Tom Collins MP: speeches 2025

Speeches

• 15 Dec 2025 · Online Safety Act 2023: Repeal · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Pritchard. At its birth, the internet was envisaged as a great advancement in a free society: decentralised, crowdsourced and open, it would share knowledge across humanity. As it grew, every one of us would own a platform and our voice. Of course, since then bandwidth has increased massively, which means that we now experience a rich variety of media. Storage and compute have increased by many orders of magnitude, which has created the power of big data, and generative capabilities have emerged quite recently, creating a whole new virtual world. Services no longer simply route us to what we were searching for but offer us personalised menus of rich media, some from human sources and some generated to entertain or meet demands. We are now just starting to recognise the alarming trends that we are discussing today. Such rich media and content has become increasingly harmful. That compute, storage and big data power is being used to collect, predict and influence our most private values, preferences and behaviours. Generative AI is immersing us in a world of reconstituted news, custom facts and bots posing as people. It increasingly feels like a platform now owns every one of us and our voice. Harms are dangerously impacting our young people. Research from the Centre for Countering Digital Hate illustrates some of the problems. On YouTube, the “Next Video” algorithm was found to be recommending eating disorder content to the account of a UK-based 13-year-old female. In just a few minutes, the account was exposed to material promoting anorexia and weight loss, and more than half the other recommended videos were for content on eating disorders or weight loss. On TikTok, new teen accounts were found to have been recommended self-harm and eating disorder content within minutes of scrolling the “For You” feed. Suicide content appeared within two and a half minutes, and eating disorder content within eight. Accounts created with phrases such as “lose weight” received three times as many of these videos as standard teen accounts, and 12 times as many self-harm videos. Those are not isolated incidents, and they show the scale and speed at which harmful material can spiral into exponential immersion in worlds of danger for young people. On X, formerly known as Twitter—a trigger warning for anybody who has been affected by the absolutely appalling Bondi beach Hanukkah attack—following the Manchester synagogue attack, violent antisemitic messages celebrating and calling for further violence were posted and left live for at least a week. ChatGPT has been shown to produce dangerous advice within minutes of account creation, including guidance on self-harm, restrictive diets and substance misuse. I am grateful to hon. Friends for raising the topic of pornography. I had the immense privilege of being at an event with a room full of men who spoke openly and vulnerably about their experiences with pornography: how it affected their sex lives, their intimacy with their partners or wives, their dynamics of power and respect, and how it infused all their relationships in daily life. They said things such as, “We want to see it, but we don’t want to want to see it.” If adult men—it seems from this experience, at least, perhaps the majority of adult men—are finding it that hard to deal with, how can we begin to comprehend the impact it is having on our children who come across it accidentally? This can all feel too big to deal with—too big to tackle. It feels immense and almost impossible to comprehend and address. Yet, to some, the Online Safety Act feels like a sledgehammer cracking a nut. I would say it is a sledgehammer cracking a deeply poisonous pill in a veritable chemistry lab of other psychoactive substances that the sledgehammer completely misses and will always be too slow and inaccurate to hit. We must keep it, but we must do better. As an engineer, I am very aware that since the industrial revolution, when physical machines suddenly became immensely more powerful and complex, a whole world of not just regulations but technical standards has been built. It infuses our daily lives, and we can barely touch an object in this room that has not been built and verified to some sort of standard—a British, European or global ISO standard—for safety. We should be ready to reflect that model in the digital world. A product can be safe or unsafe. We can validate it to be safe, design it to be safe, and set criteria that let us prove it—we have shown that in our physical world since the industrial revolution. So how do we now begin to put away the big, blunt instrument of regulation when the problem seems so big and insurmountable?

