Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what steps his Department is taking to support environmentally-friendly industry and manufacturing in Dudley North constituency.

In April 2020, a consortium led by the Black Country Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) was awarded funding from UK Research and Innovation through the Industrial Decarbonisation Challenge. The LEP was invited to compete for a total of up to £8 million in phase two of the competition, to develop plans for decarbonising the local industrial cluster through the ‘Repowering the Black Country’ project.

This project aims to agree a roadmap for the Black Country’s industry to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2040. The roadmap will provide a framework for securing significant commercial funding and investment to support clean industrial growth within the region.

In July 2020, the Government announced plans to publish an Industrial Decarbonisation Strategy in Spring 2021. The Strategy will set out the Government’s vision for a prosperous, low carbon UK industrial sector by 2050.The Government is also investing £147 million towards the Manufacturing Made Smarter challenge, which is open to firms across the UK. This competition will support innovation in industrial digital technology that will accelerate the drive to net zero, raise productivity by 30%, and create thousands of new highly-skilled jobs.