Russian Gas

Lord Higgins Excerpts

Thursday 8th May 2014 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Higgins]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what action they are taking following the recent speech by the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change advocating a policy designed to reduce European countries’ dependence on Russian gas.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change (Baroness Verma) (Con)]

My Lords, the UK currently sources less than 1% of our gas from Russia. Although we are not dependent on Russian gas, we are working with allies on actions to improve global energy security in response to the situation in Ukraine. The European Council agreed in March that the EU should intensify its efforts to reduce its dependency on imported gas and the European Commission will present a plan for the reduction of EU energy dependency by June 2014.

[Lord Higgins (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend for that reply and welcome the robust statements made by the Secretary of State. Does my noble friend agree that the events in Ukraine have exposed very clearly the dangers to which European countries are exposed as a result of the reliance on Russian gas? In the present and forthcoming negotiations, particularly at the G7, will my noble friend ensure that we press for action to countervail the present monopoly power of Russian supplies and strategically do everything we can to diversify the sources of power to European countries generally by improving terminals, pipelines, the capacity of gas-carrying ships, and so on? I appreciate the point made by my noble friend that we are less directly affected than most other countries but none the less we have a general economic and political interest in this. I hope that we will pursue these matters.

[Baroness Verma]

My Lords, my noble friend is right in all those points. Of course, the key to ensuring less dependency on a particular source is having greater diversity. That is what we are trying to do. We are encouraging member states to promote and explore other options for other sources. As my noble friend said, there are a number of areas we are sourcing from, which makes us less dependent on imports from other countries. We are having this discussion and my noble friend was right in saying that the Secretary of State was very firm in putting forward his points of view.