Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Paul Holmes and Grant Shapps

Tuesday 17th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Grant Shapps]

My right hon. Friend makes an excellent point, and it is noticeable that gas prices are high, but the price of renewables is typically much lower. Indeed, for a whole load of days in a row more than half our electricity has been provided through renewables, in particular offshore wind. That decoupling is important, but it is also not straightforward, as my right hon. Friend will know. It is something that the Minister for Energy and Climate and I are actively working on.

[Paul Holmes]

Eastleigh has a diverse housing mix that includes pensioners, those living in park homes and lower-income families, who are all struggling to pay their energy bills. What steps is the Secretary of State taking to pass on any falls in wholesale energy prices to consumers, so that they pay less as prices come down?

[Grant Shapps]

My hon. Friend raises a good point. What concerns me is the idea that when wholesale prices go up we get a rocketing in domestic prices, but as wholesale prices fall again, as they have done, we get a sort of feathering down, very slowly. I am concerned about that and I have written to Ofgem asking it to look at the market. Energy companies are forward buying their energy by several months, but we need those changes to come through in reductions to households, and we will be pressing to make sure that happens.

Industrial Action on the Railway

Debate between Paul Holmes and Grant Shapps

Monday 20th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Grant Shapps]

I was just checking whether the hon. Member is repeating the RMT’s handout, because what he says is factually untrue in the same way as a series of things that the RMT and Mick Lynch said on television and at the press conference this afternoon. One of the untruths is that anybody is trying to cut anyone’s pay. That, I am afraid, is being propagated by Opposition Front Benchers, who try to suggest that this is somehow like P&O. That is not true. We are putting salaries up. We want people to earn decent wages for decent days of work. We just need to get the reform so that we are not stuck in the 1970s on a railway that is having to recover from coronavirus.

[Paul Holmes (Eastleigh) (Con)]

These strikes will cause untold harm to businesses, students and vulnerable people who have lived through some of the toughest of the last two years. Considering the huge sums of money that the RMT donates to the Labour party, does the Secretary of State agree that Labour should publish a table of donor receipts so that constituents can lodge a claim for their lost wages from Labour party coffers or from the extortionate union salaries?

[Grant Shapps]

My hon. Friend makes an interesting point.