UK Export Finance: Expenditure

Lord Teverson Excerpts

Wednesday 27th March 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fairhead]

My Lords, we absolutely have regard to those things. All our projects are rigorously assessed according to the common approaches of the OECD and the Equator Principles—the environmental, social and human rights aspects. We rigorously follow all the international guidelines, which include making sure that people stay safe in those nations, as well as having regard to human rights.

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, is it not the case that things work really well for developing countries when there is not high infrastructure investment? Moving straight to mobile phones was a good example of that. Fossil fuels generally require high levels of infrastructure and networks, whereas clean energy is distributed and works far better for developing countries and economies. Should that not be another reason for concentrating more on clean rather than fossil fuel technologies?

[Baroness Fairhead]

My Lords, this Government are concentrating on building growth based on clean technologies, and our support for offshore wind is one obvious example. In terms of what is appropriate for each country, it is for them to decide how they meet their Paris commitments—for example, the trans- formational project in Ghana, in which we were involved, reduced its dependency on oil. In this transformational part of our journey towards the climate change agenda, we need as far as possible to move to cleaner forms of energy production, and, as the noble Lord will be aware, gas is significantly cleaner than oil.