Draft Contracts for Difference (Miscellaneous Amendments) (No. 2) Regulations 2025

Anna Turley Excerpts

Monday 2nd June 2025 General Committees

[The Chair]

I am being advised by the Clerk.

[The Lord Commissioner of His Majesty’s Treasury (Anna Turley)]

We are debating the legislation, not a company.

[Nick Timothy]

The Government Whip could stand and refer to the names of the companies in receipt of the subsidies, if she so wishes.

[Anna Turley]

We are discussing the legislation; that is the point of principle, and that is why the Clerk has intervened.

[Nick Timothy]

And, as I say, the main recipient of the public subsidy will be Drax.

When will we see the NESO modelling justifying the extension of this subsidy scheme? When will the Government publish details of their new sustainability criteria and means of enforcement to ensure that biomass is properly sourced?

The Minister should also answer why the Department only sought the advice of the Subsidy Advice Unit on its plans last Friday, knowing that we would be voting on the draft regulations today. The SAU is now running a two-week consultation and will not publish its report until 10 July. There should not be a vote on extending the subsidy until Parliament and the public have been able to examine thoroughly the SAU’s findings. These are big questions that should have been answered before the draft regulations were debated.

Beyond those concerns, we must also ask ourselves whether subsidising companies like Drax is good energy policy. The evidence shows that it is clearly not. The company that I have been discussing is an expensive white elephant for which we have been paying ever since the Energy Secretary first held his post back in 2009. Since the ramp-up that he authorised, the company has cut down 300 million trees, six times more than in the entire New Forest. The company has received £6.5 billion of public subsidy. In the nonsensical world of net zero, it has been classed as clean energy, but it is far from being a source of clean energy. It is a plant for burning wood imported from forests across the world. As new forests are planted to offset the emissions from chopping down the trees, turning them into pellets and burning them, we are supposed to believe that it is clean. The truth is that the plant we are discussing produces four times the carbon dioxide emitted from our last coal plant, which itself produced twice as many emissions as gas. The imported wood has come from rare, at-risk and irreplaceable forests and arrives here on diesel-powered ships.