Oil and Gas

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Tuesday 24th March 2026 Commons Chamber

[Claire Coutinho]

The hon. Lady might like to know that oil and gas jobs have been stable for the past six years, but we are losing 1,000 jobs a month because of the Government’s policies. I know that because I have been to Aberdeen; perhaps she would like to do the same.

We also saw yesterday that the markets are charging us 5% for our borrowing. That is because they think we borrow too much and earn too little. There is an easy way for the country to earn some more money: we can make the most of our own resources and back the North sea, which would drive down costs for everyone. It is unfashionable at the moment to talk about balance of payments, but if we keep sending billions of pounds abroad and rack up the credit card bill, that causes costs for everybody.

Fourthly, on climate, Labour will say that drilling our own oil and gas in the North sea is “climate vandalism”—I am quoting the Secretary of State—but that is patent rubbish. Every drop of gas that we do not drill ourselves, we import from abroad instead. The liquified natural gas that we import has four times the emissions of gas that we could get from the North sea. LNG, for those who do not know, has to be frozen to minus 150ºC, shipped in diesel-chugging tankers, then heated up here. That is why it has much higher emissions overall. The Labour party says that it cares about that and that climate change is the biggest threat to our national security—its words, not mine—but it has a choice today: we can be three times more reliant on that dirtier LNG shipped across the Atlantic or shipped in from the middle east, or we could use our own gas with four times fewer emissions. Do the Government prefer virtue signalling and higher emissions under the Secretary of State, or more jobs and lower emissions under our plans to back the North sea?

[Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

Does my right hon. Friend, like me, feel sorry not only for all the consumers up and down the country who see billions of taxes that could be paid if we just produced more oil and gas here—that could be used to lower their taxes when they fill up their cars and travel to work—but for the two Ministers on the Front Bench, the hon. Members for Inverclyde and Renfrewshire West (Martin McCluskey) and for Rutherglen (Michael Shanks)? Neither of them is an idiot, but they have been captured by an ideological Secretary of State who is literally making them swear that black is white.

[Claire Coutinho]

The two Ministers are Scottish MPs. They have been to industry, and they know what people in those areas are saying. They know the jobs that are being lost. It is so blindingly obvious that we should use things that we make in this country, rather than using dirtier imports from abroad. The question they need to ask themselves is, why is it that their Secretary of State cannot see the truth?

Fifthly, the Government say that new fields will take too long to get up and running. That is dangerous, short-termist rubbish. Jackdaw and Rosebank could be up and running by Christmas. They have been sat on the Secretary of State’s desk gathering dust. The Government are hiding behind the process. I was part of the process, and it is in the Secretary of State’s gift—it is up to him to make the assessment. We are in an energy crisis, and he could speed things up if he chose to do so. Jackdaw alone could produce enough gas to heat more than 1.5 million homes. Labour’s Chancellor commended Norway and Canada for drilling more—[Interruption.] That is what she said last week. She said that

“every country has got to play their part”

by generating more oil and gas. Government Members should ask themselves why their party position seems to be to support the oil and gas industry anywhere but Britain.

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[Martin McCluskey]

As the hon. Member will know, the price of gas and oil is set on an international market and, as I have said, extracting more from the North sea would not make a penny’s difference to the price in this country.

The North sea is a super-mature basin that accounts for around 0.7% of global oil and gas production. Production has been naturally falling for more than 20 years, which means that our North sea no longer has the reserves available to support domestic energy demand. Crucially, any new licences now would not make any difference to people’s energy bills because, regardless of where it comes from, oil and gas is sold on international markets, where we are price takers, not price makers.

[Graham Stuart]

If we were to accept the argument that it would make no difference to the international price—notwithstanding the fact that there are global markets and that supply and demand leads to much lower prices in some places than in others—we are still talking about billions of pounds in forgone taxes, which could be used to reduce prices, to reduce VAT and to reduce all sorts of impositions on the British people, saving not pennies but many pounds on ordinary people’s bills. That is true, isn’t it, Minister?

[Martin McCluskey]

The Conservatives want us to remove a tax that is contributing £12 billion to the Exchequer, funding our public services and allowing us to invest in our schools, hospitals and other public services. If they oppose that funding, they need to come forward with their own proposals. The only route to energy security and lower bills is to get off our dependence on fossil fuel markets over which we have no control, and on to clean home-grown power over which we do.

