Energy Security Debate
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Polly Billington
Main Page: Polly Billington (Labour - East Thanet)Department Debates - View all Polly Billington's debates with the Department for Energy Security & Net Zero
(4 weeks ago)
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Claire Coutinho
I know that the hon. Gentleman’s party has changed position on this recently, and I welcome that change. As I have said, the North sea is a foundational industry. It is not just about the oil and gas it provides. It is not just about the tax revenues. It is not just about the jobs that exist within that industry. It is about all those other industries it supports, including the chemicals and plastics industries. By the way, even the renewables industry supports more drilling in the North sea, because it needs the specialist rigs, the undersea technologies and the exact same workers. There are so many industries and wider economies that the Government are killing just because of the ideological bent of this Secretary of State.
Claire Coutinho
I will make a bit more progress.
Here is the fundamental bind that the Labour party is in. It does not matter who its next leader is—they will all fail. Its supposedly popular leadership contenders will become unpopular very quickly when they cannot keep their promises. It happened to us in government. It is happening to Labour now. It is happening to Reform at council level. It will happen to whoever is in government next unless they face up to the trade-offs that get us better growth.
Growth is the antidote to so many of our problems, but to deliver it, we need two things: cheap, abundant energy and economic freedom. By shutting down the North sea, cancelling nuclear projects and keeping a distorted electricity market in place, the Government are making energy scarce and expensive. Being part of the EU does not solve that problem. The EU leaders themselves rail against their own energy policy. Reindustrialisation is just a meaningless slogan unless we back the North sea, axe the carbon taxes that are killing British industry and cut the cost of energy. If none of Labour’s contenders has the courage to say anything about these issues, nothing will change.
Alongside cheap, abundant energy, the most important ingredient for growth is economic freedom, but the Labour party openly stands for more state control, more tax and spend, more red tape on employing people, more expensive energy, less AI, fewer profits and more subsidies. It has been on this path for two years now, and what do we have to show for it? Higher inflation, weaker growth and soaring unemployment. Why would anyone want more of this? Families are working harder and harder and getting less and less at the end of the month. And if people want full-fat socialism, why would they choose Labour when they have the boob whisperer offering them bigger and better?
Our whole system is flooded with caution. Nobody is incentivised to take any risks.
That is what is making us poorer. The truth is that the personalities in the Labour leadership race do not matter. Unless we get cheap, abundant energy, remove the legal straitjackets and onerous taxes, and fix the broken regulators and the sluggish machine of government to set the economy free, nothing is going to change.
If Labour Members think that Andy Burnham has the answers, let me tell them this. Andy is like the fun uncle who sits on the sidelines saying whatever he wants without anybody holding him accountable: “Let’s have ice cream for dinner! Let’s go to the zoo next week! Let’s nationalise everything! Who cares about the bond markets? Let’s rejoin the EU!” He has said whatever he liked because he has never had to pick up the bill. Now that he is actually looking at being in charge, he is having to go back on all those promises. Members should ask him this: how is he going to fund his nationalisation plans? He wants to stick to the fiscal rules. Is he really saying that he is going back to taxpayers, who already face the highest tax burden in history? When he talks about reindustrialisation, they should ask him whether he supports the Secretary of State’s plans to shut down the oil and gas industry—the biggest act of industrial self-harm committed in generations. If Andy Burnham wants more powers at a local level, amen to that—I could not agree more—but Labour Members should ask him how he can argue for economic freedom in one breath, while in another dictating to people what tumble dryers or cars they have to buy.
If Labour Members really cared about growth and reindustrialisation, they would axe carbon taxes, get Britain drilling, double down on nuclear and make electricity cheap. In short, they would put the national interest ahead of the Secretary of State’s ideology and vote with us tonight.
Sir Edward Leigh
My hon. Friend is very well respected in his area for the fantastic amount of work that he has done in Scunthorpe. He is constantly holding the Government to account, and indeed working with the Government. We have to do this together to protect our steelmaking capacity, for the sake of our industrial wealth.
