National Emergency Plan for Fuel

Lord Bellingham Excerpts

Tuesday 28th April 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitehead (Lab)]

The noble Lord is right to raise storage and resilience. As far is gas is concerned, we have reliable supplies from a range of sources. Most notably, 43% of our supplies come from UK fields. A further 20% comes from Norwegian fields, some of which can be landed in the UK only when it has come from the fields. Only a small percentage comes in from LPG and other tankered arrangements. The question of supply, therefore, is about supplementing those secure supplies with a reasonable amount of reserve facility. That is indeed in place, in terms of eight reserve supply arrangements, as well as the development of the former Rough field in the UK for gas supply purposes.

[Lord Bellingham (Con)]

My Lords, on the Minister’s last point about resilience and the Norwegian fields, does he personally support the early development of Rosebank and Jackdaw?

[Lord Whitehead (Lab)]

The noble Lord will know that those two fields have exploration licences but do not yet have production licences. The general point about those fields, and indeed new fields, particularly in the UK, was made just recently by the director of the International Energy Agency, who said that those and other fields

“would not change much for the UK’s energy security, nor would they change the price of oil and gas. They would not make any significant difference to this crisis”.

Regarding the current crisis, it is right in general to continue to move away from reliance on volatile and possibly unstable sources of fossil fuel and develop the greater security that comes with renewable and low-carbon energy, which is what the Government are doing.