, water users and the environment first. For too long, it has felt as though shareholders, overseas investment banks or indeed private equity firms were the first priority of the water industry. I hope that will change as a result of this Bill, and I am pleased that it builds upon the early action already taken by this Labour Government.

To me, what is most important is that my constituents in South Dorset know that getting the clean water Bill right really matters. We are so proud of our coastline, and it is perhaps the most impressive—certainly in the south-west, if not in the whole country. Protecting it from unwanted sewage spills and failing water companies really matters, which is why this Bill matters.

[Jessica Toale]

I am actually quite jealous of my hon. Friend, because about four of his beaches were recently listed in Time Out among the top beaches. However, I visited Durdle Door with him to call for year-round water testing and for our waters to be cleaned up. Does he agree that this Bill will take further the action to clean up sewage spills that we have already taken?

[Lloyd Hatton]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend; the Bill certainly builds on the early progress that has been made.

To be most effective, the clean water Bill needs to include a meaningful duty on all water companies to operate for the public benefit. We all know that the current model of ownership in the water sector is failing both the public and the environment, and that instead of fixing crumbling infrastructure, water companies have been lining their own pockets and accumulating debt for far too long.

Until the big water companies have a clear obligation to deliver both public and environmental benefits, I fear they will continue to make decisions that increase their profit shares but also vandalise our coastlines. That is why a duty to operate for the public benefit is critical—it will help to overhaul the day-to-day operations of water companies and change the corporate culture at the top of many of those firms. If we look at similar sectors where that duty exists, such as public transport and buses in particular, we see that it does begin to change the culture.

It is really important that the Government use the clean water Bill as an opportunity to move the water sector towards a different way of operating, with a different model of ownership. That can only be achieved if we start to compel water companies to act in a different way, and that requires a mechanism such as a public benefit duty. The Bill is our golden opportunity to put the public and the environment first, and it is our chance to fundamentally reform the water sector for good.

Oral Answers to Questions

Lloyd Hatton Excerpts

Tuesday 10th February 2026 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero (Martin McCluskey)]

We are working closely with heritage organisations to tackle precisely that problem. The hon. Lady will see in the warm homes plan that there is specific advise about retrofitting historic buildings. [Interruption.] Although they are not in her constituency, I will be visiting some projects soon.

[Lloyd Hatton (South Dorset) (Lab)]

Morwind recently received funding to conduct an important feasibility study for a major offshore wind hub at Portland. If built, the hub would be a key part of the west country’s manufacturing supply chain, and it would create hundreds of well-paid green jobs for local people. Will the Minister work with Morwind and me to deliver the hub at pace, and will he come to Portland to meet the key players and get the ball rolling?

[Ed Miliband]

It sounds really exciting, and one of us will visit.

Budget Resolutions

Lloyd Hatton Excerpts

Monday 1st December 2025 Commons Chamber

[Claire Coutinho]

Let us talk about that £150. If someone has a gas boiler, the figure is £130. I remind the Secretary of State that that is almost everybody in the country. Oh yes, and if they pay tax, the amount has not come off—it has just been moved from their energy bill to their tax bill. Most importantly, that amount does not even touch the sides of what this Secretary of State will cost people in the end. Like so much of what Labour says, it is just sleight of hand. The real question is this: since the election, have bills gone up or down? The answer is up.

The Secretary of State should be honest that this policy was never part of his plan. It is not part of Great British Energy or clean power 2030—all the things that he promised would lower bills. In fact, it is a tacit admission that he has failed. The centre knows that his plan cannot lower bills. In fact, if the reporting is correct, the Secretary of State fought against the policy, but he has been forced into it, because his promise to cut bills by £300 has become a national embarrassment to them all. It is taxpayers who are bailing him out to the tune of £7 billion.

[Lloyd Hatton (South Dorset) (Lab)]

Does the right hon. Lady not share the concerns already articulated by the Confederation of British Industry that simply to scrap the Climate Change Act and the important work of this Government in pursuing net zero targets would be a “backwards step”? That would actually be to the detriment of people’s energy bills and inward investment into our economy and would kill off jobs. Those are the words of the CBI, after all.

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[Claire Coutinho]

Let me make this point to the hon. Gentleman. The average person on benefits in work is working 20 hours, sometimes less. Why should a family with kids who are not well off and are working 40, 50 or 60 hours a week be worse off than a family on benefits working far fewer hours?

I quit a job in the City to go to work for the Centre for Social Justice and work with people fighting poverty, and I have worked with struggling families in some way since I was 16. It is not compassionate to make welfare pay more than work. It is not a helping hand; it is a trap.

