Oral Answers to Questions
Matt Western Excerpts(2 weeks, 1 day ago)
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Justin Tomlinson
That is absolutely understood. As set out in the spring Budget, the Government are working with Ofgem and network companies to release more network capacity and to prevent speculative projects from obtaining and retaining network capacity. That, alongside faster network infrastructure delivery, should result in more capacity across the country and help to reduce any clustering of generation projects.
Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)
National grid infrastructure is critical to the delivery and connection of these solar farms, as it is for onshore and offshore wind. The importance and urgency of that was stressed by the Winser review of August last year. The Government have got until 2030 to deliver this policy. Will the Minister update us on the transmission acceleration action plan?
Justin Tomlinson
The hon. Member is spot on. We are proud to have gone from 7% renewable energy to 47%. To go further, we must hit those ambitious targets by unlocking additional investment. For example, through the accelerating strategic transmission investment process, we anticipate unlocking a further £198 billion of investment by 2030. Alongside the changes I have already set out, that will be key to getting that extra power generated through solar.
Offshore Petroleum Licensing Bill
Matt Western ExcerptsMonday 22nd January 2024
(3 months, 1 week ago)
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Sir Alok Sharma (Reading West) (Con)
I refer the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.
I agree with the Secretary of State, who I hold in high regard, that the United Kingdom has been a leader in climate action internationally. We have cut our emissions in half over the past 30 years, faster than any other major economy in recent years. We have set ambitious domestic emission reduction targets, in particular ahead of COP26. Through our COP26 presidency, we managed to get over 90% of the global economy signed up to net zero. Just about every G20 nation signed up to a net zero commitment. We led on climate action domestically and we translated that into leading the world on climate action.
Just a few weeks ago at COP28, the UK, alongside other nations, signed up to transition away from fossil fuels. On his return from COP28, the Minister for Energy Security and Net Zero, my right hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Graham Stuart) welcomed that global agreement from the Dispatch Box. He spoke about the importance of listening to the voices of the most climate-vulnerable island nations, who, as we know, wanted the world to agree to stronger language to phase out fossil fuels. Indeed, my right hon. Friend himself tweeted at COP28:
“There must be a phase-out of unabated fossil fuels to meet our climate goals.”
I commend the work that he and the whole UK team did in Dubai.
But today we have a Bill before the House, the sole purpose of which is to double-down on granting more oil and gas production licences. I do not believe, and it pains me to say this, that the Bill will advance that commitment to transition away from fossil fuels. I also do not believe that those climate-vulnerable nations my right hon. Friend referred to will think the Bill is consistent with the pledge that we, along with every other nation, made in Dubai.
As for the substance of the Bill, I think that, as currently drafted—and it pains me to say this—it is something of a distraction. I do not think it is necessary. The North Sea Transition Authority can already grant licences annually, or, indeed, when it considers it necessary. It has been doing that regularly for the past few years. The Department’s own explanatory notes make that clear by stating:
“ The NSTA will remain free to grant licences outside this new annual duty in the usual way, whether or not the new statutory tests are met.”
As for those two statutory tests, they seem to override the already non-binding climate compatibility checkpoint, and I have to say that I think they have been designed in such a way that the computer will always say yes to new oil and gas licences. Overall, the ability of the NSTA to grant new licences will not change materially as a result of the Bill.
Sadly, however—this is my opinion, and others will have theirs—what the Bill does do is reinforce the unfortunate perception of the UK’s rowing back from climate action, as indeed we saw last autumn with the chopping and changing of some policies, and that does make our international partners question the seriousness with which we take our international commitments. I said “it pains me to say this” because I know that the Government have been coming forward, under this Secretary of State, with commitments to try to tackle climate change and deliver on a clean energy transition.
We have heard that the Bill is about improving domestic energy security, but I think we all understand that the oil and gas extracted from the North sea is owned by private enterprises and the Government do not get to control to whom it is sold. Moreover, I think it is acknowledged that the Bill would not necessarily lower domestic energy bills in the UK, given that the price of oil and gas as a commodity is set internationally. I think that the best way to enhance our energy security, and ultimately bring down bills, is for the Government to continue to deliver on their ambitious plans for expanding home-grown clean energy, to which I know the Secretary of State and her Ministers are absolutely committed. That means more wind power, more solar and more nuclear as part of a diversified clean energy mix, and I back the Secretary of State in the work that she and her team are doing in delivering that clean energy mix.
