Draft Contracts for Difference (Electricity Supplier Obligations) (Amendment) Regulations 2024

Mark Garnier Excerpts

Wednesday 16th October 2024 General Committees

[Mark Garnier (Wyre Forest) (Con)]

You will be delighted, Sir Edward, to hear that I do not intend to keep the Committee for long. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear!”] I am going to be popular.

I thank the Minister for her introduction of the regulations; this is quite a technical issue and she did well in introducing it. I am delighted, because on both occasions when we have got together in Committee it has been terrific, from our point of view, to see that the new Government are carrying on the hard work done by the previous Government and, indeed, endorsing all our good policies.

CCUS is an exciting technology, and it was the announcement in last year’s Budget by the former Chancellor, my right hon. Friend the Member for Godalming and Ash (Jeremy Hunt), on the delivery of £20 billion of investment that led us here. It is worth mentioning that that is reinforced in paragraph 5.4 of the explanatory memorandum, which says that

“the HMT Budget 2023 confirmed government’s intention to make up to £20 billion available to support the early deployment of CCUS”.

When he gave the recent statement on CCUS, the Secretary of State said that that money had not been allocated; it would be helpful if the Minister could confirm the Government’s position. All the evidence seems to suggest that it was allocated, so the Secretary of State may have misled the House when he said it had not been.

Much work has gone into getting everything moving forward and making CCUS a reality. I thank officials for the huge amount of work they have done to get these technical regulations over the line. As the new Government are agreeing to continue to support CCUS, we hope that means we will hear more about the track 2 clusters, Acorn and Viking, which were due to make progress over the summer. Again, we asked in the exchanges on the recent statement for a progress report on track 2 clusters; it would be helpful if we could have one.

I will leave it at that, Sir Edward. The Opposition are happy to support the policies that we introduced, and we are delighted that the new Government are so enthusiastic to do likewise.