I agree—we all agree—that the energy independence Bill provides a framework for transitioning the UK energy market away from fossil fuels and towards alternative forms of energy. We have no problem with that; it is sensible in the context of nuclear energy. However, the ideological pursuit of renewables is doing harm, and is at odds with achieving energy security when we have our own fossil-fuel resources in the North sea. It is not a zero-sum game. I do not see the ideological virtue of simply exporting our carbon emissions, which we are doing.
Sir Edward Leigh
No, I must make some progress. I do apologise.
I should have thought that we could have a compromise on this. We could have a policy that is sensible, gradually moving away from fossil fuels and gradually becoming a more green-energy economy, but we should not simply export our emissions and set arbitrary dates.
As this is a debate on the King’s Speech, I hope you will you forgive me, Madam Deputy Speaker, if I mention another subject in the short time available to me. When you get to my age, you can say unpopular things; I have not got much longer anyway. [Hon. Members: “Aah!”] I have two minutes!
The problem with our country is that we are governing by focus group. What do focus groups want? They want less tax and, of course, better public services. Debt is already 100% of GDP, and within 50 years, because of the triple lock and other benefit increases, it will be 170%. Of course the old vote, but the old have children and grandchildren, and we have a responsibility to younger people in our country. The Government know that the present system is unsustainable. While the average increase in the triple lock measures over the past 13 years—and we brought that in; it was supposed to be a temporary measure, but no party has the courage to change it—has been about 40%, pensions have gone up by over 60%. That is nearly £20 billion of annual additional costs so far, and that will get bigger every year and more unaffordable. The gap is likely to grow to £120 billion, if not more, by 2050, exacerbating the economic crisis. Whoever becomes Prime Minister will have to cope with that. By then, there will be 20% to 25% fewer taxpaying workers—our children and our grandchildren—per pensioner in Britain.
Of course we have to care for old people, particularly old people in poverty, and divert resources to them, but we must remember the younger people as well. This is entirely unsustainable. Yes, we want to keep a triple lock, but not the triple lock. We want it to be the average of the three indices, so that the amount does not go up exponentially every year. The Government should do the right thing by the nation, and bring in a measure to that effect. They should make our finances affordable, and those on my party’s Front Bench should not oppose them. We should govern in the national interest. We should make our finances sustainable, and then we really can help the people who are most in need.
Joe Robertson
I accept that there are some difficult questions in and around this whole area of debate. The truth remains that no Government have done more to decarbonise the economy and to bring forward green technology than the last Conservative Government, but we would not do that at the expense of hard-working families. The bonkers green tax agenda that this Government are peddling is harming the debate on decarbonising the economy. I will give an example of that.
Ms Billington
I am comfortable with accepting that there has been a growing consensus about decarbonising our energy system over a period of time, starting with the Climate Change Act 2008, which only a handful of Conservative MPs voted against. However, I am puzzled that hon. Member thinks that the last Tory Government did that without any burden on the taxpayer or on bills, when the so-called energy savings package that Liz Truss put in place cost £44 billion and has left this country in profound debt.
Joe Robertson
I acknowledge that the last Government made mistakes—I do not have a problem with that—but that is not an excuse for the hon. Lady’s Government to do even worse for hard-up working families.
Bonkers green taxes harm the debate, and I will give this House an example. UK emissions trading scheme levies on the maritime sector are levied on ferry companies. My constituents on the Isle of Wight rely on those ferry companies to access things that everyone else takes for granted: health, education, jobs and seeing friends and family. Next month, someone can travel across the Solent to the Isle of Wight, taking their car on one return trip, for £511. That is for a five-mile return crossing.