We have heard that the Bill will secure 200,000 jobs. Of course people’s jobs and livelihoods matter, and we must ensure that we secure those jobs, but we must recognise that we are in the process of an energy transition. I support an orderly transition; for me, this is not about turning off the taps overnight on oil and gas. We must also acknowledge that more than 200,000 jobs, supported by the oil and gas industry, have been lost over the past decade, despite hundreds of new drilling licences being issued. We know that many of the skills used in the oil and gas sector are transferable to clean energy—to offshore wind and geothermal. If we want to truly turbocharge a clean energy transition, we need to help, support and retrain the workers who are making the transition, over time, from the fossil fuel sector into the many tens of thousands of jobs that are being created in clean energy as a result of the work that the Secretary of State and her team are doing.
Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)
The right hon. Gentleman is making some powerful points, and I have huge respect for him when it comes to this topic. Does he agree that we are in real danger of turning off the interest and the investment appetite among many other nations, such as Korea and Japan, which see the UK as having vast expertise in offshore wind development sites, and that legislation of this kind will undermine that market?
Sir Alok Sharma
There was some commentary expressing concern about investment appetite following some of the statements that were made in the autumn, but I think we must acknowledge that, over the last few months, the Government have managed to secure billions of pounds of extra investment committed within clean energy to the UK.
Turning to the carbon intensity test for granting new licences, I have to say again that I am not sure that the Government recognise the whole picture of where we get our imports from. The majority of the gas that the UK imports comes via a pipeline from Norway. It is not imported LNG. The carbon intensity of Norwegian gas production is around half that of UK domestic gas. If that is the test that the Government want to apply in deciding whether to issue new licences, I think they should take into account the average carbon intensity of all imported gas, not just LNG. Given that around 70% of remaining North sea reserves are oil, perhaps the tests should also include the carbon intensity of UK-produced oil, which is higher than the global average.
Jerome Mayhew
A number was mentioned earlier in the debate, but I did not catch it. I am sure that the hon. Lady might have that number in mind. It is right that we support industries in this country, because they create employment, generate economic activity and, in turn, pay taxes. I am not ashamed of that, because it is a good thing.
The final reason why I want oil and gas extraction in this country, if we are to use it, is the balance of payments. That used to be a fashionable economic argument back in the day. When I was a teenager, we used to have announcements on the news about the balance of payments month by month. What has happened to that? The balance of payments is every bit as important economically today as it was back in the 1980s. We run a current account deficit in this country of about £150 billion. That is a huge number, and it will be exacerbated if we choose—and it would be a political choice—not to generate and export a product from this economy to a third economy, but instead choose to import one, exacerbating the balance of payments deficit twice over.
For those four reasons, I am wholly in favour of the ambitions behind this short Bill. Climate change will be solved by reducing demand for hydrocarbons, not by reducing supply. We will solve the demand problem by providing cheap alternatives, which the Government are doing. Members who have contributed were quite right to highlight that. We need renewables.
Matt Western
I agree with the hon. Member’s point about reducing demand. The great travesty is that we are still seeing houses built today—I am sure he does in his constituency—where the insulation is not at all deep. That is ridiculous, is it not?
Jerome Mayhew
I could not agree more. The future homes building regulations, which require a significantly decreased carbon footprint for modern buildings, come into force in 2025. It is deeply frustrating that they were not brought in earlier. The sooner they come in, the better. We also have the challenge of retrofitting insulation in the 28.5 million existing houses in Britain. Some good points have been made by Opposition Members about the need to improve retrofitting, and there is scope for the Government to incentivise further insulation of private houses, to go with the successful scheme in place already for public sector buildings and housing.
We must also increase our wind power. We have an extremely ambitious target of 50 GW by 2030. The current rate is about 17 GW of renewable wind power generation capacity. We must also increase solar and nuclear, including small modular reactors. We need better technology for carbon capture, usage and storage. We need to accelerate our use of electric or hydrogen vehicles—or, frankly, any other kind of technology that solves the problem—and we need to incentivise the market to step into that area.