• 15 Dec 2025 · Online Safety Act 2023: Repeal · Hansard source

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  Absolutely. My hon. Friend is right. All those algorithms now have hidden interests, which are sometimes just to increase use, but I think we all strongly suspect that they may stray into political agendas. It is remarkable how powerful that part of the online world is. My personal view is that it is not dissimilar to the R number during covid. If a person sees diverse enough content, their worldview will have enough overlap with other people that it will tend to converge. In the old days, “The Six O’Clock News”, or the news on the radio, provided us with shared content that we all heard, whether we agreed with it or not. That anchored us to a shared narrative. We are now increasingly in echo chambers of reality where we are getting information that purports to be news and reactions that purport to be from human beings in our communities, both of which reinforce certain views. It is increasingly possible that the R number will become greater than one, and our worldviews will slowly diverge further and further. Such an experiment has never been carried out on a society, but it strikes me that it could be extremely harmful. While we are exploring this theme, I would like to point to the opposite possibility. In Taiwan, trust in the Government was at 9% when the digital Minister took office. They created a digital platform that reversed the algorithm so that, instead of prioritising content based on engagement—a good proxy for how polarising or divisive something is—it prioritised how strongly content resonated with both sides of the political divide. The stronger a sentiment was in bridging between those two extremes, the more it was prioritised. Instead of people competing to become more and more extreme, to play to their own audiences, they competed to express sentiments and make statements that bridged the divide more and more. In the end, as the system matured, the Government were able to start to say things like, “Once a sentiment receives 85% agreement and approval, the Government will take it on as a goal. We will work out how to get there, but we will take it as a goal that the public say we should be shooting for.” By the end of the project, public trust in the Government was at 70%. Algorithms are powerful—they can be powerful for good or for ill. What we need to make sure is that they are safe for us as a society. That should be the minimum standard. Finally, we can imagine harms that apply at a societal level but come through interaction. That comes, I would say, when we start to treat machines as if they are members of our society—as people. When I first started exploring this issue, I thought that we had not seen that yet. Then I realised that we have: bots on social media and fake accounts that we do not know are not human beings. They are not verified as human beings, yet we cannot help but start to believe and trust what we see. I would say that it is only a matter of time before these bots become more and more sophisticated and with more and more of an agenda—more able to build relationships with us and to influence us even more deeply. That is a dangerous threshold, which points to the need for us to deal with the issue in a sophisticated way. What next? It is critical that we first start to develop tools—technically speaking, these are models—that classify and quantify these hazards to individual people and to us as a society, so that we can understand what is hazardous and what is not. Then, based on that, we can start to build tools and models that allow us to either validate products as safe—they should, I agree, be safe by design—or provide protective features. Already, some companies are developing protection algorithms that can detect content that is illegal or hazardous in different ways and provide a trigger to an operating system to, for example, mask that by making it blurred or opaque, either at the screen or the camera level. Such tools are rapidly becoming more and more capable, but they are not being deployed. At the moment, there is very little incentive for them to be deployed. If, for example, we were to standardise in the software environment interfaces or sockets of some kind so that these protective tools could be plugged into operating systems or back ends, we could create a market for developing more and more accurate and capable software. In the world of physical safety, we use a principle called “state of the art”. In contrast to how we all might understand that term, it does not mean the cutting edge of technology; rather, it means safety features that are common enough that they should be adopted as standard and we should expect to have them. The automotive industry is a great example. Perhaps the easiest feature for me to point to is anti-lock brakes, which started out as a luxury feature in high-end vehicles, but rolled out into more and more cars as they became more affordable and accessible. Now they come as standard on all cars. A car without anti-lock brakes could not be sold because it would not meet the state of the art. If we apply a similar principle to online protection software, tech companies with capable protections would have a guaranteed market. The digital product manufacturers or service providers would have to keep up; that would drive both innovation and uptake. These are already practised in industry. They cost the public purse nothing and generate growth, high-value jobs and national capabilities. Making the internet safe in the right way does not close it down; it creates freedoms and opens it up—freedom to trust what we are seeing; freedom to use it without being hurt; and freedom to rely on it without endangering our national security. There is another parallel. We would not dream of building a balcony without a railing, but if we had built one we would not decide that the only way to make it safe was to declare that the balcony was for use only by adults. It still would not be safe. Adults and children alike would inevitably come to harm and many of our regulations would not allow it: in fact, there must be a railing that reaches a certain height and is able to withstand certain forces, and it must be designed with safety in mind and be maintained. We would have an inspection to make sure it was safe. Someone designing or opening a building with an unprotected, unbarriered balcony could easily expect to go to prison. We have come to expect our built environment to be safe in that way; having been made robustly safe for adults, it is also largely safe for children. If we build good standards and regulation, we can all navigate the digital world safely and freely. Likewise, we need to build the institutions to ensure fast and dynamic enforcement. For services, there are precedents for good enforcement. We have seen great examples of that when sites have not complied, such as TCP ports for payment systems being turned off instantly. That is a really strong motivation for a website to comply. It is fast, dynamic and robust, and is very quickly reversible, as the TCP port can be turned back on and the website can once again accept payments. We need that kind of fast, dynamic enforcement if we are to keep up with the fast and adaptive world working around us. On the topic of institutions, I would like to point out—I would not be surprised if my hon. Friend the Member for Rugby (John Slinger) expands on this—that when television and radio came into existence, we built the BBC so that we would have a trusted source among those services. It kept us safe, and it also ended up projecting our influence around the world. We need once again to build the institutions or expand them and the infrastructure to provide digital services in our collective interest.

