Sustainable Aviation Fuel Bill

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 10th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Harper (Con)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 4 in the name of my noble friend Lord Grayling and the similar Amendment 18 in this group in the names of other noble Lords. They both have the same intention, which is to make sure, as set out in the Explanatory Notes to the Bill, that the point of the revenue certainty mechanism is to support UK SAF production, not SAF production that takes place elsewhere. I think my noble friend Lord Grayling had two purposes in tabling the amendment: first, to make that point explicit; and, secondly, to test with the Minister what definition of UK production the Government are going to adopt in their contracts. What does that mean for the components of the fuel, and where do the different stages of production have to take place? What will be the lines about what qualifies as UK production?

Clearly, what we are intending to do, certainly with the plants that have received capital support from the Government, is to have the end-to-end process here in the UK, the plants here in the UK and effectively all the value created in the UK. But there may well be businesses that do only part of that in the UK. It is important for the Government to be clear about where the lines are going to be and what they are going to insist on in the contracts, so that the money coming from UK consumers is going to support UK jobs as part of that industrial policy. That is, after all, the point of this. There is no point in having a revenue certainty mechanism if all it is going to do is deliver SAF production elsewhere in the world. We could just let it get on with it, frankly, and not be too worried about it.

The point is to make sure that we produce that fuel here for two reasons, as I understand it. One is the industrial policy argument of making sure that we develop the technology here, but there is also the learning from what happened during the Covid pandemic when countries resorted to holding on to essential fuel supplies for their own industries. During that period, the international trade in some of these internationally traded commodities gummed up, and we found that some of those strategic supplies were not available. UK production is important for both those reasons, and I think it would be of benefit to the Committee to hear from the Minister exactly how the Government are going to deliver that.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, my name is attached in support of Amendment 18, but I did not ask for it to be. I asked for it to be attached to a different amendment in the name of the noble Earl, Lord Russell, but I think this is a great amendment anyway and I am fully in support.

[Earl Russell (LD)]

My Lords, I welcome the noble Baroness’s support. I am sorry to hear that the noble Lord, Lord Grayling, cannot be here, and I wish him and his family well. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Harper, for speaking to his amendment.

My Amendment 18 in this group is on UK SAF production. I thank my noble friend Lady Pidgeon, the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, and the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, even if it was the wrong amendment, for adding their support to it. This amendment seeks to ensure that the Government’s support for sustainable aviation fuel translates into genuine homegrown industrial capacity, as we have heard. We support the Bill and its aims, and we want to see it move forward. Other countries are moving forward, such as the United States through its Inflation Reduction Act, and across Europe progress is being made. We need to act decisively to make sure that we do not become a passive importer, and we welcome that the Bill seeks to prevent that.

We believe that this reporting mechanism would help to strengthen the Bill to make sure that these issues are defined and reported on. There is an important distinction between manufacturing and simple operations such as blending, trading or storage. Too often, limited progress is repackaged as domestic production when it is not, so in this amendment we have sought to define what UK production means: that the main chemical or biological conversion processes take place here. We believe that clarity is essential, and having it is in the Government’s interests as well as ours. The amendment does not seek to tie the Secretary of State’s hands. It provides a clear framework for defining what counts as UK production. It also allows flexibility to set out more detailed rules by regulation on the extent of processing ownership and the evidence required for compliance, while maintaining robust accountability.

--- Later in debate ---

Together, these amendments would allow for an assessment of the impact of this legislation. I hope the Minister will look favourably on these amendments, which support greater transparency in this emerging area.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 15, which is absolutely vital. Every time I look at the Title of this Bill, I get irritated because there is no such thing as sustainable aviation fuel, and we really ought to accept that. Too often, we have these grand promises that are never backed up— I would argue that carbon capture and storage is another one. But if the Government are to press ahead with so-called sustainable aviation fuel, the very least we should expect is full transparency about what is being produced, where it is coming from and what the real impacts are. Reporting on UK sustainable fuel production would give Parliament the ability to see whether this industry is genuinely delivering any climate benefits or whether we are simply shifting emissions, land pressures and environmental harms elsewhere.

As one expert put it:

“We’re not about to start eating more chips, so we will have to start importing more waste oil”.


What if rising European demand for so-called waste oil is being met with virgin palm oil fraudulently passed off as waste? If that is happening—studies suggest it is—then any emissions savings vanish, replaced by deforestation for palm-oil plantations. Plus, most of our waste cooking oil is currently used in road transport fuels, so diverting it into aviation simply shifts emissions elsewhere and nothing actually shrinks.