We need to take a step back and look at buildings. It is about not just about the operating carbon costs of existing infrastructure, which we are focusing on in both commercial buildings and the residential sector; it is also about the embodied carbon in our construction processes, hence my private Member’s Bill on the measurement of embodied carbon in large buildings and developments. About 50% of the carbon associated with building is in its construction, not its operation.
There are areas where the Government are either ahead of the game or moving in the right direction. They have already been successful in reducing demand for hydrocarbons. I do not understand why Labour appears to put virtue signalling before the economic impact and 200,000 local jobs. I support this eminently sensible Bill.
Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for South Dorset (Richard Drax).
The irony will not be lost on you of all people, Mr Deputy Speaker, that we are reduced in number in Parliament today by the impact of Storm Isha, the origins of which lie in climate change, yet we are debating the Government’s desire to increase the global supply of oil and gas. It is also damning that the Government’s net zero tsar, Chris Skidmore, felt compelled to resign, having spent three months researching his report and travelling the length and breadth of these isles. He said that he could
“no longer condone nor continue to support a government that is committed to a course of action that I know…will cause future harm.”
To pick up the point made by the hon. Member for South Dorset, 10 years ago, when I was a councillor, I was talking about how we needed to create energy resilience in Warwickshire, how we needed to consider the future needs of our communities and how we could best use our pension funds to help to drive that agenda.
The Government claim that the Bill will not add undue burdens on households. “Undue burdens” is a pretty strange phrase. The Secretary of State has also admitted that new licences will not necessarily bring down energy bills. Let me put that into context. This is the same Conservative Government who ripped up the zero carbon homes policy announced by Chancellor Gordon Brown in 2006 and produced by my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) and my hon. Friend the Member for Llanelli (Dame Nia Griffith).
That legislation would have meant that all new homes built from 2016 onwards were zero carbon. Just imagine: we would have built 1.2 million zero-carbon homes by now. There would be thousands of new zero-carbon homes in my Warwick and Leamington constituency on the Mallory Grange, Priors, Montague Point, Myton Gardens, Chesterton Gardens and Victoria Point estates, and many others. My constituents would be benefiting from next to no energy bills, and they would be doing the right thing, but they were denied that choice by the Conservative Government who ripped up that legislation.
The next generation will not thank this Government for what they have done. They will not be thankful for one of the highest levels of debt we have ever seen, the greatest tax burden since the war, the stagnant economy and, I dare say, the moral bankruptcy of this Government.
We have had nine named storms so far this year, with the 10th coming down the track. We had just 11 named storms in 2015-16. The flooding is reaching into all corners of the United Kingdom, creating economic damage, damage to people’s homes and businesses, and distress to all. There has been damage to infrastructure, crops and food production. Waterlogged soil means that seeds and crops cannot be harvested.
A report from Ernst & Young says that last year was the worst year for insurance underwriting in decades, pushing up premiums by at least one third in the next two years—an expected increase of 36%. Amanda Blanc, the chief executive of Aviva, has said that new oil and gas drilling
“puts at clear risk the jobs, growth and the additional investment the UK requires to become more climate ready.”
Today, the country is plunging further into chaos and economic damage. Our transport is disrupted and our businesses are impacted. Colleagues have been unable to get to London to attend Parliament. Two weeks ago I requested a debate on floods and flooding and, on my journey home, my train was delayed by a landslip caused by climate change—yet more irony. We need a wider debate on the impacts of climate change, which is causing not just floods but tidal surges and strong winds.
The Prime Minister speaks of climate “zealots”. Well, the public, and young people especially, must be climate zealots because, I am afraid, they are deeply concerned. They are not zealots. They are realists about the future we face. On my recent visits, nearly every primary school—St Margaret’s, All Saints, St Paul’s, Heathcote, Woodloes, St Peter’s, Coten End and Bishop’s Tachbrook; I could name them all—has raised the critical importance of climate change and how they want us in this place to bring about immediate action.
The young people studying in our colleges understand the future. They can see what is happening, and they have said to me, “The future is electric. That’s why we are training for these skills.” They get it; they can see the future.
We know that 2023 was the world’s hottest on record. Last year was about 1.48°C warmer than the long-term average before humans started burning large amounts of fossil fuels. The eight warmest years on record have occurred since 2014. The global average sea level has risen by 8 to 9 inches. Flooding across the UK, including in my constituency, has damaged 2,000 properties across the country, and 5.7 million properties were at risk of flooding in England in 2022-23. Those facts underline just how irresponsible this Bill is.
