National Policy Statement for Ports

Lord Greenway Excerpts

Tuesday 14th October 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Greenway (CB)]

My Lords, for domestic reasons, I was unable to put my name down to speak today. I should like to make just a couple of quick observations. Much has been talked about electricity, both for powering ships and transport within ports. I agree entirely with the noble Lord who spoke about this. The grid is the problem; there simply is not the capacity in it. Remember that if we are going to get ships to turn off their generators in port to stop pollution, they will have to plug into the normal electricity supply. How many other people are going to be adding to that supply? We have electric cars, electric this and electric that. AI, of course, is going to use more electricity than anybody has even thought of. It is not going to be easy.

Southampton, our largest cruise port, has been looking at shore supply of electricity for it for some time. It probably has one provision operating now, but if five large cruise ships were in port, as they are today, with 150,000 tonne ships all plugging in, Southampton would lose its electricity. It is as simple as that. So we have a long way to go there.

My other observation is slightly tongue in cheek. We have a robust ports industry. We are an island. In general, the ports do a good job. I remind the Committee that it was largely due to two Members of this House that the ports are in that position today. The noble Lord, Lord Fowler, who was Secretary of State in the Commons at the time, and Lord Brabazon, who was Shipping Minister, were two of the only six people who knew that the iniquitous dock labour scheme was going to be abolished. The unions were caught on the hop; they called a token strike, which lasted two or three weeks then fizzled out. It is largely due to those two Members of this House that our ports are in the pretty good position that they are in today.