Claire Coutinho MP: speeches

Speeches

• 2 Jul 2025 · Heathrow Substation Outage: NESO Review · Hansard source

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  Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. I feel older, wiser and significantly more sleep-deprived. I thank the Minister for advance sight of his statement. I also thank NESO for its rapid work. The report is clear that there have been serious failings by National Grid to fix an issue that it knew about for seven years. The Minister is right; that is unacceptable. What is most important, though, is what happens now. I have some questions for the Minister. First, who at National Grid made the decision to defer critical maintenance of the transformer in 2022? He said that he would hold them accountable, so how will he do that? He spoke about breaching licence conditions. What are the penalties for doing that and what accountability mechanisms will he use? Secondly, the report says that the North Hyde site did not meet modern standards on physical barriers between transformers. Can the Minister confirm he has asked National Grid to review substations with transformers built before the current standards were put in place? Thirdly, what steps will he take to look at the resilience of our energy system, particularly in the light of the heightened geopolitical risk that we all face? The key message that we should take from the report on the Heathrow blackout is the importance of critical national infrastructure to our energy security and our national security. In that regard, it is the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change who is playing with fire. A week after the blackout hit Heathrow, Spain and Portugal gave us a stark warning of what happens when countries fail to protect their energy security: public transport down, payment systems down and millions of people unable to cook, travel or contact their families. Tragically, people lost their lives. In the case of North Hyde, the blackout affected schools, the London Underground, Hillingdon hospital and 70,000 customers, some of whom had to move out of their homes. That is the price we pay when we do not take energy security seriously. It is not a nice-to-have—energy is a basic need—and yet this Government are putting our energy at risk. The national security strategy that the Government published just last week included 12 mentions of climate but not a single mention of the risk that China poses to our energy system. Last year, our intelligence services warned that Chinese state-sponsored hackers were working to disrupt and destroy critical infrastructure in the event of conflict, and yet the Secretary of State is rushing to make Britain dependent on Chinese solar panels, Chinese rare earths and Chinese batteries in just five years’ time. We have just seen China limit the export of critical minerals in its trade war with the US. We have seen kill switches found in Chinese inverters. The US intelligence services have warned us about the risk of surveillance devices in Chinese wind turbines. I first wrote to the Secretary of State eight months ago, asking him to publish an assessment of what his targets mean for our reliance on Chinese imports. He has not even bothered to reply. If the Secretary of State wants to hand over the keys of our energy supply to the Chinese Communist party, he should come to this House and explain why. We are lucky enough in this country to be surrounded by our own gas fields, but the Secretary of State does not care. This is a man who would rather import gas from Norway, from the very same fields in the North sea that he is banning Britain from using; who is pouring concrete down our gas wells; and who is blocking off any contingency plan that Britain might need in a crisis. I do not say this lightly, but this is a man who is putting our national security at risk. Today we are talking about the first transformer fire in a decade in this country and he did not even bother to turn up. That is the problem. The Secretary of State might prefer to be in Brazil, Baku, Beijing or wherever he is today, but he should be here to explain himself, because as the former head of MI6 said, he is pursuing an energy policy that is “completely crazy” when it comes to national security. I want clean energy from nuclear, from small modular reactors and from the next generation of British innovation, but first and foremost I want energy that keeps the lights on and keeps bills down. This Government are going to leave us completely reliant on foreign imports: from China, from Norway, from Qatar—from anywhere as long as it is not Britain. NESO and Ofgem will do their work, but the Minister must do his work too. Alongside the work of the North Hyde report, can he confirm that he will come back and update the House on his plans to protect the energy resilience of this country?