We are 18 years on from the Stern report and “An Inconvenient Truth”, which was told like never before by Vice-President Al Gore. Two years ago, the report by the UK’s independent Climate Change Committee said that the best way to ease consumers’ pain from high energy prices was to stop using fossil fuels, rather than drill for more of them. That is part of the great deception that is this legislation: the best way to bring down prices is to reduce demand and the Government are doing next to nothing on that. We also need to bring in cheaper energy sources and to reduce demand by insulating homes. We can put in energy insulation panels that are really not very thick.
The approach being taken in this legislation is a crime and an obscenity, and it is happening because the Government tore up the legislation of the last Labour Government. We need to bring in cheaper energy sources by allowing onshore wind, which is currently the cheapest form of electricity generation. In the 12 months to the end of September 2023, total consumer expenditure on electricity, gas and other fuels used in the home was £62 billion, a figure almost double that of two years before. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband) said,
“it is precisely our dependence on fossil fuels that has led to the worst cost of living crisis in generations.”
It was clear from the King’s Speech that this Bill will not take even a penny off energy bills. Lord Browne, of all people, the former chief executive of BP—he is also a highly regarded individual across the industry and in the other place, where he is a Cross-Bench peer—said that the proposals are
“not going to make any difference”
to the UK’s energy security. That point was echoed by the former Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May).
In conclusion, energy security has to start at home, but not the home of the international oil and gas majors and their market preferences, and instead the homes of the British people—homes that are better insulated and that can generate and store their own electricity and power. The only thing holding back the British people is this Government, who are weak and capable only of short-term decisions. That is why the country needs Labour’s clean power mission: to make the UK a clean energy superpower.
We have a plan to make energy cheap and secure so that the British public never again face spiralling bills. It is a plan to boost jobs and investment in every region and nation of the country. It is a plan to cut energy bills for good, taking up to £1,400 off annual household bills; to create good jobs by rebuilding the strength of our industrial heartlands and coastal communities, creating more than 1 million jobs in 10 years; and to deliver energy security by using our abundant natural resources for our own citizens. We will do that by establishing “GB Energy”, a new home-grown publicly owned champion in clean energy generation to build jobs and supply chains here at home.
We will also set up the national wealth fund, which will create good, well-paying jobs by investing, alongside the private sector, in gigafactories, clean steel plants, renewable-ready ports, green hydrogen and energy storage. We will also do this through a warm homes plan. The Bill is yet another reason why this country is desperate for a general election and I will be voting against it.
Oral Answers to Questions
Matt Western Excerpts(11 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero (Amanda Solloway)
I thank the hon. Gentleman for bringing the matter to our attention. I would be very happy to meet him to discuss it.
Independent Review of Net Zero
Matt Western Excerpts(1 year, 2 months ago)
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Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)
I appreciate being given the opportunity to speak, Madam Deputy Speaker. I congratulate the right hon. Member for Kingswood (Chris Skidmore) on compiling this review—an impressive feat in such a short period of time since it was first requested of him. The focus on this issue is long overdue. This place and this country need far more urgency and purpose in trying to achieve our net zero ambitions. I absolutely respect him; he is a decent individual and, while I have not read the entire review, I am sure that all 129 recommendations are sensible and well-founded.
For me, net zero is not just the right thing to do, something that is critical for our society, our future and our civilisation, but economically important. That is why I am so struck by the failure in recent years to grab that opportunity. I wish the right hon. Gentleman well in the internal discussions on this review; certainly I fear that the Government perhaps have not engaged as much with Lord Deben and the Climate Change Committee in recent years, which is a real shame.
I think back to the signals we have had for many years now, going back to 2006 and Lord Stern’s report and the international work of people such as Al Gore, speaking about the inconvenient truth that we face and the lack of urgency in recent years. That was in 2006. We are approaching almost 20 years since then. Funnily enough, it was in the same year, 2006, that I approached my local district council, wanting to convert a building into a low-carbon property. Sadly, I was refused permission—to be fair, it was a minor change of use from a storage building, although it had been used as a house in times past—so I went to the Planning Inspectorate and appealed. The planning inspector found in my favour and I was given permission to convert that building. I wanted to prove what could be done in terms of developing a low-carbon building.