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[Martin McCluskey]

The Chancellor has had discussions with industry and will continue to do so, and that is the right and appropriate way to conduct these decisions. I was pleased to be in Aberdeen a couple of weeks ago talking to the same workers that the right hon. Member mentions. Of course, we need to do as much as possible to ensure that oil and gas workers are properly protected through this transition, but we must not lose sight of the great potential, for example, in floating offshore wind, which will also provide a significant future for his constituents and people across Scotland.

As I was saying, the transition that is under way is the only way to get off the rollercoaster of fossil fuels and build a more secure energy system. Following a consultation with businesses and communities last autumn, we set out the steps we are taking to unleash the North sea’s clean energy future. That plan recognises our world-class energy workers and supply chains and the importance of supporting them through that transition.

[Graham Stuart]

The Minister has been most generous in giving way. He will know that Harbour Energy was the single largest producer in the North sea—it is leaving. He will know that it has been devastating for so many workers in the industry. He will also know that, by all projections, in 2050 this country will still be dependent on oil and gas in all scenarios. Yet, by not doing new licences, we will by definition be more dependent on foreign supply, much of it having to come through the strait of Hormuz. How can that make any sense? I do not think the Minister thinks it does, but I suppose he is forced to stand on his feet and repeat the nonsense that comes out of the mouth of his Secretary of State.

[Martin McCluskey]

I am more than capable of forming my own conclusions, and what is in this speech are my own conclusions. I encourage the right hon. Gentleman to listen to what I have had to say throughout this speech. Harbour Energy is continuing to operate. He talks about dependence. The dependence that we see at the moment is dependence on fossil fuels and on oil and gas, which has left every single one of our constituents across this House exposed to volatile oil and gas prices and to higher prices. As I said in response to my hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell (Peter Swallow), the only way out of that is to get off this rollercoaster of fossil fuels and on to home-grown energy where we can control the price. That is a responsible action from a Government who are focused on the long term and not the short term.

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[Anneliese Dodds]

Well, I can answer that very quickly, because many of them are in my family and among my friends. The shadow Secretary of State said before that she had visited Aberdeen. I found it extraordinary that when the Liberal Democrat spokesperson, the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Pippa Heylings), mentioned the fact that jobs in oil and gas extraction fell by a third between 2014 and 2023, she would not even acknowledge it—she looked stunned. Well, I can tell her that for workers in that area, those job losses were painful. Every bust has been painful, and she should acknowledge that, rather than pretending it did not even happen. People who are working in that industry deserve a proper strategy for their future, not magical thinking and empty sloganeering.

[Graham Stuart]

Will the right hon. Lady give way?

[Anneliese Dodds]

I will make some progress, then I would be happy to take the right hon. Gentleman’s intervention.

The long-term trend very clearly is for the growth of low-carbon offshore industries. That has not been the case for North sea oil and gas. Research at Robert Gordon University—just to let the shadow Secretary of State know, that is based in Aberdeen, the city that she visited—has shown that nine in 10 of the UK workforce in oil and gas have medium to high skills transferability and are well positioned to work in the adjacent energy sector. Hydrogen, carbon capture, wind and other renewables are critical to sustaining high-skilled jobs in both engineering and manufacturing. We urgently need to boost those technologies with an active labour market strategy. That is what will secure the future of those high-technology, safety-critical jobs.

[Graham Stuart]

I am grateful to the right hon. Lady, who is being very generous in giving way. She is nearly making the right point, which is that the people who work in oil and gas need the transition. This Government are pulling the rug from under them. Hydrogen, carbon capture, floating offshore wind and other developing technologies—even tidal—are not growing quickly enough and fast enough to give those people jobs. That is the point. The Government are destroying the very engineering capability we need for the transition and putting up emissions while doing so, by having imports instead of domestic production. It is mad.