Parliament should not be expected to take the Government’s optimism on trust. We need to see what is really happening, and Amendment 15 would provide at least a little transparency, accountability and a dose of realism—three things that are too often missing from aviation policy. If the Government believe that sustainable aviation fuel will play a meaningful role in decarbonising aviation, they should have no hesitation in reporting openly and regularly on its progress.

My Amendment 19A asks the Secretary of State to do something that should already be at the heart of a Bill such as this: to acknowledge that what we do here—what we incentivise, what we subsidise and what we label as sustainable—has real consequences for land, forests and communities here and far beyond our shores. Sustainability does not stop at the white cliffs of Dover. Protecting land over here while outsourcing environmental destruction over there is not sustainability; it is hypocrisy.

Supporting crop-based aviation fuels risks taking land away from food and from nature. It risks fuelling deforestation, especially in the global South, where communities are already living with the impacts of land grabs and ecological collapse. Yet this Bill encourages exactly that. We are using or talking about land as if it were an infinite resource, and it most definitely is not. Land is already under enormous pressure from farming, housing, biodiversity loss and climate breakdown. Turning that precious land over to growing crops for climate-destroying fuel makes absolutely no sense.

My amendment would require the Government to publish an assessment of how the revenue support mechanism for so-called sustainable aviation fuel is affecting land use internationally, including whether it is driving deforestation or other damaging land use change. Parliament deserves to know if we are simply shifting environmental harm on to other countries while congratulating ourselves on green progress.

Even if we overlook the land use impacts—and we should not—this Bill will not do anything to actually reduce air travel emissions. Sustainable aviation fuel, as described here, is at best a drop in the ocean—a rapidly rising ocean. A clever accounting trick will not cool the planet, nor will a marginal fuel switch deliver any sort of the emissions reductions we need. One analysis of sustainable fuels shows that carbon emission savings are almost entirely wiped out by the rising demand for air travel. As Professor Bill Rutherford of Imperial College said:

“The only way you can make aviation any more sustainable is to do less of it”.


Every hectare of land used to grow fuel crops risks locking us further into a system that protects the freedom of frequent flyers, rather than the future of the planet.

I apologise; I did not thank the noble Earl, Lord Russell —soon to be Baron—for his support for my amendment.

[Lord Harper (Con)]

My Lords, since they are both still in the Chamber, I add my congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Addington, and the noble Earl, Lord Russell, on their life peerages so that they will remain with us. I will not get into the ranking thing we got into earlier, but it is very good they will both still be with us.

On the substance of these amendments, transparency is broadly a good thing. As I said in response to an earlier amendment, being transparent about this is very helpful. Given that Amendment 15, tabled by the noble Earl, Lord Russell, talks about reporting on progress, this might be a suitable opportunity to ask the Minister, when he winds up this group, to respond to the question I asked him at Second Reading and provide the Committee with an update on the plants we hope to see in the UK and where they have got to. The Minister very kindly responded to some of the questions Members raised at Second Reading in his recent letter of 2 December, including one or two that I raised. I am very grateful to him for being courteous and doing that as he said he would, but he did not touch on where we were at with those plants. Given the significant amount of money in the various rounds of support that we have given—both through the Aerospace Technology Institute and directly from government—it would be helpful for the Committee to have an update on some of the timeframes. We have been contacted directly by some of the providers with updates on when they think their plants will be ready, but it would be helpful to have that wider picture.

Although the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, knows that I do not agree with her overall view about aviation—we had that exchange at Second Reading—I will take the opportunity, as it does not happen very often, to support the thrust of her amendment. Transparency is very helpful. She will know from my comments at Second Reading that I generally do not support the use of food crops being grown specifically for this purpose, but she will also know I have one potential exception: if, by doing so, we can keep the present United States Government focused in this space, it would be a win.

I am grateful for two points the Minister made in his reply. First, he confirmed that the Government were working closely with the US Administration and wanted to keep them on board. That is helpful. Secondly, he confirmed—I hope this was welcomed by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones—that the Government set very high sustainability standards for SAF in the UK and were looking to make sure the revenue certainty mechanism was in line with that approach and did not trespass on it.

The noble Baroness is absolutely right that there is no point in us doing great things in the United Kingdom if the result is that we just drive poor behaviours elsewhere, so having some transparency on that would be very helpful. The specific amendment may or may not be able to be improved, but I would welcome the Minister’s comments on whether the Government intend to add extra transparency to the Bill on Report, or whether we will need to return to that ourselves and use the collective set of amendments here to do some sensible reporting.

We have to make sure that it is balanced and that we do not put undue burdens on people, but transparency in this space would be helpful for the industry in explaining what is going on, as well as for consumers. Given that there is a cost to this, showing consumers what is happening, and the cost of that, would be helpful in demonstrating the trade-offs that we are having to make in this space. I am broadly supportive of this group of amendments.