I appreciate that in the last 24 hours the Government are now refocusing on the importance of net zero with the restructuring of the departmental teams, but we are only really going back to where we were in 2010, when we had the Department of Energy and Climate Change, in recognition of the work of Lord Stern, Al Gore and so many others. That recognition led to the world-first Climate Change Act 2008, passed by Labour in government, which I think was a fantastic piece of work. Even though I was nowhere near this place at the time, I had a huge amount of respect for the work being done.
Sadly, in the intervening 12 to 13 years, we have seen massive retrograde actions by first the coalition Government and then successive Conservative Governments, when there was an enormous economic opportunity for us. I will come back to some of those opportunities later, but the decision to do away with the zero-carbon homes legislation was one of the most retrograde acts that they could have committed. We are now seeing why building new homes with gas dependency was such a wrong decision, first because of increasing demand for gas, but secondly because it was not the right thing to do to combat climate change.
As I am sure other colleagues across the House do, I visited a new housing estate a couple of weeks ago. There were 130 properties on the estate I visited, and of those none had EV charging points, solar photovoltaics, solar thermal or heat pumps. Those are brand-new houses that have not yet been completed. When I asked why those things were not being done, the builders said, “Well, it didn’t need to be done, to be fair, and the owners can always retrofit them.” Trust me—having been through building a house, I can tell hon. Members it can be quite challenging, but if a house is being built from scratch, it is much cheaper to install those things there and then. The fact that we are not installing such basic things, or even making provision for energy storage units in those properties, is a massive failure of the system. That should have been going on all this time; it would have happened under Labour had the party been returned to power in 2010.
The issue of existing homes has also been discussed and mentioned by a couple of hon. Members. I appreciate that we have a much older housing stock, but we could have been taking action over many years to change properties through secondary glazing, triple glazing and so on. When I visited properties built in the late 1950s in Germany, which had had double glazing and underfloor heating installed back then, I was struck by just how far in advance of us other nations have been on this.
There is an economic opportunity on insulation schemes, where we can not only reduce households’ dependency on fossil fuels, but also significantly reduce their energy bills. To the naysayers who say there really is very little advantage for an individual or a household, the gas consumption in my property in the last 13 years has been 130 cubic metres. When hon. Members next look at their gas meters and see how much they have used in the last year or the last quarter, they will realise how staggeringly low that figure is.
On power generation, I am afraid I do not share the views of the right hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), who has sadly just departed the Chamber. I believe there is an exciting opportunity in the field of power generation to introduce much more onshore wind, and offshore wind as well. Those of us who have the apps on our phones will have seen that for many months now, offshore wind-generated power has typically produced 40% to 50% of UK electricity energy. That is a fantastic result and just shows what can be achieved. Domestic solar is also a good and important thing that should be installed as a matter of course, not just in new build, but retrospectively, and then of course there is the opportunity for localised modular reactors to supplement power generation across the UK.
Power distribution is another important part of the equation, as the right hon. Member for Kingswood was saying. National Grid, which is headquartered in Warwick in my constituency, is central to that. Just a couple of weeks ago, I was up in the Wansbeck constituency, where there is a National Grid site with two cables coming ashore from a plant in Norway. Those are the interconnectors about which hon. Members may have heard, whereby hydroelectric power is generated and comes into the UK as renewable energy.
To visualise that, at that diameter, those two cables provide 3% of UK electricity. That is just how extraordinary those connections can be. Of course, more are planned, not just from Norway, say, but from Denmark and France. Those cables work both ways: we can bring power from Norway, but we can also supply power to Norway from the excess generated in the UK. That is why they present such a great opportunity. I appreciate that there is an issue on the planning side of distribution. We have to be much more joined up in the way that we approach it. Without localised power distribution, we will not be able to supply much-needed electric power to households and businesses.
One of last areas that I will cover is transport, on which we are really behind the curve. The EV industry is frustrated by where the Government are on this. It is easy to set targets, but we need to give the industries and sectors frameworks and structures against which they can deliver those targets. They recognise that those targets are challenging, and they want to achieve them, but they need more than just the setting of a target. Currently, we do not have an EV gigafactory at scale in the UK other than Envision up in Sunderland, which is very small. We need to get many more built in the UK. Other nations, including France, Germany, the US, Japan and China, are already manufacturing, while we do not even have a spade in the ground. Unless we do that, we will miss out big time on the economic opportunity.