[Anneliese Dodds]

I could not disagree more with the right hon. Gentleman. I have a lot of respect for him, but surely he will have seen the figures on the relative growth of the renewables industry in the UK compared with other industries. Those people see that there is now a long-term plan for that industry from this Government. That was not the case before—there was not that certainty there before. I want to see renewed, deepened engagement, particularly with the workforce and the trade unions representing them, and a move towards the active labour market strategy that we need, but to suggest that we are not on the right trajectory now after so many years of neglect is, frankly, laughable.

I want to end on this point. Even setting aside the lengthy lead-in time for new drilling, expanding it would not shield our country from oil and gas price shocks, because the price is set internationally. The shadow Secretary of State did not even acknowledge that. She spoke about imports, but she did not talk about prices, because she knows the reality. We need to stop distant conflicts impacting household bills in the UK. We need to get bills down, not keep them artificially high. We need cheap green tech and scaled-up clean power. We do not need the kind of cheap political posturing represented by the Opposition motion.

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[Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to take part in this debate and to follow the hon. Member for Morecambe and Lunesdale (Lizzi Collinge), who follows in a tradition of Government Back Benchers standing up and trying to make the case for the utterly insane, the truly crazy and the utterly groundless. I feel more sorry for the hon. Lady than I do for the Ministers on the Front Bench, because we know that this impossible position cannot be maintained.

I do not know whether the Government are on U-turn No. 13, 14, 15 or 16—who can count them?—but I guarantee that it is impossible to maintain the current position; it rests on a number of fallacies. The hon. Member for Morecambe and Lunesdale said it as passionately as any of the Government Members, did she not? They say, “Oh, it is outrageous! The Conservatives are suggesting that our producing more oil and gas in the North sea will change the global price.” Well, I went back to the motion, and nowhere does it say that. That is the case of the “crazies” on the Government Benches—I do not know if that is parliamentary or not—and I include the Liberal Democrat spokesperson, the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Pippa Heylings), in that. This is lunacy made flesh.

[Sir Alec Shelbrooke]

On the subject of the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Pippa Heylings), it was a shame that she did not take my intervention, because she may have been able to answer this question. She was very keen to talk about what happened under the Conservative Government and how we need to have renewables, but does my right hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Graham Stuart) find it incredulous that at no moment did the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire mention that it was Nick Clegg who cancelled all the nuclear power stations? He said that he was not going to invest in something that would not come along until 2022.

[Sir Alec Shelbrooke]

You can’t intervene on an intervention!

[Graham Stuart]

My right hon. Friend is right. I was incredulous when listening to the incredible things that the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire said.

Let me go back to this big, passionate attack. That production will not change the global oil price, but it will help to employ 200,000 people in this country, with all the engineering expertise and the deep supply chain in this country, in oil and gas. It will help to provide gas, nearly all of which—practically 100% of the gas produced in the North sea—comes into the UK grid. Nearly all of it is consumed here. Some of it goes through interconnectors in either direction the other way, but the idea that it does not directly contribute to our energy security is for the birds.

I return to the point about price, because Labour colleagues put so much effort into saying, “How dare they suggest that it will change the price?” There are localised prices, so it is also not true to say that oil and gas have a global price and we have to take that price regardless. As the hon. Member for Boston and Skegness (Richard Tice) interjected earlier, in the United States, the price of gas is between a third and a quarter of the price that it is here. Getting supply and demand in the right balance does make a difference. Relying on LNG means that we have to liquefy it, gasify it, ship it with specialist ships and put it into specialist infrastructure to bring it into the UK gas grid, which all costs money. It is even more ironic, given the attitudes of Labour Members, that according to the North Sea Transition Authority, that gas comes with four times the embedded emissions. It is environmentally insane as well as economically insane.

[Bradley Thomas]

Does my right hon. Friend acknowledge the comments made by Greg Jackson, the founder of Octopus Energy, who said that importing LNG has a greater carbon footprint than extraction from the North sea? Does he also agree that Labour and the Liberal Democrats are now acknowledging that the renewables market is itself not competitive?

[Graham Stuart]

For the purposes of today, I will leave aside the renewables market, but I notice that RenewableUK agrees with the chief executive of Octopus Energy that it is crazy, along with the heads of the unions responsible. They all agree that this is crazy.