• 15 Dec 2025 · Online Safety Act 2023: Repeal · Hansard source

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  The Minister describes the review of the Act and how we have a rapidly growing list of potential harms. It strikes me that we are up against a very agile and rapidly developing world. I recently visited the BBC Blue Room and saw the leading edge of consumer-available technology, and it was quite disturbing to see the capabilities that are coming online soon. In the review of the Act, is there scope to move from a register of harms into perhaps domains of safety, such as trauma, addiction or attachment, where the obligation would be on service providers or manufacturers to ensure their products were safe across those domains? Once again, there could be security for smaller businesses available from the world of technical standards, where if a business is offering a simple service and meets an industry-developed standard, they have presumption of compliance. The British Standards Institution has demonstrated very rapid development of that through the publicly available specification system, and that is available to help us to navigate this rapidly. Could that be in scope?

• 15 Dec 2025 · Online Safety Act 2023: Repeal · Hansard source

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  I thank my hon. Friend for his remark. He is entirely right. In my own experience of engineering products, very critically, for safety, it was incumbent upon us to be fully open about everything we had done with those regulating and certifying our products for approval. We had numerous patents on our technology, which was new and emerging and had immense potential and value, yet we were utterly open with those notified bodies to ensure that our products were safe. Similarly, I was fortunate enough to be able to convene industry to share the key safety insights that we were discovering early on to make sure that no mistake was ever repeated, and that the whole industry was able to innovate and develop in a safe way. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Rugby (John Slinger) for his comments, and I strongly agree that there is no excuse for a lack of openness when it comes to safety. How do we move forward? The first step is to start breaking down the problem. I have found it helpful to describe it in four broad categories, including hazards that apply to the individual simply through exposure. This would be content such as pornography, violence and images of or about abuse. And then there are hazards that apply to an individual by virtue of interaction, such as addictive user interfaces or personified GPTs. We cannot begin to comprehend the potential psychological harms that could come to human beings when we start to promote attachment with machines. There is no way we can have evidence to inform how safe or harmful that would be, but I suggest that all the knowledge that exists in the psychology and psychiatric communities would probably point to it being extremely risky and dangerous. We have discussed recommendation algorithms at length. There are also societal harms that affect us collectively by exposure. These harms could be misinformation or echo chambers, for example. The echo chambers of opinion have now expanded to become echo chambers of reality in which people’s worldviews are increasingly being informed by what they see in those spaces, which are highly customised to their existing biases.

• 15 Dec 2025 · Online Safety Act 2023: Repeal · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend is, of course, right. If we regulate for safety, we do not need to worry about the ecosystem needing good actors to displace it. At the same time, however, those good actors would have a competitive and valuable role to play, and I do not want to undervalue the currency of trust. Institutions such as the BBC are so robustly trustworthy that they have a unique value to offer, even if we do manage to create a safe ecosystem or market of online services. I am convening a group of academics to start trying to build the models I discussed as the foundation for technical standards for safe digital products. I invite the Minister to engage the Department in this work. That is vital for the safety of each of us and our children as individuals, and for the security and resilience of our society. I also invite anybody in the technical space of academia or industry exploring some of these models and tools to get in touch with me if they see this debate and are interested. Only by taking assertive action across all levels of technical, regulatory and legal governance can we ensure the safety of citizens. Only by expanding our institutions can we provide meaningful enforcement, designing and building online products, tools and infrastructure. If we do those things, the internet will be more open, secure, private, valuable and accessible to all of us. Good regulation is the key to a safe and open internet.

• 15 Dec 2025 · Online Safety Act 2023: Repeal · Hansard source

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  Thank you, Mr Pritchard. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East (Tom Hayes). I was fortunate enough to meet the Worcestershire youth cabinet, which is based in my constituency. I was struck that one of its members’ main concerns was their online safety. I was ready for them to ask for more support in navigating the online world, but that is not what they asked for. They said, “Please do not try to support us any more; support our adults to support us. We have trusted adults, parents and teachers, and we want to work with them to navigate this journey. Please help them so that they can help us.” I thank my hon. Friend for his excellent point.

• 8 Dec 2025 · Child Poverty Strategy · Hansard source

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  As the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on family hubs, I am pleased that Best Start family hubs are at the heart of the strategy, and that the strategy values a fresh approach rooted in place, community and partnership across sectors. This could be a watershed moment that finally breaks the cycles of disadvantage and inequality. The family hubs APPG represents a diverse collective of organisations that are already doing just that—innovating through partnerships rooted in communities. I thank the Secretary of State for her Department’s excellent engagement with our sector’s collaboration. Will she ensure that that continues, and does she agree that empowering all families with frictionless, integrated support is key to building a fairer, stronger and more responsible society that gives each and every person the freedom to thrive?