• 26 Nov 2024 · COP29 · Hansard source

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  I thank the Secretary of State for advance sight of his statement. I echo his comments on Storm Bert and thank the emergency services for all that they have done to help those in need. I start by passing on my personal condolences to the right hon. Gentleman on the passing of John Prescott. I know that he wanted him to lead the Paris accords in 2015, having admired his work in Kyoto, and I believe that, at the time, he described John as good at “bashing heads together”. I hope that, as the Secretary of State’s opposite number, I can achieve some of that head-bashing that he so clearly valued in John. In that vein, the Secretary of State has talked a lot about regaining global leadership, but I fear that he is stuck in 2009. He may not want to acknowledge this, but for the past 14 years, we have been a global leader. We are the only major economy to have halved carbon emissions since 1990. In that same time, America’s emissions have stayed the same and China’s have tripled. However, we have seen that countries are not persuaded just by Britain going further, faster; they are persuaded by prosperity, and by living standards. We account for 1% of global emissions, and I fear that if he continues down the path that he has set out, our country will face hardship, and there will be no point in being world-leading because nobody will want to follow our lead. He would make us a warning, not an example to others. Let us start with what the Secretary of State announced at the conference of the parties. He has set out a new target of cutting our greenhouse gas emissions by 81% by 2035. However, what we did not hear in his statement is how much this will cost the British people. The independent Climate Change Committee says that that target will require people to eat less meat and dairy, take fewer flights, and swap their boilers for heat pumps and their petrol cars for electric vehicles at a pace that will require taxes and mandation. Even the Chair of the Select Committee has acknowledged that people will be forced to change their lives. But the Secretary of State says not to worry, as he will deliver all the savings through energy policy, and those plans will lead to higher growth, a cut in bills, job creation and stronger national security, but when it comes to his plans, none of those things is true. The independent Institute for Fiscal Studies has already said that his climate plans will not lead to growth. The National Energy System Operator’s report shows that his rush for clean power in 2030 will add eye-watering costs to our energy system, and that despite those very expensive costs, it would still leave gas pricing the system around 50% of the time—or it would leave the equivalent of millions of homes in the dark waiting for the wind to blow. I do not think that that is anybody’s idea of energy or national security. The Secretary of State does not have to take my word for it. The head of offshore wind development at RWE, one of the country’s largest wind developers, has warned that the Secretary of State’s rush to meet his 2030 target will lead to price spikes, with consumers losing out. The chief executive of Octopus has warned about the £6 billion in costs that consumers will have to pay, because the right hon. Gentleman wants to build renewables without reforming the grid. The former head of MI6 has warned the Secretary of State— [Interruption.] This is worth listening to. He said that from the point of view of national security, the Secretary of State is pursuing “a completely crazy energy policy”. The Secretary of State’s plans to make our energy expensive and unreliable will see jobs fleeing to more polluting countries, because it is cheap energy and innovation that matter in the race for jobs. We need only ask China, which dominates clean tech supply chains and is the world’s largest polluter. That is where billions of pounds of our taxpayers’ money will be going to pay for his rushed transition—from our country, with all the investment that it has made in clean power, to a country still 60% powered by coal. We are talking about low growth, high bills, jobs lost and even blackouts, for more carbon in the atmosphere. That is the opposite of what he has been promising. In Baku, while the Secretary of State was signing us up to these targets without talking about what they will do to the lives of British people, he was also signing away billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money. He signed us up to a $300 billion annual climate finance target. I am afraid that it is not credible to say that taxpayers will not have to pay more. They will have to pay more, and they deserve to know how much more. Will he tell us today what that new target will mean for British taxpayers? Considering the increase in the target, the public will rightly question why countries such as Russia and particularly China, now the world’s largest polluter and second largest by historical standards, will not be obliged to pay a penny—I think he tried to insist that they would, but it is very clear that they will not be obliged at all to pay in—while Britain, which has invested billions in cutting its emissions and accounts for only 1% of global emissions, will have to pay more. Will the Secretary of State also set out an assessment of the impact of increased reliance on coal-powered Chinese imports for his 2030 zero carbon plans, and of what that means for global emissions? The Secretary of State is not being honest with the British public. He promised them £300 off their energy bills by 2030, but just weeks ago, he whipped his Labour MPs to vote down that pledge. He took away the winter fuel payment, despite promising that the elderly would be looked after under his energy policy, and he now says that he can achieve stronger climate targets in a way that will require zero cost from the public. This is not a recipe for climate leadership, but a recipe for higher bills and lost jobs, and it will be a disaster for the British public.

• 13 Nov 2024 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  During the election campaign, the Conservative party committed to clarifying the definition of “sex” in the Equality Act 2010 to protect women’s rights. At the end of this month, For Women Scotland v. Scottish Ministers will be heard in the UK Supreme Court. The case will have far-reaching consequences for sex-based rights, so can the Government assure the House that they are now clear that the definition in “sex” in the Equality Act 2010 means biological sex?

