Electric Vehicle Battery Production

Lord Lennie Excerpts

Monday 23rd January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lennie (Lab)]

My Lords, 12 months ago, £100 million was made available by the Government to Britishvolt to help unlock the necessary private finance and the company’s future. Ministers were falling over themselves boasting about how they were supporting 3,000 highly skilled direct jobs and a further 5,000 jobs in the supply chain in the north-east of England. But the money never materialised, and we all now know the consequences. Does this signal the end of the Government’s green industrial revolution, at the expense of these jobs and the key role they would have played in the electric vehicle industry and the wider decarbonisation of the UK’s economy?

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Lord Callanan) (Con)]

No, is the short answer to the noble Lord’s question. Of course, before we make any government money available, we do the appropriate due diligence. As a result of this work, the funding was designed so that agreed milestones had to be achieved for the company to draw down substantial amounts of taxpayers’ funds. In the event, it was not able to meet those milestones, so the money was not handed over. I am sure the Opposition would like us to be careful with public money. If the alternative had happened and we had handed over the funds and the company had still gone into administration, I am sure the noble Lord would have been on his feet demanding an inquiry into why we had been so careless with public funds.