Linked to that is the charging network. I mentioned the distribution of power; what we do not have is an overall strategy for the delivery of charging points across the UK. Again, we are way behind our international partners. The other point to mention on transport is the importance of the insistence on transport hubs across our towns and cities to encourage active travel.
The report that the right hon. Member for Kingswood has put together gives hope. Every time I visit a school, there are one or two issues on the minds of the young people there, and climate change is absolutely the foremost. They do not expect us just to talk about it; they demand that we act and deliver for their futures.
There is, as I say, an economic opportunity, and not just with gigafactories. I remember that the solar thermal unit I bought was manufactured in Scotland. I do not even know if that plant still exists, but I would be surprised if it does after the changes in 2010 and the green whatever- it-was that my hon. Friend the Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Ruth Cadbury) referred to. That change in legislation meant that we lost a lot of good businesses and manufacturers in the UK that could have been supplying to this economic opportunity. Even Alternative Energy Technology, a small business based in Atherstone in Warwickshire, which installed all the kit in my property, fell by the wayside because of those changes.
I commend the right hon. Member for Kingswood for this substantive report. He spoke of challenges and opportunities, and he is absolutely right. I see huge opportunities, and we need to minimise the challenges. I appreciate the point made by the hon. Member for Waveney (Peter Aldous) about how planning needs to be addressed across Departments if we are to speed it up. It is so, so slow. I hear his point about “not zero”. If we do not do this, we will miss a huge economic—as well as critical—point in our history. Many people talk about this stuff, but I think the right hon. Member for Kingswood is absolutely sincere, and I welcome his report, for which I thank him.
Chris Skidmore
I thank the Backbench Business Committee again for granting this debate and all Members who have spoken in it. The debate has demonstrated that, while Members may disagree on some of the contents of the report and its recommendations, as should be the case, the overall narrative of the review—that net zero is an opportunity and not a cost, and that we must seize this opportunity now and not delay—is overwhelmingly welcomed by all parties in the House. I stand ready to brief any political party that is willing to continue to look closely at the recommendations in the report.
The hon. Member for Warwick and Leamington (Matt Western) spoke about the Stern review, and it would be an honour if this report was seen in the same bracket in terms of its ability to influence future policy innovation.
Mention was made of the length of the report and the fact that it was done in three months. I am grateful for the incredible work that was done by the wider net zero review team in Government. Three months is 1% of our journey to net zero. We do not have time to waste. It has been 43 months since I, as the Minister, signed net zero into law. There are 323 months left until we reach net zero by 2050. The net zero clock is ticking. This year alone, that window is vanishing in front of our eyes. To borrow the analogy used by the hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse), the bus is already at the stop and is about to depart, and we have to decide now whether we want to get on it or leave it behind. We need to look at this change this year and move as soon as possible.
When John F. Kennedy introduced the moon landing mission in 1962, he said that we do these things
“not because they are easy, but because they are hard”.
It will be hard to get to net zero, but let us all work together across parties to recognise the scale of the challenge. This challenge must reflect the whole of society. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) said, we must not leave any community behind. When it comes to net zero, we should not impose this on communities, but work with them and the wealth of views and opinions on how we can deliver on decarbonisation for the future. I hope that this report is not just the beginning but is a blueprint for a new Department on how it needs to move forward as soon as possible.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House has considered the Independent Review of Net Zero.
Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)
On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. Thank you for granting this point of order. I would welcome your advice. I wrote in both December and January to the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care to press him on the status and costs of the Rosalind Franklin laboratory, otherwise known as the mega-lab, in my constituency. Three weeks ago, it was announced that it would be closing, with a loss of 670 highly-skilled jobs, with four weeks’ notice. I wrote to the Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, the hon. Member for Lewes (Maria Caulfield), two weeks ago, and she told me to write to the UK Health Security Agency. I am not sure what I should do now, but surely the responsible Department should reply to me directly.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)
Mr Speaker has made it clear that he believes any parliamentary written question should have a timely response. I am sure those on the Treasury Bench have heard the request and will pass on the hon. Gentleman’s concerns, and our concerns, that he has not yet had a proper response from the Department.