• 29 Oct 2024 · Great British Energy Bill · Hansard source

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  It is nice to be back discussing Great British Energy, and on the day before the Budget, too. I am sure that Labour Members are worrying about what kind of horrors they will be forced to defend next. They will have had a miserable summer trying to explain to their constituents why they are scrapping the winter fuel payment for pensioners in poverty, just weeks after a general election in which no mention was made of that. They will have spent the last few weeks explaining that the term “working people”—the people they promised to protect in their manifesto—does not include small business owners, or employees with savings, and that their use of the term “national insurance” does not prevent a national insurance rise for employers. They will be getting a bashing from companies, who were told that Labour would be pro-business, yet have been clobbered by post-election announcements of tax rises and trade union charters, and who have a Prime Minister with an optimism about Britain that puts him on the charts somewhere between Eeyore and Victor Meldrew. And tomorrow Labour Members will have to explain why the Chancellor who said before the election that any change to the fiscal rules would amount to fiddling the figures is now changing them to open the door to billions of pounds of borrowing. This is a timely return to the Great British Energy Bill. Our amendments today will give Labour Members an opportunity, which I am sure they will welcome, to hold their leadership to account for at least some of the promises that they were told to go out and sell. Let us take a look at a few of the promises that Labour Members made during the election. The hon. Member for Brent East (Dawn Butler) wrote on her website: “We will set up Great British Energy…cutting energy bills by an average of £300 a year.” The hon. Member for Bracknell (Peter Swallow) posted on Facebook: “Why am I backing Labour’s plan to set up Great British Energy? It will save £300 off average household energy bills in the South East by 2030.” The hon. Member for South Norfolk (Ben Goldsborough) said on Facebook: “everyone in the east of England will get £300 off their energy bills…no ifs, no buts, no maybes, these will be measurable and you will be able to check our progress at the end of the next Parliament.” At least 50 MPs made similar claims. Why were Labour candidates up and down the country saying these things? Perhaps they were simply listening to the Cabinet. The Science Secretary said on “Good Morning Britain”: “I can tell you directly…by the end of this Parliament that…energy bills will fall by up to £300.” The Work and Pensions Secretary said: “Great British Energy will get people’s bills £300 a year lower.” This is my personal favourite: the Chancellor—the woman of the hour—said, “Great British Energy, a publicly owned energy company, will cut energy bills by up to £300.” These were not one-off promises; it was the party line, as dictated by the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero. These promises are still up in writing. In fact, the Labour party website still says that its energy plans will cut bills by £300 on average. Oddly, Ministers now do not seem so keen on that pledge. We have asked them about it in this House, as have the media, but the number seems to have vanished. They have even taken down the Great British Energy website, and the newly appointed chair even said in Committee that cutting bills is “not the scope of Great British Energy.” –– [ Official Report, Great British Energy Public Bill Committee, 8 October 2024; c. 6, Q5.] This is not trivial; these are promises that people care about. Every single Labour Member will have had constituents vote for them because they believed that Labour’s promise of £300 off their energy bills would make a meaningful difference to their lives. Amendments 6 and 7 in my name will hold the Government to account on their election promise to cut bills. Our amendments would give Great British Energy a strategic priority to cut people’s energy bills by £300 by 2030, and would require Great British Energy to produce an annual report on progress towards meeting that target. Surely all Labour Members who made these promises and kept them up on their social media accounts will want to track the Government’s progress on this important issue for their constituents. Well, tonight is their chance. But £300 off bills was not the Secretary of State’s only promise at the election. He also claimed that Great British Energy would create 650,000 new jobs, but he did not mention that figure on Second Reading, and the Energy Minister, the hon. Member for Rutherglen (Michael Shanks), did not mention it in Committee. It does not appear in Great British Energy’s founding statement, nor does it appear in the Government’s explanatory notes on the Bill. The only detail we have heard about the number of jobs to be created by Great British Energy came from the Secretary of State’s hand-picked chair of that body, who said that “hundreds” of people will be employed at its Aberdeen headquarters. We have since found out that the chair himself will be based in Manchester. It is a funny kind of headquarters if the head will not be based there, but that is the kind of sophistry that the public are starting to expect from this Labour Government. More importantly, those few hundred people will hardly make up for the 200,000 jobs this Government are putting at risk through their plans to shut down the North sea, or the missed opportunities for jobs thanks to their go-slow on nuclear. On the Secretary of State’s watch, we have already seen thousands of jobs in industry lost. The Secretary of State can talk about skills passports and Government transition projects all he likes, but the truth is that they do not pay the bills. He likes to say that we need to cut carbon at an extreme pace, faster than any other major economy, in order to show climate leadership and save the planet, but if our gas production, steelmaking or energy-intensive manufacturing moves to Asia, which is still powered by coal, he will be adding to emissions. That would mean more carbon in the atmosphere, and would be devastating for the hundreds of thousands of people who would lose their livelihoods here in Britain. I say that as someone who, before entering Parliament, worked on regenerating some of our most deprived communities once the jobs were gone. As with our amendments on the Government’s £300 pledge, amendments 8 and 9 in my name would give Great British Energy a strategic priority of creating 650,000 new jobs by 