Green Energy: Ports

Debate between Stephen Crabb and Dan Poulter

Wednesday 18th October 2023 Westminster Hall

[Stephen Crabb]

I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s intervention. Banff and Buchan is a constituency with which I am very familiar, as he knows, and there are some exciting things happening. For a long time the north-east of Scotland was associated with fishing and oil, but there is a lot more to talk about now, so I look forward to hearing further contributions from him this afternoon.

To encourage the investment required for all the ports that we have an interest in and are talking about this afternoon, the targets that the Government are setting are really important because they set the level of ambition and send a signal to investors in the marketplace about what the Government want.

There are two documents that are particularly important in describing the opportunities flowing from the new energy environment that we are in. One is the energy security strategy published in April last year; the other, which was published in March this year, is “Powering Up Britain”, which speaks to the role of new renewable technologies in our energy mix and outlines the scale of the ambition. Because of my local port and our proximity to the Celtic sea, I have a particular interest in the Government’s ambitions for floating offshore wind. In those two Government documents, I believe there lies a major new industrial opportunity for our nation.

The targets that have been set include 5 GW of floating offshore wind, 10 GW of low-carbon hydrogen production capacity, up to 70 GW of new solar, and an ambition for between 20 million and 30 million tonnes per annum of carbon storage. That is an exciting and ambitious set of targets that the Government are setting out. Meeting them will require a lot of work and a lot of investment, and ports will be right at the centre of it.

Different ports will undoubtedly offer different capabilities according to size, location, local skills mix and local supply chains. It is too easy to say that there will be something for everyone, but if the floating offshore wind sector in the Celtic sea plays anything like the role that the Government are setting out for it in “Powering Up Britain”, it will generate new activity in multiple port locations across south Wales and south-west England.

But let us not get ahead of ourselves. The truth is that we still do not have any floating offshore wind projects up and running in the Celtic sea. That leads me on to the final section of my speech, in which I will outline the significance of what we have in my constituency at Milford Haven, as well as summarising the key asks that I want to put to the Government.

[Dr Dan Poulter (Central Suffolk and North Ipswich) (Con)]

I feel this is an appropriate juncture to intervene. My right hon. Friend will be aware of the importance of Felixstowe port in Suffolk, which has almost 50% of the UK’s container trade. Through strategic investment, there is a great opportunity for the Government not only to support the economic growth of ports, but to support them in delivering the decarbonising agenda. In the case of Felixstowe, investment in the Ely junction will make a significant difference by potentially improving freight rail capacity to the port. Will my right hon. Friend join me in urging the Minister to recommit today to the Government securing timely funding for upgrading that junction and others in the east of England? That will allow improved freight transport to Felixstowe, will help to decarbonise the transport of goods to the port and will improve its economic capacity.

[Stephen Crabb]

I am grateful for that intervention. I am not familiar with the specifics of what my hon. Friend is talking about, but as I am generally in favour of upgrading junctions, I will echo his call to the Minister to support the investment required. His point about decarbonisation is really important; I might say a few words myself about decarbonisation in the context of the local energy industry in Milford Haven.

In the port of Milford Haven, we have the UK’s single largest cluster of energy-related businesses, with high-capacity oil and gas pipelines, electricity connections and a wide range of conventional oil and gas companies, as I referred to earlier. The energy sector in Pembrokeshire supports the employment of 5,000 skilled workers across Wales and the employment of many hundreds more throughout the wider supply chain.

Last week, alongside representatives of many companies at the port, I had the pleasure of celebrating the delivery of the 1,000th cargo of liquefied natural gas at the South Hook LNG terminal. This afternoon we are talking about the green energy revolution, but the truth—this is a point that the Minister understands very well—is that we will rely on oil and gas for decades to come, and the terminals in my constituency that have done a lot of the heavy lifting in the last couple of years in enhancing UK energy security will be as vital as ever. Those conventional energy companies are themselves taking huge strides and making big investments to decarbonise, reduce their own carbon footprint and fit in with the framework of policy and ambition that the Government have set out.