The Government should also talk to the many couples who have put off having children or stopped at one or two children because they cannot afford it. Younger brothers and sisters simply will not be born. Those missing children are a personal tragedy for every couple who are having to make that choice, but there will be more of those decisions, because the Government are loading more and more costs and taxes on to hard-working families.

[Lloyd Hatton]

Can the right hon. Lady explain to the House what it would mean for the 1,360 children in her constituency, and the nearly 1,700 children in my constituency, who would remain in levels of relative poverty if we chose to pursue the two-child benefit cap for many more years, as she is suggesting?

[Claire Coutinho]

We have a fundamental difference in belief. Labour Members believe the best way out of poverty is welfare; I think the best way is jobs and growth, but the Government are killing those things.

The problem with the Labour party, as we can see from its policies, is that it clearly thinks the only answer to the cost of living is redistribution, even past the point at which there will be no one left to redistribute from. Conservative Members know that jobs, low taxes and low costs improve the quality of life, but the Government are killing those jobs—every month under them, parents are losing their jobs. What do Labour Members think the cost of living is like for those families who have lost their salaries under this Labour Government? There are 170,000 fewer people on the payroll since the election. Young people cannot get a foot on the jobs ladder—because of this Government, the cost of hiring a young person has gone up by £4,000. They say they are raising the minimum wage, but they are crushing businesses’ ability to pay for it. The result is hiring freezes and redundancies, and for all those people just above the minimum wage who are also struggling, there will be no money left for wage progression. The best way to improve living standards is growth, but this was not a Budget for growth; it was a Budget for Labour Back Benchers. That is why it did not contain a single growth measure.

Labour’s entire approach to the economy has been to raise the cost of basic goods, to raise taxes, and to crush wages and employment. The Government are expecting a shrinking group of hard-working taxpayers to pay for more redistribution, to cover the costs that they are choosing to impose on the public. In the words of one Labour Cabinet Minister, this Budget has been a “disaster”. Those are not my words—according to a No. 10 source, they think they are the words of the Secretary of State. Labour will not be known as the party helping people with the cost of living; it will be known as the party that has broken its promises to working people, broken its promises on tax and on bills, and broken the social contract that sees work pay more than welfare.

Energy Resilience

Lloyd Hatton Excerpts

Tuesday 6th May 2025 Westminster Hall

[Tom Collins]

I agree that with the correct technology, those systems can provide local resilience.

The fundamental change to the core role of the energy system has been from efficiency to storage. How we achieve that future system is already well debated. We start with energy efficiency and insulation, then we move on to shifting the time of demands, and we can enhance that with intraday storage in some buildings. The way we actively control and manage the response to demands and our storage is the big question for the future electricity system.

Currently, moment-by-moment control is achieved technically using the A/C power itself as a signal. Control over longer time bases is co-ordinated and partially directed through markets. In the future, we expect markets to play a bigger part in our electricity system, working in shorter timeframes and in a more distributed way. When we think about resilience, the design of our economic and commercial energy system and the digital systems that enact it will be absolutely critical. The commercial energy system will be as critical as the physical one.

Whereas markets may be good for some resilience attributes such as flexibility and diversity, they are often bad for others, such as redundancy, continuity and headroom. Also, our new digital communications channels offer potential single points of failure for our system. This is a fundamental question of national security. In the light of a string of cyber-attacks, it is crucial that when our digital world fails, our heating, lights, sanitation and vehicles must not. Either our grid must not depend on signals such as dynamic pricing to keep working, or those signals must be multiple-fault tolerant. With distributed generators playing a larger role in future, avoiding cascade failures requires them to support graceful degradation instead of disconnecting in the face of uncertainty.

This dynamic, digitally enabled future can introduce other risks, not only for resilience but for social equity. It must not penalise those who cannot afford battery storage, and each internal system boundary and each new pricing location threatens overall value. Alongside markets, our systems must incorporate core features that function primarily in the public interest. The system must be resilient against market-induced price instability and commercial failures, both for our security and for those markets to function healthily.

That all misses the single largest and most novel component of our future energy system: clean, long-duration energy storage at scale—storage, not just for seconds through inertia, not just for minutes through demand-side response, and not just for a day or night through in-building storage, but intraweek and longer to ride through long stagnant weather events or other major disruptions. Today, our energy resilience is assured by the incredible flexibility and capacity of fuels: oil in transport and off-grid heat, and methane gas for heat in buildings and industry. Those fuels intrinsically store energy indefinitely and carry vast amounts of energy through simple infrastructure, such as pipes and tanks. Our gas system currently carries three times as much energy each year, and up to four times as much in a day as our total electricity system. It shares its energy storage capability with the electricity system through gas power stations, our core electricity resilience assets. We have found our dependency on gas to be a weakness, but only because we depend on it for our system’s strength.