2030, and would require an annual report to Parliament on progress towards this aim. That is important, because even the trade unions that normally support Labour have warned the Secretary of State and his team that his plans will lead to the mass deindustrialisation of Britain. The general secretary of the GMB has said that the Secretary of State’s plans are “hollowing out working class communities”, and will amount to “decarbonisation through deindustrialisation.” He said that importing more from China is “bad for communities, not great for national security and it makes no sense in terms of the environment.” He also said, and I hope the ministerial team are listening closely to this one: “Our message to Ed Miliband is very clear: We are worried about a lot of promises that are not being delivered on jobs.” Those Labour MPs who are members of the GMB, including the Energy Minister, have the opportunity tonight to hold the Government to account by voting for annual reporting on the jobs being created. The question is, will they listen to the general secretary’s concerns? The next promise was that Great British Energy would turn a profit for the taxpayer. The Secretary of State admittedly got himself into a mess on this one. He has never had to make commercial investment decisions, and neither has any of his ministerial team, which is why they have been caught out promising the British public that they can turn a tidy profit, while at the same time telling multimillion-pound energy companies that they will take the least attractive parts of their investments off their hands. That is important, because the Secretary of State has written this Bill to give himself powers of direction. That was not the case for the UK Infrastructure Bank, and there was a recurring question in Committee about how much independence the supposedly independent Great British Energy will have. This is my proposal: if the Secretary of State wants the power to meddle, he should be duty-bound to report the results of that meddling—its profits and losses—to this House. Amendment 10 in my name would require Great British Energy to produce an annual report on the performance of its investments, including its in-year return on investment and a forecast of the following year’s expected return. That is the bare minimum we can expect, so that British taxpayers can see what he is doing with £8 billion of their money. I tabled clause 1 because it is crucial that we have proper oversight of the wider activities of Great British Energy. New clause 1 would require the appointment of an independent reviewer to assess Great British Energy’s effectiveness in achieving its objectives and strategic priorities. In Committee, the Energy Minister said that the Government want Great British Energy to be “accountable, transparent and clear about how it is delivering on its objectives.” –– [ Official Report, Great British Energy Public Bill Committee, 15 October 2024; c. 168.] I agree, and that seems a perfectly good reason to support new clause 1. As I have said previously, Great British Energy is pretty much a carbon copy of the UK Infrastructure Bank, which was set up to provide loans, equity and guarantees for infrastructure to tackle climate change, backed by £22 billion. No Minister has been able to tell us the real difference between Great British Energy and the UK Infrastructure Bank, or why the taxpayer has to pay for two headquarters, two chief executives and so on. The one difference appears to be that Great British Energy will mean additional powers for the Secretary of State. If Labour Members are so intent on handing this Secretary of State billions of pounds to gamble with, I expect they will also want to replicate the independent review enacted by the United Kingdom Infrastructure Bank Act 2023. New clause 1 would provide that scrutiny and, although I intend to withdraw it this evening, if the Minister would like to table a similar amendment in the other place to follow the precedent set by the Act, I assure him of our backing. The Secretary of State and his ministerial team have made big promises. It is crucial that this House can hold them accountable, as the consequences could not be more important for people’s energy bills, people’s jobs and businesses’ ability to succeed. As the respected energy and climate economist Dieter Helm has said, the risk is that this Government will head towards a 2029 election with industries lost and bills higher—exactly the opposite of what the electorate has been promised. The Government’s refusal to publish evidence for their claims, to set out the details of their plans or to engage in any meaningful policy discussion outside their normal slogans and mantras means that their policies are more likely to fail. For example, the Secretary of State has said that this Bill and Great British Energy are part of his plan to ramp up renewables at breakneck speed because every wind turbine and every solar panel constructed will lead to cheaper energy and greater security, but that is simply not true. First, it depends on the price we pay for them. Expert analysis by Cornwall Insight found that the contracts for difference round that the Secretary of State bumped up, and that he now boasts about, will actually increase people’s bills by £5. Moreover, he has advertised to the multimillion-pound energy companies that he will buy whatever they sell, no matter the cost, up to 2030. People do not need a business background to work out what that will do to prices. Secondly, if we are building renewables faster than we can connect them to the grid, the constraint payments needed by 2030 could add hundreds of pounds to people’s bills. Then there are the network costs, the green levies and the cost of dispatchable power. If the Secretary of State wants to replace gas, which is our main form of dispatchable power, he should set out the cost of what will replace it. The options in this country are coal, which I assume Labour Members do not want, biomass, carbon-capture gas or unproven technologies, none of which will make our system cheaper. All the signs are that, far from making energy cheaper and more secure, this Secretary of State and his ministerial team will send people’s bills through the roof, and more and more people are sounding the alarm about whether he can even keep the lights on. Perhaps that is why he never commissioned an accurate assessment of his plans. Labour Members had 14 years in opposition, 14 years hankering for the jobs and the responsibilities they now have, but when we asked for the full-system cost of the Secretary of State’s approach, he could only say that it will be published “in due course.”

