Making Britain a Clean Energy Superpower

Debate between Richard Thomson and David Duguid

Thursday 9th November 2023 Commons Chamber

[David Duguid]

Norway is the two. Actually, it is broadly equivalent, but apart from Norway, any gas coming in from overseas has between two and five times the carbon footprint. New oil and gas capacity will reduce exposure to global instability—the kind of instability that we saw when Russia invaded Ukraine. This Bill means that we can reach net zero without unduly burdening families and businesses. Data from the North Sea Transition Authority and the Climate Change Committee tells us that if we produce as much oil and gas from the new wells as we can, that will still merely slow the decline in production. Even with an optimistic 7% year-on-year decline—I mean optimistic from a producer’s point of view—that decline is faster than the average global decline needed to align with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 1.5°C pathway.

Finally, if we follow the SNP’s presumption against new oil and gas or Labour’s Just Stop Oil approach and shut down this vital industry too soon, we will not see a massive transfer of workers to the renewables sector, as is predicted. We will not even see a bunch of unemployed oil and gas workers; we will see a massive exodus of those oil and gas workers, going where the oil and gas industry is being promoted.

[Richard Thomson]

I thank the hon. Member for giving way. In his haste to castigate the SNP for presumptions against oil and gas, will he not at least have the intellectual honesty to recognise that in the climate change compatibility checkpoints, his own Government are introducing a presumption against further development, no matter how weak and feeble that presumption might seem to anyone with a care for the subject?

[David Duguid]

I have heard the hon. Gentleman make that remark before, and I am sorry to say that I completely disagree. A presumption against new oil and gas development is a presumption against new oil and gas development; a climate change compatibility checkpoint is part of an assumption of new oil and gas, so it is not a presumption against new oil and gas. [Interruption.] I have just explained it.

Those workers with their skills and expertise, those supply chains and those service companies with their technology will simply go elsewhere—as I have said—and deliver someone else’s energy security and energy transition. I commend the Offshore Petroleum Licensing Bill for showing this Government’s commitment to not let that happen, and to make the right decisions for this country’s long-term future.

--- Later in debate ---

[Richard Thomson (Gordon) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to speak in a debate about energy, because it feeds into the most pressing crisis that all our constituents face at this point in time: the cost of living crisis. We know that higher interest rates are not the answer to the inflation they face. Brexit has certainly made things a great deal worse by increasing the cost of imports, but the cost of living crisis has at its core the massive increase that we have seen in the cost of energy. That taps into our energy security and, as we have heard, it taps into the climate crisis, but it also taps into the opportunities for economic transformation as we industrialise—at least, we have the opportunity to industrialise —through the green revolution.

The Government seem to be failing to provide answers in this area. I agree with the right hon. Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband)—words that I do not say very often—that I cannot think of a Government, certainly in my lifetime, who have been so ill suited to facing up to the challenges of the era we all face. No matter how graciously it happened to be delivered, the King’s Speech revealed that we have a Government who are not guided by principle, by strategy or by science, whether woke or otherwise. Instead, they appear to have made a lifestyle choice—if I can put it that way—to be guided by the whims of a few hundred voters in Uxbridge, where they squeaked a very narrow by-election victory, in the vain hope that by pandering on the issues that they thought brought them success in that corner of suburban London, they might find a wedge issue that will allow them to progress in the culture war they are waging against everyone in the UK except their core supporters, to try to protect them from the electoral wrecking ball that appears to be coming their way with increasing force and momentum.

To genuinely be a clean energy superpower, three things are needed. First and foremost, we need an energy market that works. We also need a genuine energy transition, not one that just pays lip service to the idea, and we need Governments who are prepared to invest in making that happen. On the first point—having energy markets that work—one of the reasons we have heard for energy bills being so high is the artificial link mandated by Government between the price of electricity and the price of gas, which the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) mentioned in her substantive contribution. That completely distorts the market, artificially inflating the cost of electricity, which hits both industry and consumers hard.

Another reason why our electricity markets do not work is the inadequacy of not just the energy grid, but grid pricing, particularly when it comes to electricity. That means that anybody generating electricity in the north of Scotland pays a subsidy for the privilege of feeding it into the grid, whereas the further south we go in the UK, generally speaking, that turns into a subsidy for the generator. We are left with the utterly ludicrous situation of somebody who wishes to promote a wind farm in the north of Scotland having to pay handsomely to get that energy into the grid, whereas if they were able to reactivate Battersea power station and burn coal in it, they would end up with a subsidy because of the locational pricing structure we have. That is an absolute nonsense. I can see the brows being beetled feverishly on the Government Benches; I encourage Members to think on that, because it is the situation that the national grid pricing structure has given us for years, and it is holding Scotland back.