I commend those companies—South Hook LNG, Dragon LNG, the Valero oil refinery, the Puma oil import terminal—which are all part of a cluster around the Milford Haven waterway that is sharing best practice and working together. They are part of the wider south Wales industrial cluster, which has been charged by the Government with the mission of leading decarbonisation efforts. I look forward to hearing the remarks of my friend the hon. Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock). The south Wales corridor—from Milford Haven in the west with its big hydrocarbon plants, through to Port Talbot with the enormous Tata steelworks, and then to Newport and the border of England at Gwent—accounts for a major chunk of Wales’s overall carbon emissions, so the south Wales industrial cluster’s efforts to decarbonise are vital. The Government support them, but it would be good for Ministers to engage even more with the cluster and particularly, from my point of view, with the energy cluster in Pembrokeshire.

In October last year, I led a debate in Westminster Hall about floating offshore wind. I will not repeat everything I said about the new industrial opportunity for Wales and south-west England that lies in the Celtic sea, but I underline the point that this is not some piece of green idealism. The Government’s targets for reaching net zero and ensuring a greater degree of energy security require industrial development in the Celtic sea on a very large scale. Milford Haven is in an ideal geographic location for the Celtic sea developments.

Milford Haven also has more than 50 years of energy industry skills and heritage. Many companies in the local supply chain are well able to adapt and are excited about the potential new opportunities from floating offshore wind. More than 20 companies have expressed an interest as potential developers in floating offshore wind projects in the Celtic sea, including large companies such as RWE and Equinor, which have global footprints and are already investing in Pembrokeshire ahead of the opening up of the Celtic sea. Other companies such as Floventis are already working with local schools and colleges to look at what kind of skills will be required and to excite young people about the green energy revolution. We will need many more people going into technical trades—more welders, pipe fitters, marine engineers, navigators and people who can work offshore—as well as project planners and all the other highly skilled jobs that are required to deliver such projects. It is an exciting time down in Milford Haven.

Let me wrap up by summarising a few asks of the Government. The first—the Minister has heard me ask this before, but I will ask it again—is that it would be great if he could visit Milford Haven, sit down with some of the companies that I am talking about, and get a sense of the excitement and the work that is happening. The previous Secretary of State made a fleeting visit in the middle of August to RWE’s net zero centre at its power station in Pembroke, but we need the Minister to engage with the whole sector. He has previously committed to coming down. Transport to west Wales is appalling—the Welsh Government need to pull their finger out when it comes to running train services, but that is a debate for another day—so it is difficult to get to. There are so many good Scottish colleagues present, so I will make the point that, given the number of visits that Scottish constituencies get, it would be great if Wales could have some of that as well. That is my first ask: come to Pembrokeshire and see what is happening.

Secondly, the bidding process for the floating offshore wind manufacturing investment scheme closed recently. I have written to the Secretary of State, copying in the Treasury. I strongly support Milford Haven’s application for FLOWMIS funding. I have made this point previously, and I will make it again this afternoon: if this fund is to help unlock strategic investment in port infrastructure, it has to be used in a targeted way. I love levelling-up funds—I love the way they are used and spread around—but this is not a levelling-up fund. It has to be used to encourage private developers to release their funding, to incentivise and to send a market signal. I encourage the use of that money. There is £160 million. It should be more, and hopefully it could be more. I would like to see Milford Haven and the port of Port Talbot in south Wales get their asks. Investment is needed in both locations. Everyone who is considering the industry of floating offshore wind in the Celtic sea will agree that Milford Haven and Port Talbot are the two western-facing ports in the Celtic sea where this will happen first.