• 29 Oct 2024 · Great British Energy Bill · Hansard source

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  When we said that we could not support the Bill in its original form, it was because we had no detail to justify giving this Secretary of State a blank cheque for £8 billion of taxpayers’ money. In the intervening two months, I am afraid that we have not learned anything to give us confidence. We have not seen a business plan, a framework agreement or an explanation of how this is different from the UK Infrastructure Bank, which was set up to do exactly the same thing. We know that there will be a headquarters in Aberdeen, with a head who will be based 360 miles away in Manchester. We know that that same head does not think that the scope of Great British Energy includes reducing bills. I remind the Secretary of State that, in an interview in June, he said not only that he was ready to launch Great British Energy within days—so he should have this information—but that it would lead to a “mind-blowing” reduction in bills by 2030. Now he has completed the embarrassment of the bright-eyed MPs behind him by forcing them to vote against their own election promises. Tonight, Labour Members have voted against holding Great British Energy accountable for cutting people’s energy bills by £300 and for creating 650,000 jobs. The Secretary of State talks about hanging things around people’s necks. Well, he made his colleagues repeat those promises over and over again during the election, and we will see what the electorate remember. These are not trivial matters. This is about people’s energy bills, people’s jobs and businesses’ ability to succeed in this country. The risk is that this Government are heading towards a 2029 election in which industries have been lost and bills have gone up—exactly the opposite of what the electorate have been promised. That is not just my argument; it is the argument of the respected energy and climate economist Dieter Helm. The Secretary of State, whether he is talking about Great British Energy or his plan for a zero-carbon grid by 2030, likes to talk in slogans and political mantras, but he does not deal in detail or fact. He knows that Great British Energy does not have the power to reduce household bills, which is why he has refused our attempts to hold him accountable for his own promises. The Secretary of State argues that ramping up renewables at breakneck speed will lead to cheaper energy and greater security—I believe he just said that—but the latest renewable auction, which he bumped up, will increase people’s bills by £5. He has advertised to multimillion-pound energy companies that he will be buying whatever they are selling, no matter the cost, until 2030—he even named a few and said that they welcome his approach. I can understand why! I know that he does not have a business background, but he does not need one to understand what kind of signals he is sending. The Secretary of State has not modelled the cost of constraint payments, network costs or green levies. He has deprioritised exciting new technologies such as small and advanced modular reactors, which will come online after 2030, and he refuses to address the question of dispatchable power. If not gas, what is he arguing for in its place and how much will it cost? Far from making energy cheaper and more secure, he will send people’s bills through the roof. And more and more people are sounding the alarm about whether he will even be able to keep the lights on, which we were able to do even during the height of an energy crisis. Tonight, Labour Members have shown their true colours by voting against making their own energy company accountable. If the Secretary of State cannot even back up his own election promises, why should we back him on this Bill? Question put, That the Bill be now read the Third time.

