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

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what plans he has to support the carbon capture and storage project, HyNet, to (a) safeguard manufacturing jobs in the North West and (b) position the UK as a global leader in clean growth.

The 2019 Manifesto and Ten Point Plan for a Green Industrial Revolution position the UK as a global leader which will create and safeguard thousands of jobs.

We have already supported Carbon Capture, Utilisation and Storage (CCUS) deployment in the North West, with an award of over £30m of development funding to HyNet, earlier this year, through the Industrial Decarbonisation Challenge.

In our Ten Point Plan, the Government set out that we would deploy four CCUS clusters by 2030, at the latest. In May this year, BEIS launched Phase-1 of the CCUS Cluster Sequencing Process. An announcement on the results of Phase-1 in October of this year; as the process is ongoing, it would be inappropriate for me to comment on the outcome at this stage.