Fuel Supplies: War in Iran

Lord Harris of Haringey Excerpts

Wednesday 25th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitehead (Lab)]

The noble Earl is right; this is currently, in essence, a price crisis and not a supply crisis. That will remain the case for quite a long time, depending on how long the war continues. If the war continues for a very long time, there obviously will be issues not necessarily of supply to the UK but offset issues relating to other people trying to eat the UK’s lunch, as it were, in their quest for supplies elsewhere in the world. The Government have already taken action in terms of taking part in the IEA’s release of substantial amounts of oil to make sure that that does not happen in the medium term and co-ordinating with efforts internationally to make sure that jet fuel, for example, is available on a world basis. Aircraft and other companies in that field hedge their supplies very long in advance, and therefore this is not an issue for the immediate future.

[Lord Harris of Haringey (Lab)]

My Lords, I refer to my interest as declared in the register as chair of the National Preparedness Commission. It is not just oil that passes through the Strait of Hormuz. A third of global trade in fertiliser passes through the strait. I appreciate that this is not immediately within my noble friend the Minister’s portfolio, so if he does not have the information in his folder, perhaps he can write to me and place a copy in the Library, but what consideration is being given across government to the implications for farmers in this country but more particularly for global farming and long-term food supplies if this disruption continues?

[Lord Whitehead (Lab)]

My noble friend is right that this does not fall within my brief particularly, but I do know a bit about the subject he is raising, which is synthetic ammonia supplies from the Middle East. We do not have ammonia production in this country at the moment, so there is potentially a long-term issue of ammonia supplies coming into the UK and into a lot of other countries across the world, as my noble friend mentioned. Part of the solution is to go for different sources of ammonia which are not synthetic, particularly green ammonia and other forms of fertiliser such as digestate, which can fulfil substantially the role played by ammonia in the farming cycle.