• 8 Oct 2024 · VAT: Independent Schools · Hansard source

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  One in four pupils in Surrey go to an independent school, including more than 4,000 pupils in my constituency, and many of those pupils have a special educational need. We have had an increasing rise in the diagnosis of conditions such as autism. The proposal is being pitched as a fundraising measure, but I do not think anybody on the Labour Benches came into Parliament to raise funds from pensioners in poverty and families of children with special educational needs. I will come on later in my speech to whether this will raise any money at all. In his wind-up, I hope the Minister will address this point: what justification can there be to an immediate exemption of specialist schools from the tax? On 11 September, Opposition Members representing Surrey constituencies wrote to the Chancellor to make that point. In response to a survey in my constituency— 1,200 parents responded nationally—87% of parents with children at independent schools said that they would have to consider sending their child to a state school. Some spoke specifically of the anguish they faced, having spent years trying to find the right placement for a child who might have ADHD or autism and having finally got them settled, now having to consider moving them again. Some Labour Members have asked why those children could not be served by the state sector. We increased funding for the SEND sector by 70% over the last few years, but you cannot magic up 99,000 places overnight. A teacher at Moon Hall in Reigate said that 70% of their pupils were on EHCPs and 30% were not, and that all those children would suffer. The other point is that the state sector will have larger class sizes, so rather than improving the state sector, all children in the state sector will suffer. They will all have worse outcomes. The Secretary of State for Education should care about outcomes, not ideology, but it is clear that she does not because we have seen teachers’ unions warning about the impact on the state sector. The Government have not published an impact assessment. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ report that Members have been quoting, we do not know how much money will be raised due to the uncertainties over children with special educational needs. I appeal to all Labour Members to ask themselves and their consciences why we cannot exempt children with special educational needs from this tax? It will not raise any funds. It will increase class sizes in the state sector and affect the outcomes of all children. It must be reversed.

• 8 Oct 2024 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  The Secretary of State promised in the general election to cut everyone’s bills by £300 by 2030—a pledge he will not repeat now that he is in office. In fact, one of his first acts has been to snatch the same amount away from millions of pensioners in poverty. The right hon. Gentleman likes to preach, to politicise and, dare I say it, to patronise, but I have one simple question for him. To the millions of pensioners who are worried about their heating bills this Christmas, will he apologise?

• 5 Sept 2024 · Great British Energy Bill · Hansard source

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  I beg to move an amendment to leave out from “That” to the end of the Question, and insert: “this House, while recognising the need to cut household energy bills for families, accelerate private investment in energy infrastructure, and protect and create jobs in the energy industry across the UK, declines to give a Second Reading to the Great British Energy Bill because Great British Energy will not produce any energy, will not reduce household energy bills by £300, does not compensate for the amount of investment in energy projects that will be deterred by the Government’s plans to prematurely shut down the UK’s oil and gas sector, and involves an unjustified use of taxpayers’ money at a time when the Government is withdrawing the Winter Fuel Payment from 10 million pensioners as energy bills rise.” I welcome you to your place, Madam Deputy Speaker. It is a pleasure to be back. I know the Secretary of State will have had a busy summer settling into Government, having the eagle-eyed civil service now screen all his comments and a hungry press pack on his tail about every promise he has made. He even slotted in a trip to Brazil, a place very dear to my heart, but perhaps he should have spent a bit more time on the Bill. If the Bill does everything he and his team have promised, I will be impressed. Let me remind the House what is on the record. If it saves £300 off bills by 2030, if every project it invests in is guaranteed to turn a profit by 2030, if it can get new innovative energy prototypes off the ground and create 650,000 jobs, even I will be impressed. But here is the rub: the Bill is four pages long—there is barely anything in it. I do not want to oppose the Bill just for opposition’s sake, but the Secretary of State has provided no detail on how the Bill will deliver any of his promises, let alone all of them. It is a four-page Bill in which he is asking for £8 billion of taxpayers’ money, while setting out no investment plan, no figures for the energy that will be produced, no numbers for energy bill savings or carbon emission reductions, and not even a timeline. I doubt it can deliver any of the things he has promised. He is asking for £8 billion of taxpayers’ money—a completely blank cheque—for an energy company that will not cut bills or turn a profit by 2030. I will come back to those promises.