Thirdly, we appreciate the support that the UK Government have given to establishing the Celtic freeport. I am delighted that Milford Haven, and Port Talbot 70 miles away, have a twinned arrangement and are partners in the Celtic freeport enterprise. A lot of work remains to be done on the governance and on getting the freeport up and running and doing its thing. I ask the Minister to show a real interest in that and to meet representatives of the Celtic freeport to capture their vision of how they want to use that to incentivise investment, particularly in supply chains, so that floating offshore wind does not happen in the same way as fixed-bottom offshore wind, where we ended up relying on companies based and doing work overseas. We want much more of the work for this new industry to be based in and close to our constituencies in south Wales.

My fourth ask of the Minister is on working with the Crown Estate, which I know he already does. If the Minister looks at what the Crown Estate has said ahead of its next leasing round, he will see that it is emphasising the importance of developers working with what they describe as integration ports. These are the ports where the kit is going to be assembled, and these are enormous pieces of kit. I take my hat off to Dan Labbad and his team, who are doing a very good job, but it is important that the plan that the Crown Estate is working on aligns with what the UK Government are doing. That aligned leadership is going to be important if we are going to make those strides and get the industry off the ground.

I was going to make a final point about contracts for difference, but the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) will be leading an excellent Westminster Hall debate on that subject tomorrow afternoon, so I will let him make those points. I am sure that he and I think the same about the issue.

I will leave it there. I look forward to hearing from other Members.

Vaccinations: Developing Countries

Debate between Stephen Crabb and Dan Poulter

Wednesday 13th June 2018 Westminster Hall

[Stephen Crabb]

I have heard that said, and I will go on to refer to the importance of reaching the hard-to-reach groups. There is evidence that that is the way to get, to put it crudely, more bang for our buck on the vaccinations spend, because the threat of outbreaks of killer diseases is higher for some of those isolated communities and families than for those elsewhere. My hon. Friend makes a useful point early in the debate.

For the last decade and more, there has been a political consensus that we should spend 0.7% of our GDP on international aid and assistance. At times in recent years, it has felt as though that consensus is being tested; certainly, the all-out assault on our aid budget in some sections of the popular press has had a corrosive effect, at least among some members of the general public. The discussion in the popular press is overwhelmingly dominated by questions over the headline funding commitment and the suggestion, repeated over and over again, that aid money could be better spent on domestic priorities.

While those of us who support Britain’s role as a leader in effective overseas development should never tire of restating the basic case for aid, we should also do more to draw attention to specific examples where UK aid has helped to achieve profound economic and social improvements in some of the poorest countries on earth. One area of British leadership and expertise that has received too little attention is the funding, development and distribution of vaccines against killer diseases, and I will use this short debate to highlight that. Diseases are not just an unpleasant inconvenience for a country; they ravage a nation’s economy, directly affect its ability to grow and hold back economic development. Diseases keep poor countries poor.

It was a British doctor, Edward Jenner, who pioneered the first vaccine at the end of the 18th century, when he used pus drawn from a cowpox boil to inoculate a boy against the killer smallpox—a story that many of us will have learned about in our schooldays. More than 200 years on, British science and medical research still lead the world in improving the health of people living in extreme poverty. The eradication of smallpox was one of the great achievements of immunology in the 20th century. Smallpox was once one of the world’s most feared and deadliest diseases. Just 60 years ago, it was endemic in dozens of countries containing around 60% of the world’s population. By 1980, it had been eradicated, following a concerted international effort.

More recently, polio, once epidemic, has almost been eradicated too, due to concerted vaccination efforts worldwide. It has been reduced by 99% globally and the number of polio-endemic countries has decreased from 125 in 1983 to just three today. That is the culmination of a remarkable international effort that brought together Governments, NGOs and many private individuals. Rotary clubs around the world, for example, took this up as a campaign and raised enormous sums toward the effort through community-led fundraising. Full eradication of the disease is within reach, showing again what can be achieved when we harness political will, public support, large-scale resources and world-class science. I believe that that formula is the key to so many of the interventions that will make the world a better place in the years ahead.