Turning to the storage of energy, the UK foolishly did away with most of its storage capacity for gas, on the flawed assumption that it would always be able to buy gas whenever it was needed at the price that was right. We have seen the folly of that in recent times, but of course, it is not just gas storage that is important; we need the means of storing electricity, whether through electrolysis at peak times to generate hydrogen that can be stored and released back into the energy system at other times, the greater use of batteries on an industrial scale, or using pumped storage hydroelectric power. I should confess a particular interest in pumped storage hydropower, because my father was an engineer at Cruachan power station in Argyle, and that is where he met my mother. If it was not for that pumped storage power station in Scotland, I would not be here, so I put that interest on the record. [Laughter.]

There are proposals to double the capacity at Cruachan power station, and to develop a very large pumped storage facility at Coire Glas. It is the regulatory role of the UK Government in those projects, or the oversight they have, that will decide whether or not they go ahead. I encourage the Minister—it might be worth her listening to this—to make progress on those projects, because that is one of the ways in which we will deal with the fluctuations of renewable energy to meet the baseload requirement.

That takes me to my second point, which is on how to be a clean energy superpower. We need a genuine energy transition, and that starts with a bit of basic honesty about the role that oil and gas need to play. The unlimited extraction of oil and gas is simply not compatible with our climate obligations. However, we also need to recognise that, even if there was not a pressing climate change catastrophe looming, our domestic capacity is in long-term decline. Any new licences that are issued and actually come to fruition are only going to slow the rate of overall decline, and we need to be making an impact where we really can, which is in licensing new renewables.

The right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Dame Maria Miller) gently chided us about playing politics on this issue. I must say that I always enjoy it very much when the Conservatives decide not to play politics with energy, particularly when it comes to the debate in Scotland. While it is tempting to say that the Labour party now appears to have the policy on oil and gas that the Scottish Conservatives have long accused my party of having, we really need to raise the debate from that level.

In an exchange with the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (David Duguid), I pointed out the Conservative policy that dare not speak its name: the Government’s own presumption against further oil and gas development. It prompts the question that if any new oil and gas developments do not meet their tests, what then happens? My presumption would be that they fail, and I understand that also to be the presumption of the Government.

[David Duguid]

It is really very simple: the difference is between a presumption in advance of deciding whether we even want new oil and gas and a caveat that we put in place after a decision that we want to produce more oil and gas. A presumption—a “pre-sumption”—is different from a caveat.

[Richard Thomson]

I am not sure I am any the wiser after that intervention. Either a development passes or it fails, and presumably if it fails, it does not go ahead. I will leave the hon. Gentleman to dance on the head of that particular pin.

On the Government deciding to license new fields, we need to recognise that not all of those licences will be taken up and not all of them will produce any significant amount, so when it comes to mitigating where we are, renewables are the only way forward. That is the way to lock in low prices for the future and the way to guarantee energy security.

The Secretary of State, who is now back in her place, was good enough to take an intervention from me, just as she was reaching a rhetorical zenith about floating offshore wind. The answer to my question, which she quite understandably chose not to give, is that the last round of floating offshore wind options would increase capacity by absolutely nothing because not a single bid came in. The reason for that is embarrassing. It yielded absolutely no bids because the price was wrong. The industry told the Government that, and the UK Government persisted in thinking that they knew best. The auction, rather predictably, fell flat on its face, and the result of that auction round was that the increase in offshore wind capacity was net zero.

The final point I wish to make is on the need to invest in making this happen. We need to learn the lesson that future oil and gas can only slow the rate of decline, and that we need to be doing much better in incentivising the technologies of the future. When Prime Minister Boris Johnson paid a visit to the Moray East offshore wind farm, he made a predictably vacuous and facetious remark, saying that Margaret Thatcher was a green pioneer through her virtual destruction of the coal industry. Just as we know there was no just transition for the miners, it looks unlikely that there is a just transition planned for steelworkers who may be affected by recent announcements. We need to make absolutely sure that there is a just transition for the oil and gas sector, but it does not look as though there is anything in prospect from anything the Government are planning, other than that it will be everybody for themselves.

That is in stark contrast to the approach of the Scottish Government, who have earmarked £500 million exclusively to aid the transition, onshore and off, in the north-east of Scotland. That sum is equivalent to the amount that both the Scottish and the UK Governments are putting into the Aberdeen city region deal. The failure —the repeated failure—of the UK Government to match that is not only, I believe, a betrayal of the communities of the north-east of Scotland, but a complete abrogation of the UK’s constitutional and moral responsibilities.

I shall wrap up. What was needed was a King’s Speech that delivered on the means by which we would achieve energy security, that tackled the climate crisis and that delivered the potential for economic transformation, as well as giving relief to hard-pressed energy users. The evidence is that this is not going to happen in Westminster, and it should be devolved. We should be independent, which would be a better place for Scotland to be, so that we can get on with taking the right decisions for the right reasons, off the back of our own decisions mandated by the electorate of Scotland.

UK Fisheries

Debate between Richard Thomson and David Duguid

Wednesday 12th February 2020 Westminster Hall

[Richard Thomson (Gordon) (SNP)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for South East Cornwall (Mrs Murray) on securing this important and timely debate. It gives us all, wherever we sit, the opportunity to set out our hopes and, perhaps, some of our fears over the change that is to come.