The Government, instead of helping us—they say they will help, and I am still holding out hope that they will—will in July levy a carbon emission tax on the Fishbourne to Portsmouth route that the ferry company cannot avoid. It cannot decarbonise its ferries and go electric, because there is no grid charging capacity in Portsmouth harbour. There is no grid charging capacity in Southampton either. These are not strange little harbours—they are the naval base of the United Kingdom and one of the biggest export container ports respectively—yet there is not the grid capacity to charge an Isle of Wight ferry. The ferries will pay, however, and guess what: they have passed on that charge to consumers and my constituents.
Ms Billington
Specifically on the Southampton point, it was under the Tory Government that the Labour-run Southampton council wanted to clean up and install that grid connection to be able to decarbonise shipping in that port and specifically to tackle air quality in that city. The Tories had 14 years, and they did nothing.
Joe Robertson
I gently say to the hon. Lady that the reason her Government are in such a mess and polling at under 20% is that she and her colleagues think that the universal excuse for her Government’s inaction is to blame a previous Government. She won that argument at the last election, and since then her Government have done nothing. Southampton will have that grid-charging capacity for boats in the mid-2030s, yet the Government are bringing in a charge in July this year. Do you know what the irony is, Madam Deputy Speaker? One of those ferries has batteries on board. It is a hybrid boat that can use batteries to cross the Solent and not burn fossil fuels, but it is being charged because it cannot use its batteries, because it has nowhere to plug into. The EU is bringing in that charge and ringfencing the money it receives from its emissions trading system to invest in grid capacity in ports—but not the UK Government; they are taking the money, shoving it into the Treasury and making no promises about investing in grid capacity. That is not the last Government; it is this Government.
I say to those on the Government Front Bench that these bonkers green levies make no sense, harm ordinary people and undermine the entire case for their green agenda.
Katie Lam (Weald of Kent) (Con)
Time and again over the past few months, and, indeed, in this debate, we have heard Ministers talk about the importance of energy independence, and they are right to do so. No country has ever succeeded without cheap and abundant energy. For energy to be cheap and abundant, its supply must be reliable. If we are dependent on energy imports from overseas, the supply of energy will necessarily be unreliable, as the disruption caused by recent events in the Persian gulf has made abundantly clear. But it is profoundly dishonest to talk of energy independence while making us more dependent on energy imports from abroad. That is exactly what the Government’s plans to ban new North sea oil and gas would do. They should, at the very least, be brave enough to admit that to the public.
Ministers say that there is no point in using our vast oil and gas reserves; they say that energy prices are set entirely on the international market, which means that increasing our domestic supply would have little to no impact on the overall prices. But that is not true. Gas is a highly localised market, specifically in the case of liquefied natural gas, which is gas that is turned into liquid, loaded on to ships and transported globally. The further those ships have to travel, the more expensive it becomes to deliver. If we rely on gas imports from the rest of the world, we will need to spend more money to bring that gas to Britain.
The vast majority of homes in the UK—87%—use gas for heating. We currently import half of the gas that we consume. If we produced more gas domestically, it would be cheaper to buy gas, meaning that heating bills would, in fact, come down.
Ms Billington
I know that the hon. Lady’s party is not very keen on experts, but I would refer her to Fatih Birol, the head of the International Energy Agency, who has pointed out that expansion of production of North sea oil and gas does not significantly improve the UK’s energy security, will not alter the UK’s status as a net importer and will take too long to affect global prices. He says that global demand for fossil fuels has changed permanently and we should, therefore, be prioritising renewables, nuclear power and electrification over further fossil fuel expansion.
Katie Lam
As I just said, 80% of houses use gas for heating. We cannot simply substitute that for renewables—it is impossible.
Returning to the issue of energy independence, producing more gas domestically would also make us more resistant to global shocks. We would be far better served if companies that provide energy in Britain were bidding on gas produced in this country, rather than gas produced halfway around the world. Not only would bills come down, but we would mitigate the risk of sudden cost increases as a result of supply restrictions elsewhere. Yet the Government are proposing a policy that would achieve exactly the opposite.