British medical and scientific research remain world leaders in the fight against vaccine-preventable diseases. We are part of numerous initiatives and alliances, recognising that multilateral co-ordination and use of public resources to leverage in private sector funding provide a strong platform for this work at a global level. I am sure the Minister will update us on some of those initiatives in his winding-up speech.

[Dr Dan Poulter (Central Suffolk and North Ipswich) (Con)]

I congratulate my right hon. Friend on securing the debate and on the speech he is making. On the issue of private company and pharmaceutical involvement in the development of vaccines, there has been a challenge, as we saw with the Ebola outbreak, in that this is not an area of great profit for pharmaceuticals; it is difficult for them to recoup their investment from lower-middle income countries. The pharmaceutical model needs more encouragement of pharmaceuticals to invest in development of vaccines such as Ebola. What would he say to encourage that?

[Stephen Crabb]

My hon. Friend, who knows an enormous amount about this field, makes an important point. We are essentially dealing here with a case of market failure, where markets in the purest sense do not work in bringing through vaccine development and distribution in some of the poorest countries. I will talk about that later. I am about to talk about GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance; the model on which it operates is based on tackling exactly that problem, where there is not sufficient market demand in a poor country to create the financial incentive or pull for pharmaceutical companies to invest there profitably.

GAVI was created in 2000 and it brings together the public and private sectors with the shared aim of creating equal access to vaccines for children living in the world’s poorest countries. Britain was one of its original donors, and today we provide around 25% of its funding. There is also the global health fund, which was created to accelerate the end of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria as epidemics, and for which UK funding averages around £360 million a year. Last year, the global health fund partnered with GAVI and Unitaid to provide around $50 million to pilot the world’s first malaria vaccine for young children in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi. That vaccine has been 30 years in the making in fighting a disease that still claims thousands of lives each year.

Back in 2015, the former Prime Minister, David Cameron, announced a plan to tackle the risk of global health pandemics that included the establishment of a UK vaccines research and development network. The network’s focus is to bring together experts from industry, academia, philanthropy and Government to invest in projects on vaccines and vaccine technology to combat diseases with epidemic potential, such as Ebola and Zika, in low and middle-income countries. Britain has led from the front in the global fight against killer diseases.

Vaccines are widely recognised as an important mechanism for controlling infectious disease outbreaks, although they are by no means the only mechanism. In fact, the supply of clean water, for example, is even more important in reducing the burden of infectious diseases. However, it is right that the international effort to develop and distribute vaccines against deadly diseases, of which Britain is a key part, is a strategic priority for our overseas aid policies, and it needs to remain so.

At the heart of that challenge is the market failure referred to by my hon. Friend the Member for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich (Dr Poulter). Outbreaks of some of the world’s deadliest diseases occur only intermittently, and often in the world’s poorest countries, meaning that there might not be a strong market incentive for the pharmaceutical industry to develop vaccines for such diseases.

The UK Government are taking concerted and co-ordinated action to address that market failure. For example, the UK has committed to invest £120 million between 2016 and 2021 in the development of new vaccines for diseases with epidemic potential, in line with the expert advice provided by the UK Vaccine Network. The UK is also helping to build laboratory capacity, surveillance networks and response capacity in low and middle-income countries to deal with the threat of antimicrobial resistance, which militates against the efficacy of drugs in treating diseases.

Some of the health impacts of vaccinations are widely known. For example, between 2010 and 2016, 109 million children were given the pneumococcal vaccine to protect against the main cause of pneumonia, saving an estimated 760,000 lives. In 2017, nearly 1 million people were vaccinated against cholera when an epidemic threatened South Sudan. Only 400 people lost their lives, thanks to an integrated approach that also incorporated surveillance, investigation of and response to cases by rapid response teams, the provision of clean water and the promotion of good hygiene practices. We could cite many other examples.

