Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Caroline Lucas and Claire Coutinho

Tuesday 27th February 2024 Commons Chamber

[Claire Coutinho]

I commend my hon. Friend’s unwavering commitment to advocating for the ceramics sector in his constituency. The UK Government remain steadfast in safeguarding sectors deemed at risk of carbon leakage, and I strongly encourage the ceramics sector in his constituency to actively participate in the consultation on free allocation policy, which is open.

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

A new report from the Green Finance Institute and the Institute for Public Policy Research notes that a lack of public investment and strategy is holding back progress on unlocking private investment, and that the chopping and changing of policy pathways has damaged investor confidence. The Secretary of State likes to say that she has a clear strategy, so will she tell investors what it is? Will she call on the Chancellor to deliver the scale of public investment that we so urgently need to restore investor confidence and lift the UK off the bottom of the G7 league table for private investment, where we currently languish?

[Claire Coutinho]

I thank the hon. Lady for that question, but I am surprised that she did not welcome the recent news that the UK was the first country in the G20 to halve its emissions since the 1990s, as I know that subject is dear to her heart. As I have said, in 2023, the UK saw around £60 billion of low-carbon private and public investment. We got that extraordinary success by encouraging private investment. Whether through the contracts for difference scheme, our new policies on capital allowances, or the effect of the green industries growth accelerator on the supply chain, the UK is doing everything it can to attract investment, and that is exactly why we have made those achievements.

Offshore Petroleum Licensing Bill

Debate between Caroline Lucas and Claire Coutinho

2nd reading
Monday 22nd January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Claire Coutinho]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for making that point. Not only is it better for energy security, but gas that we bring in from abroad in the form of liquefied natural gas has emissions four times higher, so if Members care about the environment, they should back this Bill.

Domestic oil and gas production adds about £16 billion to the UK economy annually and brings in tens of billions of pounds in tax revenue. To give an example of how that has helped support families with the cost of living, we raised £9 billion in tax revenue last year from the oil and gas sector. That is money that we can use to support families, as we did last winter, paying half the average family’s energy bill, which amounted to roughly £1,500 per household. If we had no oil and gas sector, £9 billion more would have fallen on taxpayers’ shoulders. Why should we concede that tax revenue to other countries? What possible benefit could the British public feel from billions of pounds in tax revenue that could be raised here being sent abroad, all to import fuel with higher emissions?

I now turn to perhaps the most important reason to back this Bill: the workers. There are 200,000 people supported by the sector, in communities such as those in Aberdeen, Grimsby and the north-east of England, and including 93,000 people in Scotland, over 10,000 people in Yorkshire and the Humber, and 14,000 people in the north-west.

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

The right hon. Lady knows as well as I do that most of the gas we import comes from Norway, where gas production is half as polluting as it is in the UK, so let us not have all this nonsense about imports being so much higher in carbon intensity, because those from Norway certainly are not. Does she accept the fact that most of the emissions are produced when we consume the oil and gas, and therefore will she start looking at scope 3 emissions and not just the production emissions, which are not the greatest emissions in question?

[Claire Coutinho]

I thank the hon. Lady for her question, but I think it fundamentally misunderstands the energy market. When we cannot get Norwegian gas and when we have made the most of all of our gas, what is the marginal gas that we use? It is LNG, which produces emissions four times higher than the gas we can produce here. If we produce less UK gas, we will need more LNG.

Coming back to what is a really critical part of the Bill—the workers—a recent report from Robert Gordon University found that a faster decline in our oil and gas sector, which the Opposition are proposing, could halve the workforce by 2030, leading to a significant loss of skills for the future energy sector. Those are the workers whose skills we will need for our future energy production. The same report found that over 90% of the UK’s oil and gas workforce have skills that are transferable to the offshore renewables sector. However, if we do not manage that transition correctly—everybody in the Chamber today agrees that we need to transition—we will lose those very important workers and their skills. It is the same people who are working on oil and gas rigs today who we will need on the offshore wind farms of tomorrow: our subsea installation engineers who lay cables, our technicians who remotely operate subsea vehicles, our divers, our project managers, and our engineering specialists servicing our offshore rigs. Those are all essential oil and gas jobs that we know will be critical in the roll-out of our low-carbon technologies. If we do not protect our world-leading specialists, we will see communities decimated, and ultimately a skills exodus that would put at risk the very transition that we are working so hard to achieve.