• 1 Dec 2025 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  Will my hon. Friend give way?

• 1 Dec 2025 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  This Budget is designed to address the issues that people in Worcester really care about. The first is the cost of living. We will see a typical household energy bill reduction of £150, the first freeze on rail fares in 30 years, and an increase in the minimum wage. The Budget will boost the NHS through the roll-out of 250 new neighbourhood health centres; I will keep fighting for a new walk-in GP service in Worcester. The Budget will begin the work of lifting hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty, including over 2,000 children in Worcester who will no longer suffer from the two-child cap on universal credit. The Budget also includes more funding for small companies to support apprenticeships; support for the midlands rail hub, which will improve our services to Birmingham; and, I am pleased to say, a fresh commitment to innovation and support for entrepreneurs. If we get that right, we can see a true industrial renewal in the UK. I chair the all-party parliamentary group on hydrogen, and I welcome the climate change levy changes in this Budget that support hydrogen production, an area that is ripe for growth and well suited to the UK’s strengths, both industrially and geographically. In recent years, we have led the world technologically in this space. It offers real opportunities for us, if we have an ambitious plan. UK industry is not confined to city regions and clusters; it is in every town and every region. The UK energy system is being reconceived for resilience and sustainability, but we need new energy storage at large scale, and we will need much higher levels of dispatchable power than we have today. An ambitious vision for hydrogen, in which the Government directly invest in hydrogen, and actively lead a strategic roll-out of its storage and transmission, is a prerequisite for an industrial renaissance that the UK could have and deserves to have, so I look forward to the publication of the upcoming hydrogen strategy. We cannot ignore the major disruptions sweeping the world. The climate crisis is a global emergency that demands urgent and assertive action, but there is also digitalisation. I cannot overstate the impact that the digital revolution is having. Debate on the Budget now takes place not only in echo chambers of opinion, but in echo chambers of reality, and people have completely different understandings of what is happening in our world and how it works. This new digital world means that our children are unsafe, and that all of us are unsafe from harmful or traumatic images and narratives, from addictive user interfaces in apps or websites, from personified artificial intelligence that encourages attachment —we cannot imagine the harms that could cause—and from algorithms that curate news, views and the voices that we hear, which reinforce bias and present misinformation as fact. These represent a fundamental societal threat that we can and must address in the same way that we address the risks of physical products. The Budget rightly increases taxes on online gambling, but we must do much more. It is not just the cost of living that is causing a crisis in mental health; there are digital causes; there is poverty and our special educational needs and disabilities crisis, and there is trauma. I chair the APPG on family hubs, and I welcome the £500 million commitment the Secretary of State for Education has already made to them. Our APPG represents a diverse ecosystem of people delivering in real communities. We have seen the sector diversify, innovate and embed in communities over the last few years, and we want to maintain those strengths. As a mission-led Government, that is right up our street. We can break the cycles of trauma by wrapping integrated support around households and families. That approach is a stark challenge to everyone who, remarkably, is criticising our changes to welfare payments, which are on track to lift half a million children out of poverty. This is a Budget about fair choices. It recognises that people come first, and that we are here to build a more just, more prosperous and fairer society.

• 18 Nov 2025 · Warm Homes Plan · Hansard source

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  The hon. Lady rightly points out the importance of health in this debate. We face a crisis of warmth, but also a crisis of damp in our housing stock. In a building, ventilation and heating can often sit in tension with one another, yet it is vital that we think about the two together, and about how people dry in their homes, for example. Does she agree that we should look at fabrics, which I am very pleased she mentioned, as well as technology for heating, and should look to address in a conscious and positive way the ventilation of homes?

• 15 Oct 2025 · Sustainable Aviation Fuel Bill · Hansard source

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  I thank the hon. Member for giving way. I would like to speak to his comments and those of the Father of the House about the impact on consumers. In Committee, the Government made it clear that they are alive not only to the considerations of cost and the impact on consumers, but to the extreme complexity of how aircraft logistics and fuelling function across global markets, and how aircraft are operated on a day-to-day basis. That makes some of these reporting requirements extremely difficult for airlines to deliver. We do not want to create a burden of bureaucracy that drives airlines away from sustainable fuel and back towards unsustainable pure fossil sources. I support the Government’s position that we should stay where we are and build processes that provide accountability.