However, the wider economic benefit of vaccination programmes to the poorest nations has not been fully explored. More research and data are needed to help us to tell the full story of how and why investing in vaccinations helps to alleviate poverty and create stronger foundations for economic success. We certainly know that high out-of-pocket expenditures contribute to poverty, and healthcare can be one of the most significant such expenses for those living in poor countries. In 2010, the World Health Organisation reported that the cost of healthcare prevented many poor people from seeking treatment while simultaneously pushing 150 million care seekers into poverty each year. Put simply, poor people getting sick is likely to make them even poorer and to wreck their future earning potential. When that picture is repeated across families and communities, the consequences can be dire.

At economy level, we have evidence of the ravages that killer diseases can cause. For example, the 2014 Ebola crisis in west Africa disrupted international trade and travel, cost at least $2.8 billion in lost growth and killed more than 11,000 people in the three countries worst affected by the outbreak—Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea. It had a severe developmental impact in those counties, placing already weak health systems under extreme pressure, and had a negative impact on employment and school attendance rates.

In February, Health Affairs published a study, jointly authored by researchers at Harvard University and GAVI, that looked at the health and economic benefits of vaccinations, which it showed have a poverty-alleviating benefit, especially for the poorest people. Although the study raised some specific questions about the delivery of vaccination programmes, distributional impacts and the transition away from aid-funded programmes as countries move across the poverty eligibility threshold, it nevertheless helped to strengthen the case for continued investment in vaccinations and helped to give us a fuller picture of how good aid spent well does exactly what we claim it does—saves lives and reduces extreme poverty.

[Dr Poulter]

My right hon. Friend makes an important point. Aid initiatives are far too often evaluated purely on what they cost the Department or organisation giving the money, but cost-benefit analyses that look at the wider economic and long-term healthcare benefits are how we should evaluate aid spending in the future. Will he join me in urging the Department for International Development to look at using those more effectively in the future when looking at how it spends its money?

[Stephen Crabb]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point and I absolutely agree with him. That is exactly the kind of research and evidence that the Department and other bodies need to provide as those who believe in and support our overseas aid spending seek to make and restate the case for it over and over again. It is a powerful message with which to challenge sceptics and cynics.

In 2016, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health examined the projected return on investment in vaccinations between 2011 and 2020 in 94 low and middle-income countries. Looking only at the direct costs associated with illness, such as treatment and lost productivity, it found that the return for every £1 spent on vaccines was £16. When it expanded its analysis to look at the broader economic impact of illness, it found that the return was around £44 for every £1 spent. Such studies point to investment in vaccinations being an important means of improving health equity and reducing poverty, and to vaccinations providing value for money.

There is another aspect to this: investment in vaccinations in the poorest countries is also an investment in our own national security and resilience. I am always wary of the self-interest argument when it comes to defending overseas aid, and I think people generally see through those arguments, but polling evidence indicates that the general public understand that killer diseases such as Ebola do not respect borders and shows greater support for aid that focuses resources on tackling those diseases.

I will wrap up in a few moments, but I will close with several recommendations and observations, which the Minister will perhaps respond to today or follow up in writing at a later date. What efforts is Britain making, through its international partnerships and on its own, to improve vaccine coverage rates among the very poorest, ensuring that aid is spent on those who need it most and for whom it has the biggest benefit?

Distributional impacts should be taken into account when decisions are made about introducing or expanding vaccination programmes, and programmes accruing greater benefits to the poor should be prioritised over vaccines with less equity impact. Hard-to-reach families and people in isolated areas should be priority targets, as investment among those people significantly reduces the likelihood of disease outbreaks, which are more costly in lives and the money needed to respond.

Despite significant progress since 2000, today, nearly one infant in 10—that is, around 30 million children—does not receive any vaccinations, and more than 1.5 million children under the age of five die from vaccine-preventable diseases every year. Pneumococcal conjugate vaccines immunise against the most common cause of pneumonia, but they remain inaccessible to millions largely due to high prices, thus leaving behind the poorest and most marginalised children.