Energy

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Wednesday 12th November 2025 Commons Chamber

[Claire Coutinho]

I remind the hon. Gentleman that when I was Energy Secretary, bills came down by £500. Under this Secretary of State, they have gone up by £200. What he needs to explain to his constituents is why signing up to higher prices on inflation-linked contracts for 20 years will fulfil the promise he made to those constituents to cut their bills by £300. I wish he could explain that.

It is worth Labour Members listening to this. From the Tony Blair Institute to the most respected energy economist, Sir Dieter Helm, everybody has pointed out this risk to them. It has not come to them without warning, the fact that they are signing up to prices much more expensive than gas for decades. They are on the wrong side of this debate and they are on the wrong side of consumers. Come January, when the results are published, everybody will be able to see that. And they will ask them: were you warned? Did you do your job in Parliament and speak up for me and my bills? Here is the problem. Their whole position is not driven by what is best for consumers; it is driven by ideology. Nowhere is that clearer than in their war on the North sea. When Scottish Renewables says that Labour’s policy on oil and gas is damaging the transition, surely even Labour Members must realise that they are on the wrong path.

[Sir Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend is making a very able speech explaining why the clean power 2030 action plan is so ruinous for consumers. What she has not mentioned is that trying to connect up this very dispersed array of wind farms across the North sea requires an enormous amount of new infrastructure. We now know that the load factors are being reduced, so we will require 30% more wind turbines to create the same net zero effect. The wind farm investors themselves do not have to pay the full infrastructure costs for connecting all that up; it is the consumers who pick up the bill. So, there is another hidden subsidy for wind power that is not reflected in the guaranteed prices that are already being paid.

[Claire Coutinho]

My hon. Friend is, as ever, an expert on this issue. If we look at the price cap and why it went up recently, it is those hidden costs. It was the balancing costs, paying wind farms to turn off when it is too windy. Next year, the network costs are about £100 per family. He is absolutely right that we have to look at all the extra costs that are coming down the track.

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[Martin McCluskey]

The hon. Lady makes a timely intervention because I am about to address all those points in this section of the speech.

Nowhere is the transition more important than in the North sea. For decades, its workers, businesses and communities have helped power our country and our world, using all their skill to tackle mammoth engineering challenges in some of the most extreme conditions on the planet. There will continue to be a role for oil and gas, and the workforce will continue to play its part for decades to come, but we are also following the evidence. The reality is that oil and gas production has been falling for decades, by around 75% between 1999 and 2024. The North sea oil and gas industry has lost around a third of its direct workforce in the last decade; that is, 70,000 jobs lost during the time in which the Conservative party was in government, when it had no plan to deal with the transition.

We face a choice: do we continue to let that happen, do we abandon entire communities with no plan for the future, or do we act, creating new skilled jobs and helping our workforce to take advantage of the opportunities that clean energy brings? This Government have chosen to act.

[Sir Bernard Jenkin]

The Minister will let me explain why, in the Alice in Wonderland world of the Government’s net zero policies, it is right to import liquefied natural gas, which for some reason does not count in our carbon footprint, instead of producing our own gas, which would count but which would be cheaper, far easier and more carbon-efficient to produce in our own country. Why are the Government pursuing that ludicrous policy, which is self-harming the economy, making our trade deficit worse and losing tax revenues for the Government because we are not exploiting our natural resources?

[Martin McCluskey]

We have been net importers of oil and gas since 2004. The Conservatives are making the precise point for us. We want to reduce the reliance on imports and we want to reduce the reliance on oil and gas by building clean, home-grown energy here in Britain.

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[Tim Farron]

That the right hon. Gentleman was the Energy Minister makes me question the selection standards of the previous Prime Minister. How far do we need to look? The channel is not that wide. Look at France and Spain. France has nuclear, and Spain has renewable energy—[Interruption.] If people stop chuntering, I will explain. In Spain and France there is no reliance on gas, partly because of nuclear in France, and in Spain it is down not to nuclear but entirely to renewables. If the right hon. Gentleman had looked not very far away at the other side of the Bay of Biscay down in Spain, he would see that it is entirely possible. How do we decouple ourselves from reliance on gas? It is blindingly obvious: do not make it so that we have to rely on gas, and invest in renewables—it is so obvious that it is almost beyond belief that people who held that brief not long ago do not get it. Investing in cheap renewables, and making sure that people see the benefit in their bills—that is the answer.

The Conservative’s plan would rip up our crucial national commitment on climate change. I will not repeat quotations from previous Prime Ministers such as Baroness May of Maidenhead and Boris Johnson—Boris Johnson, now a moderate and a progressive by comparison, which is utterly stunning. It is distressing that the Conservative party has left behind traditional voters who do care about the environment and our economy.

Communities such as mine bear the brunt of the impact of climate change, as well as farmers whose businesses are blighted by ever-lengthening droughts and ever more severe floods. Communities such as Kendal, Burneside, Staveley, Appleby, and Grasmere are experiencing appalling flood damage. In just three weeks, we will note the 10th anniversary of Storm Desmond, which did hundreds of millions of pounds-worth of damage to our communities, and devastated lives, homes and communities. An apparently once-in-200-years event happened only a few years after two once-in-100-years events. It is obvious that things are changing; do not dare to tell Cumbrians that climate change is not a clear and present danger.