• 5 Sept 2024 · Great British Energy Bill · Hansard source

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  I will not; I will continue. Once again, we simply have no answers. I find all this very strange, because at our last encounter in this House, the Secretary of State was keen to confess that he was a “super-nerd”. As someone who has been a lifelong mathlete, I am the first person to want to champion a fellow super-nerd, but when I meet super-nerds they normally like evidence, facts and numbers. Whenever we look at what the Secretary of State has set out, there are no numbers attached. He talks about decarbonising the grid by 2030, but he has not set out the full system costs of that. He promises profits and bill savings from GB Energy, but he cannot tell us by when or how much. When it comes to the Bill and its 2030 target, it is clear that the Secretary of State does not have the numbers, because two weeks ago he wrote a letter to the director of the Electricity System Operator. I have it here. Do you know what he said, Madam Deputy Speaker? He asked the director to please “provide practical advice on achieving clean power by 2030”, including a “High-level assessment of costs”. Given that we are talking about people’s energy bills, I think the public would like a detailed look at what this is going to cost them. To top it off, he asked the director to advise what actions his Government should take “to enable delivery…clearly setting out where further work is required.” The evidence could not be clearer. He went into a general election with a pledge and no idea how to achieve it, what it will cost or whether it is achievable at all.

• 5 Sept 2024 · Great British Energy Bill · Hansard source

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  I thank my right hon. Friend for his intervention. It is always a pleasure to see him in the Chamber making excellent points. The question that I have is this: why has the Secretary of State set up a duplicate programme with no instructions for governance, independent review, investment plans or consumer savings that he can be judged by? Why should taxpayers’ money fund a similar entity when the only difference that I can discern is that it gives the Secretary of State unchecked power? What is it about the £8 billion of taxpayer money that he can direct without checks or balances that first attracted him to the idea of GB Energy? These are fair and reasonable questions for us as the Opposition to ask, and he must look to improve the governance in this Bill. Let me turn to the promises that he made. The Prime Minister, the Chancellor, the Secretary of State and at least 50 Labour MPs promised their constituents in the July election that GB Energy would save them £300 a year on their energy bills. They said it on their election literature, on social media and in hustings. They said it because they were told to do so by the Secretary of State, but I listened very closely to his speech today and I did not hear him make a promise that GB Energy will save them £300 on their energy bills. In a debate just before the summer recess, the Under-Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, the hon. Member for Rutherglen (Michael Shanks), would not repeat the promise either. That is because they all know that it is not true. In fact, one of Labour’s first acts in government has been to take away up to £300 from 10 million pensioners this winter, including two thirds of pensioners in poverty. It takes some nerve for the Labour party to say that it never wanted to do this, because the winter fuel payment was in the manifesto of the Secretary of State’s party when he wrote it in 2010. It was in there when he was leader in 2015, it was in there in 2017 and in 2019, but in 2024 it was omitted. There was no mention at all for the first time in 14 years. I will give credit to the right hon. Gentleman—something that I do not always do. When he was leader in 2015, he put it in his manifesto that he would take the payment away from the top 5% of pensioners. He will remember that. He had the courtesy of telling the public his plans, but, professional politician that he is, I suggest that he would have clocked that it was not included this time round. He has been in politics for 30 years and would have known what that meant, so I hope that he can confirm today whether he had any conversations with the Prime Minister, the Chancellor or Morgan McSweeney before the manifesto came out. If so, he sent out those Labour candidates—all the people on the Benches behind him—with this false promise of the £300 energy savings when someone clearly knew that they were going to take that amount away from millions of pensioners this winter.

• 26 Jul 2024 · Making Britain a Clean Energy Superpower · Hansard source

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  I thank the hon. Gentleman, but as I said, we have to look at the full system cost. He is very experienced in the energy sector, and he knows as well as I do that the flexible capacity that is used to back up an intermittent system is where the true costs lie. It is fair for Opposition Members to ask for an assessment of what those costs will be, and what they will mean for British bill payers. The other area where the Government must be honest with the public is about what they are going to build. The Secretary of State’s first week in the job saw him approve 4,000 football pitches’ worth of solar farms on farmland in Rutland, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire. Those projects were not sat on my desk, as the Secretary of State has claimed. I had made a decision to reject Sunnica on the basis of a scathing examining authority report, and I changed policy to protect our best agricultural land. These are not projects that were likely to be approved; these are bad decisions. Work was being drawn up to be announced, but the decision had been taken in the case of Sunnica. The Secretary of State will know that from civil servants, who are duty bound to brief him honestly in the Department. In the case of Mallard Pass, the site has been signed off, 40% of which will be built on our best and most versatile agricultural land, taking no notice of legal planning guidance that says that best agricultural land must be avoided. The Secretary of State and his Ministers will have to justify that, and many more decisions, to his new colleagues, many of whom now represent rural communities and whose constituents will be rightly concerned that they are next. I wish the new Minister well for his time in the Department. The energy sector is one of the most interesting and important policy briefs affecting this country, and it is in all our interests that he does his job well. However, what the Government have done so far —make claims during the election that they cannot stack up now they are in government—will just not do. They have set out a hard target to decarbonise the grid by 2030, and the Secretary of State stakes his entire political reputation on it, without being honest about the costs. These issues are far too important for Government not to take seriously, and they are far too important for Labour Members to follow the Government blindly without asking questions. They did that during the election with promises to save households £300, and they can no longer stack up those promises just three weeks into Government. I humbly suggest that this is their first lesson of the Parliament: they should not give the Secretary of State a blank cheque again.