Making Britain a Clean Energy Superpower

Debate between Caroline Lucas and Claire Coutinho

Thursday 9th November 2023 Commons Chamber

[Claire Coutinho]

I will make some progress.

Oil and gas is an industry that supports 200,000 jobs and is expected to provide £50 billion of tax revenue in the next five years. That is the people and the money that the Labour party would send abroad, because it is not against oil and gas jobs, just against British oil and gas jobs—and for what? To increase our reliance on imports from foreign regimes with higher emissions and to send away billions of pounds of investment in carbon capture and hydrogen schemes. Opposition Members support those technologies but would rather the taxpayer footed the bill for them.

With our ambitions on net zero and for our energy security, it is critical that we make the most of our own home-grown advantages, but Labour and the SNP’s policy means jobs abroad, investment lost and energy security sabotaged. You do not have to take my word for it, Madam Deputy Speaker—the unions are sounding the alarm. It has been said that Labour “does not… understand energy”, is self-harming and “naive”, and that its policies would leave our oil and gas communities decimated, turning our oil and gas workers into the “coalminers of our generation”. Those are not my words but those of the GMB and Unite. We want to keep jobs and manufacturing here, but Labour has not understood that we needs natural gas supplies. Those are the words of industry. The important truth is that we know we need to transition to clean energy, but it is the same people, communities and expertise that will unlock the green transition. The skills of those working on oil and gas rigs today are the same skills that we will need for the offshore wind jobs of tomorrow.

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

I am losing track of the number of times I have pointed out in this Chamber that just because we extract oil and gas from the North sea does not mean that it gets used here. It gets sold on global markets to the highest bidders, as we have said 100 times.

When it comes to annual licensing rounds, which the Secretary of State is flagging up, is it not the case that the North Sea Transition Authority was already licensing in 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019? It only stopped because of the climate compatibility checkpoint. The tests that she sets out are not worth the paper that they are written on; she knows as well as we do that they are impossible not to meet, because they are set so low. Will she stop pretending that the Bill is serious, and just admit that it is nothing more than a gimmick?

[Claire Coutinho]

It is not a gimmick to protect 200,000 jobs. It is not a gimmick to protect the investment that will go into the cleaner energies of the future. On the hon. Lady’s first point, 50% for the gas supply that we use here comes from domestic production.

Net Zero by 2050

Debate between Caroline Lucas and Claire Coutinho

Monday 16th October 2023 Commons Chamber

[Claire Coutinho]

My right hon. Friend is a huge champion of all environmental issues, and I look forward to speaking to her Committee in due course. It is really important that we have a just and fair transition—that is exactly what the proposals we have set out aim to do. She will know that tax matters are for the Chancellor but, again, I would be happy to speak to her further about those issues.

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

Honestly, this statement takes Orwellian doublespeak to new levels. It must have set some record for the largest number of misleading statements in the smallest amount of space. I do not know how the Secretary of State has the gall to stand at the Dispatch Box and say that this is about easing the burden on hard-working people, when she knows that all the evidence shows that what has been announced will increase costs for ordinary people.

For example, we have heard from the Climate Change Committee that the changes when it comes to landlords and efficiency standards in homes will cost renters an extra £300 a year. The Office for Budget Responsibility is clear that, as a result of the changes that are going to be made, our dependence on gas will cost us more. If the Government really cared about hard-working families, they would not be handing Equinor £3 billion to develop the climate-wrecking Rosebank oilfield; they would be admitting that what the Secretary of State is doing is ripping up the climate consensus for short-term electoral calculation and populist right-wing propaganda.

[Claire Coutinho]

I thank the hon. Lady for that question, but if she had any constituents living in properties off the gas grid, it would be clear to her how worried people were about those policies. We have given them this reprieve because we understand that putting in some of those technologies, such as heat pumps, would have cost them thousands of pounds—making sure that they had the right insulation in place, for example.

Turning to Equinor, far from us paying that company money, that is something that will pay tax into the Exchequer, unlocking green investment and allowing people in the wider sector to continue in 200,000 jobs across the economy. Those are jobs, people and communities that we will need in the transition to renewable energy, because they are the same people with the same skills that will be used. It would be right for the hon. Lady to talk to the people of those communities about this issue.