Energy Bill [ Lords ] (Fourteenth sitting)

Mark Jenkinson Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 22nd June 2023 Public Bill Committees

[Alan Brown]

The Minister can shake his head but that is a fact.

[Mark Jenkinson (Workington) (Con)]

Does the hon. Member agree with the former Labour leader of one of the Aberdeen councils, Barney Crockett, that Labour’s energy policy will wreak more harm on industrial communities than anything that Margaret Thatcher ever did?

[The Chair]

Order. Before we allow ourselves to get into what might be an amusing, if controversial, area, I remind the Committee that we are dealing specifically with clause 270, which prohibits new coalmines in the six months after the Bill is passed. Perhaps we could restrict ourselves to that, rather than getting into more exciting rabbit holes.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alan Brown]

I am happy to comment on energy security, but I remind the right hon. Gentleman that those were not my words but the words of the former COP26 President. He said that the proposed new mine will not deliver energy security. I am sure that, like me, the right hon. Gentleman respects the President of COP26 and believes that he did a good job.

This argument about supplying coke and coal to the steel industry has already been debunked: 85% of the coal from the new coalmine will go abroad, so it will not provide energy security by supporting the steel industry in the UK. That is a bogus argument.

[Mark Jenkinson]

The hon. Gentleman says that that point has been debunked, but I actually debunked the debunking in the previous sitting. I am sure he heard those comments. On the issue of 85% being for export, that all depends on whether we want a UK steel industry and whether we want to grow it. Does he agree that we should be growing the UK steel industry and using 100% of that coal here?

[Alan Brown]

I want to debunk the hon. Gentleman’s debunking of the debunking. Let me come to the comments of the chair of the Climate Change Committee, Lord Deben, who the last time I checked is a Tory and was a Tory Minister.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alan Brown]

The whole point is that coal is not being used to support baseload. Even if we believe in the concept of electricity baseload, it is not coal that is doing that. Coal is being used as a back up to the back up for when peak demand is hit, so that argument is wrong. Coal is not used for baseload.

The hon. Member for Workington stated:

“We are far too parochial on the subject of net zero and emissions.”

He seemed to be saying that if we do not do it, somebody else will, which is not showing international leadership. He went on to say:

“if we can export to Germany or somewhere else where people make large quantities of steel using coking coal, that is a reduction in total global emissions that we should champion.”––[Official Report, Energy Public Bill Committee, 20 June 2023; c. 373.]

The hon. Member has still not explained how the UK shipping coal to Germany is going to reduce global emissions—I still do not see how that follows—but I do share his concern that a lot of emission reductions have come from that offshoring manufacturing and industry. That is something we have to stop, so I fully agree with him on that, but opening a coalmine to export coal to Germany is not the way to re-shore industry.

[Mark Jenkinson]

The hon. Member is being incredibly generous with his time. On the point on how shipping coal from the UK to Germany lowers emissions, if that happens instead of coal being shipped from the US, Russia or somewhere further afield, then the shipping emissions are greatly reduced. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Elmet and Rothwell points out, it is also much cleaner coal to start with.

[Alan Brown]

I understand the point that Government Members are trying to make but, at the end of the day, if we are shipping coal to Germany, we are still increasing UK shipping emissions. We are increasing emissions from the UK to about 400,000 tonnes of CO₂. In the global context, there is no saying whether those coal emissions are getting displaced if the coal is going to Germany, so we cannot guarantee a reduction in global emissions. We would be putting more coal on the market, which is coal somebody else will snap up elsewhere. The likelihood is that we would actually increase emissions.

I should have said in my opening remarks that I represent a former coalmining area, so I recognise the devastation caused by pit closures. My area recovered some jobs through open-cast coalmining, but even that industry collapsed a few years ago, leaving us with devastating blights on the landscape and huge craters that needed filling. Unfortunately, again, there was no help from the UK Government when we needed it. I understand the legacy of coalmining and I want support for these areas, but opening new coalmines is not the way to do it.

We cannot turn back the clock. What we need to do is create jobs for the future. We need green-based jobs in coalmining areas such as mine, using geothermal energy and making use of the closed mines. Let us make them an asset for the future, providing clean energy and reducing energy bills at a local level.

The Committee will be pleased that I am bringing my monologue to an end. I hope that my comments are going to convince the Government and Conservative Committee members that there is no need for new coalmines going forward. I would be delighted to hear the Minister, in his summing up, say that he is not going to move against clause 270, but is going to retain it and listen to those of us who want it.

Clause 271 is to be replaced by new clause 52. I welcome the Government’s change on that and their making reaching net zero a statutory duty of Ofgem. Will the Minister tell us whether new clause 52 and Ofgem’s new statutory duties will make it much easier for Ofgem to allow anticipatory investment? That has been one of the issues, so we want to make sure that it can do that and do that forward plan-ahead, rather than building more constraints into the grid while upgrading it at the same time.

Turning to clauses 272 and 273, it seems like for ages Energy Ministers have stated their support for the principle of the Local Electricity Bill—community electricity generation and the sale of electricity locally—but they have always said that the Bill was not the right solution to facilitate that. The original drafters and MPs who have tried to bring forward private Members’ Bills have changed the Bill to try to address the concerns of Ministers, but that still was not enough.

The cross-party group of peers who drafted clauses 272 and 273 to mimic the effect of the Local Electricity Bill again tried to address the Government’s concerns. I fail to understand why the Government are still against the two clauses. It is worth pointing out that 323 MPs overall, including 128 Tory MPs—let alone myriad local authorities, environmental groups and individuals—have supported the Bill. The feet-dragging makes no sense. I commend the hon. Member for Bristol East for pointing out that the Minister himself was a signatory to the Local Electricity Bill. I wonder what about a ministerial car made him change his mind about supporting it.