I was taken by the hon. Lady’s observations about how Norway and its relationship with the EU could set a precedent. That is a laudable ambition, but I would caution that the Norwegian Government seem to set greater importance by their fishing industry than the UK Government do, given the evidence of recent years. We will see how that transpires.

I was also taken by the comments made by the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), about the prospect of no longer seeing EU vessels coming into our waters. I will touch on that later. My particular concern, which I share with many colleagues, is about the differentiated relationship that will potentially exist between Northern Ireland and Great Britain, and whether we will see fish caught in Scottish waters landed in Scottish ports, or whether they will go through Northern Ireland for seamless access to important EU markets, that might not otherwise be accessed.

The hon. Members for Totnes (Anthony Mangnall), for Waveney (Peter Aldous) and for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Cat Smith) all spoke about the importance of making sure the economic opportunities were fully seized on shore; I completely concur with that.

My group and the Scottish Government will consider the Fisheries Bill carefully, to assess whether it delivers for Scottish fishing communities, in our view. We will seek to improve it throughout the process, wherever we have the opportunity. We will be guided by the sustainable and responsible vision for fisheries management set out in the Scottish Government’s “Future of fisheries management in Scotland: national discussion paper.”

It remains a matter of real concern that UK Ministers have taken power to set quota for Scotland-only stocks. Even if they have no intention of using it, it is a matter of concern that that decision has been taken. I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say about it.

In preparation for the debate I cast my mind back to a statement issued by the Scottish Fishermen’s Federation and the National Federation of Fishermen’s Organisations in April 2018. They set out three criteria by which they would measure the success of the Government’s negotiating outcomes. Those criteria were about

“actual as well as legal authority”

over fisheries; whether

“fisheries management decisions on shared stocks”

would be made through bilateral annual agreements; and about the ability to secure “free and frictionless trade.” I will deal with each in turn.

Regarding the first criteria—

“actual as well as legal authority”—

obviously, even as a coastal state, we will still be subject to the United Nations convention on the law of the sea and the concept of the total allowable catch, but if all we do is use the legal authority to take back control of the seas and repackage the status quo with a Union Jack around it, that will be very much a missed opportunity, far from the goals set out.

Secondly, I turn to “shared stocks” and bilateral agreements. I apologise, Sir George; at the outset I should have declared an interest. I am vice chair of the North Sea Commission’s marine resources group and had the opportunity to attend a fisheries conference in the Netherlands province of Flevoland. There, I had the privilege to hear Peter van Dalen, a Member of the European Parliament in the European People’s Party group, talk about an earlier stage in Brexit discussions. He thought there should be a link between access to waters and access to markets. We can instantly see the danger with that. Even if we manage to get the relationship right at the outset, given the imbalance in negotiating power and the importance of fishing to the economies of other countries relative to our own, bilateral negotiations are a risk. Access and quotas simply become a factor in annual politicking. I do not have a huge amount of confidence that UK fishermen, wherever they fish from, will necessarily always be the beneficiaries of that outcome.

Thirdly, “free and frictionless trade” depends on what sort of deal is struck, or indeed if one can be struck at all. A no-deal situation, or one that sees divergence or a lack of alignment, could create significant difficulties for exporting a product, whether it is a primary product or one at the value-added stage. For example, I am currently a member of Aberdeenshire Council, which, like all local authorities, provides environmental health officers. There remains a real concern about the need to provide export health certificates for catches, if they are required. That would obliterate small-value exports of single or small numbers of boxes. There are simply not enough EHOs to cope with what would be required. The qualifications to become an EHO are a Bachelor of Science degree and two years’ experience, meaning that people need to have a minimum of five years’ experience before they can sign off their first consignment.

[David Duguid]

The hon. Gentleman makes an excellent point and I agree that we do not have enough environmental health officers. As a current—and soon to be recovering—member of Aberdeenshire Council, can he explain why the council has to cut back on environmental health officers?

[Richard Thomson]

The hon. Gentleman would be better advised to direct that question to his colleague Councillor Jim Gifford, who is the leader of the council. As members of the same party they will have ample opportunity to discuss the question. My point was that it takes five years from scratch to build EHO capacity, and without that there is a huge problem, which we cannot gloss over.

There is also a need to have heat treated pallets for exports, wagons and drivers with appropriate credentials, and there is the prospect of delays at ports. For a perishable product, that is bad news, especially as the European Union accounts for 77% of total Scottish seafood exports by value.

The only area of opportunity that I could concede Brexit offers is in terms of the value that could come to fishing and coastal communities. However, that requires investment in skills and training and requires the manufacturers, the producers, to have access to product. As hon. Members said, it depends very much on zonal attachment and getting access to that product. It depends very much on free and frictionless access to markets. It also depends on freedom of movement. I sat through a rather dispiriting Government response to a debate yesterday afternoon in the main Chamber about freedom of movement. We absolutely do need to have that if we are to take full advantage.

It is very clear—