Fuel poverty is worse in our area too, and 27% of our housing stock was built before 1900. Those homes have solid walls, and are hard to insulate and expensive to heat. North Westmorland has the least energy-efficient housing in the whole of England, with 17% of homes classed as either F or G, but we are well placed to provide the solutions. Our coastal waters hold huge amounts of latent energy, yet like the rest of the UK they are largely untapped for tidal power. Britain has the second highest tidal range on the planet after Canada, and we are making use of nearly none of it—what an absolute waste.

[Sir Bernard Jenkin]

On that point, will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Tim Farron]

I will not.

Just think about all the jobs that could be created in Cumbria if we did that, all the cheap energy that we could generate and all the bills that we could slash. We have the big scale answers in our community, as well as the small scale ones. The Coniston hydro scheme has been hugely successful, but its future could be secured and the energy bills of the local community drastically reduced if only the Government would deliver the P441 code modification to make local energy markets a reality for us in the lakes, and across the United Kingdom, in every community. Local energy markets would open the floodgates—pun intended—for local schemes in every community, in every constituency represented in this House and beyond, so that households and businesses benefit from cheaper, cleaner energy created by people they know.

What would a real plan to cut energy bills, while continuing the UK’s leadership on climate change, look like? We have set it out in our amendment on the Order Paper: do not slash investment in cheap, clean renewables, but increase it, as we Liberal Democrats did when we were in government. We quadrupled the amount of renewable power generated between 2010 and 2015. We also say: make homes warmer and cheaper to heat with an emergency upgrade programme; and work with the European Union to trade energy more efficiently, cutting costs and reducing reliance on gas. In addition, we must end those expensive, old renewable obligation contracts from 20 years ago that impose levies on people’s bills and stop them seeing the benefits of cheap renewables, and move them on to cheaper contracts for difference, pioneered by the Liberal Democrats, to bring down prices and drive investment at the same time. Now, that is a real plan that treats the British people with respect, by presenting actual solutions, rather than vacuous soundbites.

In closing, the crushing poverty that millions endure as a result of eye-watering energy bills is real, and it is an outrage. The threat to our world and to our children’s future from climate change is real, and it is an outrage. Loving our neighbour means having a real and practical plan to tackle both. The motion does not provide that, but I am determined that we will.

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[Michael Shanks]

I would say that it is significantly cheaper to generate electricity from renewables, but I might not go quite as far as the hon. Lady does.

There is a false argument that because the wholesale price of gas is cheaper, we should simply rely on gas more. That completely ignores the fact that we have an ageing gas fleet in this country, and would have to build significant numbers of new gas power stations to take advantage of that price. The figure the Conservatives frequently throw around compares the construction costs of renewables with the cost of gas, not the cost of building gas power stations, whereas renewables have extremely cheap ongoing costs in the long run.

[Sir Bernard Jenkin]

Will the Minister give way?

[Michael Shanks]

Sorry, I will not. I have a great respect for the hon. Gentleman, but I have four minutes to sum up this debate.

For a long time in our post-war history, there was consensus. It was fuelled first by the transformative discovery of gas in the North sea, but also by a protracted period of us not worrying about whether, when we flicked on a switch, the electrons would flow. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine threw all that consensus away, and it threw into stark reality our dependence on gas power. By 2022, astronomic energy prices, which many of our constituents still face, shattered the complacent idea that continuing with the system we have known for a long time would work.

The answer is to build a system fit for the future. That will not be easy. Too often in this House and in our public discourse, we have come to believe that we can achieve difficult things by giving simplistic answers. This issue is complicated, and only by tackling the root causes of our dependence on gas, and the failure to build grids and the infrastructure of the future that we need, can we deliver not only long-term bill discounts for our constituents, but the energy security that we badly need. Most of our electricity grid was built in the 1960s and has not been upgraded since. It is holding back economic growth, but it is also failing to get cheaper power to people’s homes across the country.

The country faces two paths. From the Conservatives today, we have heard the status quo—the idea that we carry on as we have done, hoping that the volatility of fossil fuels will give us cheaper prices for a little while, until we get to the next spike and fail to protect our consumers. We have seen that time and again. In the past 50 years, half of the recessions in this country have been caused by our exposure to fossil fuels. We will not do the same thing again. We will not build an expensive monument to how we used to do things—to a system that let people down. We will deliver change and build an energy system for the future. That is why we are delivering our clean power mission.

I turn to the contributions on the North sea, which is a hugely important subject. I am afraid that I do not have quite as much time to sum up as I thought I might. It is important to recognise that the North sea has been in transition for a long time. Failing to recognise that does not help the workers in the North sea now. The status quo has led to a third of those workers losing their jobs in the past 10 years, and it has let down workers and communities. The failure to have a plan has let them down, but we will not do that. The status quo cannot be sustained, either economically or practically, so we will set out our future for energy in the North sea in the coming weeks. It will recognise the importance of creating new jobs and driving forward investment in renewables, carbon capture and hydrogen. We will not talk down those industries, but we also recognise that oil and gas will be with us for decades to come. The workers who have powered our country for more than half a century will continue to have a hugely important part to play in our energy system and economy.

There are two paths ahead of us: ambition for our country, or the barely managed decline that we have all faced in the past 14 years; hope that we can build something better, or defeatism that says we should not tackle the climate crisis or build new infrastructure because it might be too difficult; building for the future, or the yellow brick road of nostalgia, which has let so many of our constituents down. All of us in this House want energy security, economic growth, cheaper bills and to improve people’s lives. What divides us in this place is our ambition. We are ambitious for the future of the country, for what we can achieve, and about tackling the climate emergency. We will get on with that. The Conservatives need to learn the lessons of their 14 years of failure.

Question put (Standing Order No. 31(2)), That the original words stand part of the Question.