The demand for gas is not going away, much as the Government might wish that it were. Even if British homes move away from gas in the long term, it is absurd to impose higher bills on them in the short term in the name of ideology. Those on the Government Benches often talk of sustainability, but there is nothing sustainable about this situation. Families across the country are facing higher bills and extra taxes to fund this Government’s ideological commitment to intermittent energy sources. Many will be forced to do things such as postpone holidays or delay moving house to be able to afford the increasing costs imposed on them by this Government.
Meanwhile, businesses are being forced to cut back on staff or shut their doors altogether, because the cost of doing business is now simply too high. That means local pubs, family farms and nursing homes all being forced to shut up shop. For industrial businesses in particular, the situation is even worse. These are businesses in sectors such as AI and high-skilled manufacturing that can provide some of the best paid and most durable jobs, revitalising whole communities and enabling people to build successful lives for themselves. While China and India fuel their industrial expansion with new coal-fired power plants, British industry faces some of the highest energy prices in the developed world—they are the highest in Europe, and they are more than double the price paid by industrial businesses in the United States. We cannot hope to sustain an industrial base in this country, let alone grow it, while the price of energy is so vulnerable to global shocks. Why would anybody start a new industrial business in Britain under these conditions?
If this action is being taken in the name of climate change, it is proving to be a catastrophic failure. In the eight years between 2013 and 2020, China pumped out more carbon emissions than Britain has produced over the past 250 years. That is not just because China is a bigger country—per-person emissions from China are more than double those in Britain. We are sending our emissions abroad to countries such as China without making a dent in addressing global climate change, and British families and businesses are left to pick up the tab.
The Government’s plans on energy policy will leave us more dependent on overseas imports and will leave the British people worse off financially, without making any noticeable impact on global climate change. If the Government genuinely want to advance our energy independence, we welcome that, but they will not do so by wrecking domestic production and leaving us reliant on imports from abroad.
Ms Polly Billington (East Thanet) (Lab)
Almost 15% of people in East Thanet are in fuel poverty—significantly above the national average of 11.4%. That is thousands of my constituents who cannot afford for their energy bills to go up, but who, because of international events completely out of their control, are now facing exactly that. Working people like them should not bear the burden of decisions made by Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin. That is why I am glad to see the Government’s focus on energy and energy independence in this upcoming legislative Session.
There is no one silver bullet for achieving energy independence. It requires action to reduce energy usage, which is why the warm homes agency will be so important in order to give people trusted advice and access to grants and low-interest loans. It requires more generation of energy at home, because the more we produce domestically, the less exposed we are to volatile fossil fuel markets. It requires reform of the market and it requires diversity of supply.
However, this new international situation is different from the circumstances we were previously considering when tackling the science of climate change and the failed energy market in this country. We now live in a situation where the global context is more volatile and more unstable than it has ever been. Therefore, the legislative programme that the Government have announced is absolutely necessary, but it may not be sufficient on its own. To secure the energy independence and resilience we require, the Government need to consider their role in establishing greater international agreements on how we increase the resilience of our global economy against our exposure to fossil fuel markets. I have called on the Government to convene an international energy summit with the same boldness and scope of Gordon Brown’s crisis summit in 2009 following the great financial crash. I saw at first hand then the role of Britain using its convening power to bring nations together, and we should look to do so again.
I was delighted to hear in the King’s Speech that we will be hosting the G20 next year, and I hope the Government will put energy co-operation right at the heart of that summit. This is crucial because 20% of the world’s oil, 20% of global liquefied natural gas and one third of seaborne fertiliser pass through the strait of Hormuz every day. The economic pain of this has not yet hit us. People are already talking about the risk to family holidays, but there is a risk of food shortages and starvation, and of blackouts in countries that are vital to our supply chains. That is the seriousness of the situation we are facing, which requires an international solution. I am delighted that we have a deep, broad and integrated approach to tackling some of the most challenging elements of creating increased energy resilience, as outlined in the legislative plans, but the situation does need to be seen in the wider global context, and it demands global leadership from the British Government.