Thangam Debbonaire
Main Page: Thangam Debbonaire (Labour - Bristol West)Department Debates - View all Thangam Debbonaire's debates with the Leader of the House
Business of the House
Thangam Debbonaire Excerpts(6 years, 5 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Andrea Leadsom
I am sure my hon. Friend will welcome the news of the Prime Minister’s commitment to increase funds for the NHS by £20.5 billion a year in real terms by 2023-24. I know that he cares deeply about services at the Horton and in the wider Oxfordshire area, as indeed do I and my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Victoria Prentis). The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care has recently reviewed the concerns raised by Oxfordshire Joint Health Overview and Scrutiny Committee, and has asked the NHS locally to work with stakeholders—including us as local MPs—to address them.
Thangam Debbonaire (Bristol West) (Lab)
The Leader of the House said that an announcement about the Swansea bay tidal lagoon would be made “soon”, which I do not think is good enough for the thousands of manufacturing and highly skilled technical jobs across south Wales and the west country. Moreover, renewable energy is the energy of the future: it will power our future manufacturing industries. May we have a debate in Government time about the renewable energy industry?
Andrea Leadsom
As the hon. Lady will know, we are ensuring that the UK has a diverse, secure and affordable energy mix. We are looking carefully at the potential to harness the UK’s natural resources to make our energy mix sustainable and affordable for the future. Through competition and innovation, the leadership that we have shown has resulted in dramatic reductions in the cost of renewable energy projects. Over the last two years, for example, the cost of offshore wind has halved, which means that we can secure a larger amount of electricity generation for every pound of bill payers’ money. That is absolutely essential. The UK is doing incredibly well in renewables, in both European and world terms.
As I have said, Ministers in the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy continue to look at the Swansea Bay tidal lagoon project with Welsh devolved Administration Ministers, and they will come forward as soon as they can.