• 15 Oct 2025 · Sustainable Aviation Fuel Bill · Hansard source

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  I will speak to new clause 1. Context is important, as this Bill is a first step on a long pathway to decarbonising aviation. At the moment, SAF components are blended with existing fossil fuels to create usable aircraft fuel, as I will go on to discuss, but I think it is helpful for us to be aware of the context: the various generations of sustainable aviation fuel that will form a road map as we move into the future. First-generation aviation fuels use oils, often of biological origin, as feedstocks, and they produce a kerosene-type fuel that can be blended with our existing jet fuel. Second-generation SAF is derived from solid waste that goes through a digestion process, producing alcohols that can then be formulated into aviation fuel-type products. Third-generation fuels—I remind hon. Members that there are four generations—use wet mass as feedstock. Again, that wet mass might be biological, but it is incapable of competing with food crops for production, and the process produces an output that is much like a bio-crude oil. As we move through the generations of sustainable aviation fuel production, it is important to remember that the outputs are different and are able to slip into different parts of the existing fuel production supply chain. The fourth generation is derived from gases, maybe even atmospheric gases, such as carbon dioxide drawn from the atmosphere. It is often referred to as a power-to-liquids process, and is an entirely non-biological process that requires a lot of new technology. It is a future solution, but an advantageous and attractive one as it can provide us with a purely synthetic fuel. The point that I am illustrating is that the Bill is the first step in a long-term vision for aviation, in which sustainable aviation fuel is able to play a progressively larger role. In future, we may even move to different fuels all together. As chair of the all-party parliamentary group on hydrogen, I would like to give a shout-out to its role in the potential long-term future of power for aviation. These generations of fuels also interact with the technology in our aircraft. Although current blends of sustainable aviation fuel can go into aircraft now, the aircraft will need to be upgraded as we move to higher fractions of sustainable components in that fuel, because some of the aromatic components in fossil fuels are not available in synthetic fuels. They are currently required by some of the seals in the engines, and the aircraft will need to move into future generations to accept high proportions of aviation fuel. All of this is about having a strategic road map. The Bill is one step—one vastly enabling piece of legislation—and it follows a model that is well proven to help establish new technologies as part of a green and sustainable future. We have seen the similar progress in offshore wind, for example, where it has been utterly transformational beyond anybody’s expectations. This vehicle should be able to do similar things for the beginning of our journey on decarbonising aviation, but it needs a long-term plan. That is why there is a really important piece of work to be done in the secondary legislation enabled by the Bill. It is very important that that legislation takes account of all the factors being discussed through the various amendments that have been tabled. I oppose new clause 1, because we must not oversimplify the journey before us. In fact, we must allow the Government the freedom to create a sophisticated, technically-led strategy to deploy these different types of sustainable aviation fuel, taking into account all factors, including our existing infrastructure, the production of biomass and the advancement of aviation technology. If we get this right, and if this game is played well, we have the opportunity to start successfully—and even lead—a journey that will be absolutely transformative, and to envisage a thriving, positive and sustainable future for aviation.

• 15 Oct 2025 · Sustainable Aviation Fuel Bill · Hansard source

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  Will the hon. Member give way?

• 15 Oct 2025 · Pride in Place · Hansard source

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  The people of Warndon in Worcester feel immense pride in their identity, and they know that for far too long they have been unheard, let down and left behind. This commitment of £20 million to Warndon could be transformative, especially as it is long-term funding over 10 years. However, more than money being spent, the people of Warndon need to be heard, respected and empowered. Can the Minister assure the people of Warndon that she shares my determination that the power, the decisions and the money are in their hands?

• 13 Oct 2025 · Bovine Tuberculosis Control and Badger Culling · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Stuart. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Irene Campbell) for introducing the debate so well and for mentioning biosecurity. Badger culling is a very important topic, not least to the campaigners in Worcester who have met with me, to whom I am grateful for their time, and to the 183 people in Worcester who signed the petition. It is also very important to our local farmers. I take a moment to pay tribute to our well-loved Bennetts, who create excellent ice cream, which I encourage anybody to come to Worcester and test. They have also been very accommodating and generous with their time in educating me about the challenges they face. I shall focus on one aspect of the problem: testing. As an engineer, I have been quite shocked by the situation, because it seems like we are trying to navigate a Catch-22. The testing that is available, relatively rapidly and at relatively low cost, is too sensitive, and that means that we are faced with a false choice. We cannot distinguish an animal that is immunised from one that has an active infection. That leaves farmers with an impossible choice: either to immunise to try to prevent infection—but then to find themselves unable to detect early, respond to and manage an infection—or to rely on testing alone and wait for the inevitable outcome. With no preventive measures in place, they know an infection and an outbreak will come, and they will be left trying to manage it and the associated losses. Is the Minister aware of any work being carried out to develop a low-cost blood sampling rapid lateral flow antibody test for bovine TB? It strikes me that if a less-sensitive, low-cost and rapid test could be deployed at scale and regularly by farmers, it could be a game changer, as other Members have said. This seems like a relatively simple and technologically available solution, even though it may take some research and development. Post covid, the landscape around our ability to develop vaccines and low-cost tests has changed. Similarly, our Government have said that we will embrace agility and partnership, and will work with others to innovate and find new solutions to problems. I would appreciate the Minister’s explaining the work that the Government have been doing in this area, or meeting me after the debate to discuss further. This is a vital step that will enable us to eliminate bovine TB and end the need for culling.