• 18 Jul 2024 · Clean Energy Superpower Mission · Hansard source

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  I would like to put on the record my disappointment not to get the statement in good time. I know that the right hon. Gentleman will want to provide us with the same courtesy that we tried to provide him when we were in government. That being said, I congratulate him on his return to government. I was sad not to see more of him during the election campaign, particularly because our ability to secure enough cheap energy will be crucial to this nation’s success in the decades ahead. I would also like to put on record my thanks to the officials he will now work with. I wish the right hon. Gentleman well in his endeavour, but energy will be this Government’s big test. They talk a good game on growth, but the Secretary of State’s energy policy is their greatest liability. In government, we built more offshore wind than any other country bar China. We set out the largest expansion of nuclear power in 70 years. We said that, yes, we will need oil and gas in the decades ahead, as the Climate Change Committee has said, and we should use British oil and gas where needed. We are in a global race for energy, and demand will be higher in the years ahead because of data and artificial intelligence. If the right hon. Gentleman’s plans to decarbonise the grid by 2030 are in place, we need to know what they will do to people’s energy bills, our energy security and our reliance on the current dominant player for cables, batteries and critical minerals—China. He is happy to quote the Climate Change Committee, but it also acknowledged that we will need oil and gas well into 2050. He must answer: where would he like that to come from? When it comes to quotes, he should consider some from the business world who have commented on his policy, such as the chief executive of Mitsubishi Power, who said that his plans would require a “huge sacrifice” by the country, citing the costs of the Secretary of State’s approach. The chief executive of Ineos said that his approach to energy was “absurd”, leaving us dependent on imports of foreign fuels with higher emissions and doing nothing for the climate. Even the GMB said that his plans were “unviable” and would lead to power cuts, blackouts and enormous cost. Unite has said that the Government’s plans for the North sea would turn oil and gas workers into the coalminers of their generation. The right hon. Gentleman must answer why he would like to import gas with much higher emissions. How many jobs will be lost from his plans? How much investment into the new technologies of the future, such as hydrogen, carbon capture and offshore wind, will be lost? Will he meet those workers and explain to them what will happen to their livelihoods? During the election, the right hon. Gentleman claimed that he would lower bills and save families £300. However, those numbers are already in the savings, and no one on his side can set out the cost of his plans to decarbonise the grid by 2030. Who will pay for those network costs? What will they do to people’s standing charges, which were already too high? The right hon. Gentleman also, I think, commented on having a say in terms of communities. The energy infrastructure he will need, and the fact that he wants to go further and faster, will have a huge impact on rural communities. Their concerns must be addressed. As I set out, the plans for our energy cannot come at the expense of our food or national security. In his statement, the right hon. Gentleman accused me of dither, but as he will know from his officials, in at least one of the cases he has signed off I had already instructed some time ago that I was minded to reject it, and that paperwork was being prepared. He must set out urgently what his criteria will be. In one case, he overturned an expert examining authority. In another case, he signed off a solar farm which will be 40% on our best and most versatile agricultural land. Did he know that was the case? If so, what was his basis for finding that acceptable? Will he continue our efforts to build more solar on rooftops? I think he mentioned that he would reconvene the solar taskforce. I hate to tell him, but it had never been disbanded and we were due to publish that work. So, I would like to know what date he will be able to publish that work. In conclusion, the Secretary of State’s party won the election and promised change, but he was not on show during that campaign to answer these critical questions of how he was going to provide that change and what it will mean for the country. What will his plans mean for the price of electricity? What will they mean for our ability to keep the lights on? What will they mean for struggling families’ bills, for our economy, and for the livelihoods of oil and gas workers? What will they mean for our reliance on China? For all that the Labour Government talk about growth, they will not be able to deliver on that with the Secretary of State’s plans for energy. I hope that in the months ahead he will set out some of that detail to be examined.