So, we face a crux. How might we win the energy resilience prize, benefiting from the clean versatility of electricity and the stabilising, security-critical storage capability of fuel? There is one answer that the UK has itself pioneered. There is a fuel that is carbon-free and 100% interoperable with electricity, and capable of being manufactured from electricity and cleanly converted back into it again at will: hydrogen. The Government, and others, have spotted the unique potential of hydrogen to fuel a clean and secure future for British industry. I would argue that they could go further, enabling industrial renewal in and around national clusters, but also in our towns and suburbs. As we seek to secure a material supply chain, the UK could deploy our immense wind resource and become a circular economy material recovery superpower of Europe.

Over recent years, however, the debate has become paralysed by an either/or question. Electrification and hydrogen have been presented in some sectors as mutually exclusive. Hydrogen has been presented as scarce and expensive. Policy has been asking whether the answer in various sectors is electrification or hydrogen, but the design answer is resounding and simple: it is both. These two energy vectors are complementary, with hydrogen power stations able to provide our grid with headroom, responsive generation and inertia, and hydrogen storage able to provide our national asset of inter-day and inter-week energy storage. Our future electricity system needs hydrogen, and at a vast scale. The truth of the matter is that hydrogen will be as cheap and abundant as we design it to be.

[Lloyd Hatton (South Dorset) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend for securing this important debate. The Dorset clean energy super cluster, in my constituency, has proposals for fixed and floating offshore wind, carbon capture and storage, and hydrogen storage. Does my hon. Friend agree that having all that energy generation and storage in one place is a really effective way to boost Britain’s energy resilience, and to quickly boost our energy infrastructure and our ability to create, store and distribute energy here in Britain, rather than being dependent on energy coming in from overseas?

[Tom Collins]

I thoroughly agree with my hon. Friend. I am so glad that Members have identified how critical it is that we have a diversity of energy sources, that we have energy storage, that these are distributed around our system, and that we invest ambitiously now to bring them into reality.

Our energy system has always been multi-vector, and it must be in the future, too. By embracing this reality, we have an opportunity to design and choose how our electricity and gas systems are coupled: upstream through underground gas storage and power stations; mid-system with smaller distributed generators, including fuel cells; downstream in areas on constrained legs of the network; or perhaps even in homes through smart hybrid heating systems. We can deploy hydrogen production wherever it is most helpful: offshore, onshore, or at critical nodes in the transmission system. Pipe infrastructure is relatively low cost, high capacity and, being underground, intrinsically secure.

The size of our supply of green hydrogen is our choice. If we choose constrained supply, we choose constrained growth. If we choose ambition and abundance, that will also be worked out in our economy. It is time to move on from old ways of thinking. There is virtually no risk of stranded assets; investment in both electrical capacity and hydrogen production is zero regret. The call to action for both sectors is simple: go big. That is, and must remain, the message of the Government.

Now is the time to convert this ambition into concrete goals in the technical domain. Industry’s voice is clear: there is an urgent need for decision making. We must deliver our ambition not by iterative cycles of consultation, but rapidly through partnership. We need to short-circuit policy silos, get all the stakeholders in a room and thrash it out. We must be open to answers that back multiple technologies. Our problem is not that we need a silver bullet, but that we had one that was literally too good to be true. Moving on from fossil dependency means diversification.

Historically, we have always relied on multiple energy vectors in homes to provide energy resilience. That is still an option now. It means moving away from questions of either/or to answers of both/and. Those decisions are not easy, but they can be made. The end point is not crystal clear, but it is sufficiently in focus. Our industrial community has the knowledge and evidence we need, and the risks from here can be managed.

This is a moment for leadership and, fortunately, this Government have the will and the opportunity to deliver it. As corporate players scramble to shape this debate to create future opportunities, investors are seeking a clear statement of ambition and for the Government to get hands on, set goals and pick winners. Recognising that there will be more than one winner in a diverse and resilient future, we can show ambition now for electrification and a powerful UK hydrogen economy.

In the end, a resilient energy system is about putting people first and making power, warmth and movement dependable, affordable and accessible to all. Seventy-five years ago, the UK built energy systems with world-leading reliability and resilience. Now it is time to do it again, and to secure a new era of economic renewal, growth and security. With ordinary people as our guiding star, through ambition, pragmatism and practical collaboration, we can deliver an energy that, for the next 75 years, through night and day, come rain or shine, dependably keeps every single person in our fantastic nation empowered.