• 15 Sept 2025 · Draft Building Safety Levy (England) Regulations 2025 · Hansard source

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  It is a real pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Desmond. I take this opportunity to welcome the Minister to her place. I am pleased that she mentioned the importance of moving rapidly to remediate buildings, because it is a matter not only of safety but of justice, and of providing reassurance and security for people. That has become starkly apparent in my constituency of Worcester, where the residents of Barbourne Works have found themselves facing not only the difficulties of an unsafe building but the uncertainty over who pays. I am pleased that the Government are moving forward with this quickly to bring about that certainty and the fast remediation of buildings. I thank the Minister for introducing the regulations, which I strongly support, and for all her hard work.

• 11 Sept 2025 · Bus Services · Hansard source

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  2. What steps she is taking to help improve local bus services.

• 11 Sept 2025 · Bus Services · Hansard source

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  Worcester has been let down on transport. Our evening and weekend buses have been decimated, leaving our roads congested, our air polluted and our city centre cut off. I thank the Secretary of State and the Minister for Labour’s early work, which has already restored some of our local services, but Worcester needs more. Our city centre businesses, our night-time economy and our commuters need and deserve a modern system of shuttle buses running all day long and at weekends. We are the Government of partnership, so will the Minister assure me that the Department is ready to do what it takes, working dynamically and creatively with a range of public and private partners to see this vision delivered locally in Worcester?

• 9 Sept 2025 · Hydrogen Supply Chains · Hansard source

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  Once again, I intervene only because I have painful personal experience of this situation. The Redcar trial was subject to a distinct, explicit and targeted campaign seeking to bring about its failure. It was extremely frustrating to experience, as the trial was testing both electrification of heat and conversion to 100% hydrogen—two key pathways for decarbonising heat that need to be validated. It was very frustrating to see that, and it was the result of a targeted campaign, but we have also seen that where the engineering is well explained and consumers are able to understand that this is just a different gas—in fact, a gas that already circulated in UK gas pipes prior to the conversion of the 1960s—these things can be done successfully. It is therefore important that we show positive ambition for hydrogen and help the public to feel secure about a problem where the engineering has been solved.

• 9 Sept 2025 · Hydrogen Supply Chains · Hansard source

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  The hon. Member is entirely right. Ammonia is a very important part of the future energy mix. It is interchangeable bidirectionally with hydrogen and it is a very compact energy carrier. It is a liquid—it is relatively easily handled and stored—but it also, vitally, provides direct injection into the agricultural fertiliser chain. That makes it a vital asset in our future energy system, as agriculture currently plays a very large role in our total carbon emissions. How we get to the future energy system is similar to how we got to this point: economics is overtaking technology as the driver for change. It is not about choosing technologies; it is about choosing these key energy vectors and then facilitating markets to grow around them. If we look more closely at that challenge and at the current UK energy system, we have seen electricity decarbonising, but if we look at electricity use in comparison with other vectors in the UK, it plays a relatively modest role. If we look at our energy use over the course of a year, our daily electricity consumption is pretty flat, but if we overlay on to that the amount of gas we use as a country—remember, gas is providing a vital part of our electricity production, and indeed the responsive part—and we see waves with peaks in the winter and troughs in the summer. The peaks of those waves are three times higher than our day-to-day electricity use. Gas is doing the lion’s share of moving energy around the UK and supporting our electricity system, and oil, which is primarily used for transport and is our main vector for transport, sits at about the same level as electricity. That is the picture of how energy is split across the UK energy system. What we can learn from that is that UK energy demand is peaky. It varies very rapidly, seasonally and throughout the day, especially for heat applications. As we move into a renewable world, we need to recognise that renewable production is also subject to these synchronous peaks and troughs. The UK is a small enough country that one weather system can influence the production of all our renewables. We are therefore subject to fluctuations both in the supply of renewable energy and in demand. We also know that global prices for energy will continue to fluctuate, and part of our Government’s strategy to make the UK rightly more energy independent is informed by our vulnerability to variations in international energy prices. Whatever our vector mix, and however we cut up the pie of our future energy system, we absolutely will need storage to navigate these variations. The transition has rightly been described as a chicken-and-egg problem: how do we build a new energy system out of an existing one? We are led by economics, which means that we need a price for the new system. We need a price that breaks the cycle by providing producers with a way to sell their energy and by providing people decarbonising at the end-use point with the ability to buy the energy they need for decarbonisation and to make long-term investments. That price enabler is made stable by storage. The crux, therefore, of building this future energy system is to build transmission and storage of the key vectors that we want to use in the future. Therefore, it would be very valuable for the UK to develop a plan to commission and build out a strategic national clean energy reserve. That can be left to markets, but the Government need to drive it with an extremely strong and firm grip and with a clear vision. I urge the Minister to look at the ways that we can build on our current work in storage, while expanding it with a very clear and ambitious vision. We can also start blending. Blending is sometimes misunderstood. There are currently investigations into blending hydrogen into our natural gas supply. That has a small benefit for decarbonisation, but it has a huge benefit for allowing us to build out production of hydrogen, because it gives producers a large and available sink for their hydrogen to be produced and sold and it allows them to build large-scale production with the certainty of a market. Blending is therefore a key enabler not of decarbonisation but of building production for a future energy system with hydrogen playing a major role. It is also vital that we take action to fill the remaining gaps. Through my experience as an engineer working in research and development I have seen personally how powerful it is when the Government set goals and work in partnership with industry to try to meet those goals. Goal setting cuts through the noise of the usual business of research and development and the competition for investment, and it allows us to move forward. It has put the UK in an incredibly strong position. The UK is already the leader in hydrogen standards, and with the publicly available specifications 4444 series, it is leading the way in establishing technical standards. We have an opportunity to build those out up to the norms of the British Standards Institution and the International Organisation for Standardisation. The UK has led and is leading that. The UK has led on technology with a series of first-in-the-world projects in hydrogen over recent years, and we have an opportunity to lead through our geography with a well-established oil and gas industry ready to transition with fantastic geology for salt cavern storage.

• 9 Sept 2025 · Hydrogen Supply Chains · Hansard source

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  The hon. Member is entirely right. One of the key questions often asked about green hydrogen is cost. There are many projections showing cost coming down dramatically in future, and part of that comes from the fact that hydrogen production is able to utilise renewable electricity that would otherwise be constrained or not used. He is entirely right that geographical and time constraints on when energy is produced are vital, but create a low-cost source of energy for the production of hydrogen, which brings the cost of hydrogen down, so I thank him for his point.

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  Before coming to this place, that was my exact area of work, and I can assure the House that the current regulatory framework has enabled the certification of these products. They have been shown to be safe; in fact, they are soon to be trialled up in Scotland, in Fife. So some of these barriers have recently been mitigated and reduced very quickly by UK innovation. The opportunity is there now to push forward into delivery.

• 9 Sept 2025 · Hydrogen Supply Chains · Hansard source

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  I thank the hon. Member for his point—he is entirely right. Hydrogen is a key enabler for industrial processes that need high temperature, high power and reducing atmospheres. It is a vital feedstock for a large part of our materials supply chain, and it is a key enabler for future heavy transport, with buses being an excellent example. I share his passion—my constituents will be the first to tell everyone how important buses are to me, and I desperately desire our current oil-fuelled buses to be replaced by some form of electrified transport, be that energised by batteries or by hydrogen and fuel cells. So, what next? There are quick wins available in the space of hydrogen. Reviewing some of our safety regulations, which are slightly outdated for a world where hydrogen will become more commonplace, could make a big difference, particularly on exclusion distances and ammonia, which is currently treated as a chemical for storage. Introducing regulations that treat ammonia as a fuel and allow its storage under simplified guidance would make a huge difference. I have already mentioned blending. It is time for the Government to work in an agile and innovative way with other Departments—as they are doing—to build out this capacity. A longer-term road map for heavy transport and for heat would be very helpful. These are hard-to-abate sectors. I would like to see recognition that heat has proven one of the hardest areas of our economy to decarbonise. It is important that, while we have ambitious targets to electrify heat, we keep the door open to hydrogen providing that fallback, as gas does now for many electrified projects, to allow us to get there with confidence, rapidity and depth of decarbonisation. Our planning reform is doing fantastic things for the energy transition, allowing us to build out our electricity transmission system and future storage. There are opportunities for us to echo that in gas and liquid fuel transport and storage, alongside electricity, for hydrogen and ammonia in particular. As I have mentioned, innovation support is vital as we work cross-Department to bring this transition. I have seen at first hand how powerful it can be when Government set goals and work in close partnership with industry, but I have also seen where there is room for us to strengthen our innovation offer around hydrogen to make this transition even more successful. There has never been a more important time for the agile, mission-led approach of our Government. There is a need for ambition in this space. Investment is currently following vision, and the UK has an opportunity to present a powerful vision. We have seen some of our work around hydrogen and the investment rounds slipping. This is the time for Government to be agile, mission-led and work in partnership with industry to accelerate that, bring shared focus and work in closer partnership with industry, with a goal-setting approach, to cut through the administration and bureaucracy and, with confidence, build out the future economy that we can start to more clearly envisage. With ambition and decisive action, the UK can prosper, and a vital part of that is our hydrogen supply chains prospering.

• 9 Sept 2025 · Hydrogen Supply Chains · Hansard source

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  I beg to move, That this House has considered hydrogen supply chains. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Betts, and a great pleasure to see my hon. Friend the Minister in his place. I congratulate him. It is good to see him back at the Dispatch Box, renewing his already well established work in our Government’s mission for growth and change. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (James Naish) for securing this debate. Unfortunately, there has been a switcheroo and I am taking his place, but I am very glad to be doing that and very grateful to him for the opportunity. This is of course a very important topic. We have faced an overly warm summer this year and we keep seeing the weather reminding us of the urgent need for change. The global energy system is also rapidly transitioning, and the UK needs to respond to that. With our ambitious mission for growth, looking to have the highest growth in the G7, it is vital that we are competitive and, indeed, that we lead in the energy space, as well as renew ourselves industrially. The UK has shown great leadership in hydrogen supply chain development and hydrogen technology development. We have been leaders, but we have also navigated and illustrated the technically complex, multi-sector, internationally charged difficulties in decarbonising our economy. It has been unclear which technologies will win, but although there is still some small uncertainty associated with how the mix of technologies will play out, the questions of how we will produce, transport and store energy at that macro scale are now finding firm answers, so we are at a turning point. The transition is no longer being led by technology, but by economics, and it is time for us to respond to that shift. The wider picture is beginning to resolve into clear focus, especially for hydrogen. In the future energy system, the UK will be more independent. It is quite likely that it will still be a net importer of energy but with a very strong position in Europe, given our incredible assets in renewables. Hydrogen and ammonia are likely to replace oil as the vector for intercontinental energy transport, and electrification will be common, especially in well-developed societies. The competitive economic battlefield will be for these fuels. Just as that crystalising picture informs our context, it informs the UK energy strategy. We know that we will electrify what we can—and that will require a huge expansion of our electricity system across the board, from production to transportation, storage and end use—but it is also vital that we go big on hydrogen, as this is critical for reindustrialisation, for heavy transport and for us to maximise our country’s strengths. That all points to hydrogen if we are to reindustrialise the UK, which is vital for economic growth and national resilience.

• 9 Sept 2025 · Hydrogen Supply Chains · Hansard source

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  Mr Betts, I will be brief. I am grateful for your generosity with time, and for the generosity of other Members in allowing me to intervene. I thank the Minister for his response. He reasserted the fundamental role that hydrogen will play in our future energy system and the vital need for storage. I really appreciate that. I am excited about the hydrogen strategy, and to see that built with our new Government’s approach to partnership and with a clear vision for our future hydrogen system. That was reflected in his speech when he reasserted our firm commitment to working in partnership with industry. I again thank my hon. Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (James Naish) for securing this debate and for his continued championing of the energy sector and all our work in it. He is a strong and powerful proponent, and I am grateful to him for the opportunity he has given me today. The debate has reflected the huge opportunity that hydrogen presents for the UK in growing our economy and facing the challenges of decarbonisation and new energy systems. It has reflected the versatility of hydrogen, the importance of building a system where it is abundant, the need for us to support industry not just in classic industrial heartlands but in towns across our country, and therefore the need for us to transition the gas networks to hydrogen in the future as well. The consensus that we have heard in the room today, for which I am very grateful—I am grateful for all Members’ fantastically knowledgeable contributions—shows that we are at the turning point where this transition is being led by economics rather than debates about technology. Electricity, hydrogen and ammonia form a pyramid of complementary energy vectors whereby we can provide sector coupling, flexibility and a dynamic future energy system that allows rapid and deep decarbonisation. I have had the opportunity to meet representatives of industry and hold workshops with a very diverse cross-section of industry, and the urge for the storage piece to be built urgently and in a decisive way, sponsored clearly by the state, is very clear, with that backed up by transition. It is not often we hear industry asking Government to be more hands-on, but here they are. The need for that in building storage is very clear. They want Government to have a very clear vision and high ambition, and the Minister has been good today in helping to articulate that on the Government’s behalf. We are a Government of partnership, and now is the moment to build on that partnership and break down silos. In taking these steps, now is the moment when we can change gear, put our foot on the gas and bring about a rapid and ambitious transformation of our hydrogen supply chains. Question put and agreed to. Resolved, That this House has considered hydrogen supply chains.