There is going to be a U-turn, and we are going to have the comic sight of the poor Minister on the Front Bench—a very likeable and very competent Minister—coming to this House to explain why the exact opposite of what he is arguing today is now the truth. That is going to happen, and it has to happen, because if the Government do not U-turn, we will lose jobs, tax revenue and energy security. I notice that those are the three qualities that are in the motion, because they are the vital things that we are missing by not drilling for oil and gas in the North sea while we continue to import it. We are importing more, with higher emissions than if we produced it here, and the net result is that we do not consume or burn a single drop less of oil or gas. The Labour party’s position is untenable.

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[Gareth Snell]

Absolutely. If we want to make fertiliser or other industrial gases in this country, we need natural gas to power those processes. There is no other way—the chemistry simply does not exist to create the gases we need without using natural gas. As such, although I absolutely support transitioning towards net zero and towards electricity, we have to recognise that great swathes of our industries simply cannot do so, and if they can, they do not have the capital to make the research and development investments that are necessary. We cannot yet fire a kiln with hydrogen in this country. We cannot get a stable supply of electricity to kilns in this country, not least because in the places where those factories are, such as Stoke-on-Trent, the grid capacity to do the hook-up simply does not exist and will not exist for generations to come.

When we talk about the transition towards net zero and more electrical generation, what are we going to say to the places that cannot do it? When we say, “It’s all going to be done through renewable energy”, what message do we send to workers in Stoke-on-Trent and in Denby in Derbyshire whose sector simply cannot transition away from gas? I want there to be more renewable energy. I want that technology to exist, but it is not there yet, and every time we forget that, we are talking about writing off jobs and livelihoods in the places that need them most.

[Graham Stuart]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Gareth Snell]

Very briefly.

[Graham Stuart]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that we also need to see the hydrogen storage and transport model issued by the Government as quickly as possible?

[Gareth Snell]

Hydrogen has to be part of the future mix. Some very interesting tests are being done in Germany, where hydrogen is being mixed with gas to power some kilns and energy-intensive processes. That technology is very expensive, though, and most companies in the UK cannot afford it—only a handful can—so, yes, we need that investment strategy.

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[Alistair Strathern]

I am going to make some progress.

I can see, though, why distractions are so attractive to the Conservatives, because facing up to reality would mean facing up to the failure to deliver more on renewables, which we know would have reduced prices by about a third last year.

[Graham Stuart]

Does the hon. Gentleman realise—he may not, because I know that some of the stuff he is fed by those on the Government Front Bench may not help him—that whereas only 6.5% of electricity came from renewables in 2010, the proportion was over 50% when we left power? He can criticise the Conservative Government all he likes, but suggesting that one of the greatest transformations and moves to renewables by any country in the history of the world was some kind of non-event is to mislead the House, and I know that the hon. Gentleman, who is an honourable man, would never seek to do that.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

Order. The right hon. Member is very experienced. He should say “inadvertently mislead the House”. We do not accuse colleagues of misleading the House. Would the right hon. Member like to correct the record?

[Graham Stuart]

I apologise, Madam Deputy Speaker. If I said anything to that effect, I withdraw it.

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[The Minister for Energy (Michael Shanks)]

This has been an interesting debate at times—at other times, perhaps it has not been—but it is a timely and important debate, as many people sitting at home will be watching the situation in the middle east concerned about the cost of living, our energy security and the impact that our energy policies have on their lives. Let me start, as the shadow Minister rightly did, with what I thought was an outstanding contribution from my right hon. Friend the Member for Oxford East (Anneliese Dodds). She rightly centred the debate, as others should have done, on the workers who have powered the country for decades. I have had the great pleasure of meeting many of them in the 20 months I have had this job—not on one visit to Aberdeen, but on many. They have done the job that we have asked of them in extraordinarily difficult circumstances. They have risked their lives—indeed, many have lost their lives—in the pursuit of the energy that we have used for six decades.

I will never diminish the role that the North sea has played for six decades in powering the country. It has been a source of energy, a source of revenue and a source of good jobs not just in the north-east of Scotland but beyond that in the east and north-east of England and right across the country. Its workers are sought after around the world for their skills and experiences.

My right hon. Friend rightly challenged what we have heard from the Opposition in the debate. Slogans do not protect those jobs. Standing up with nothing but rhetoric and pretending that the 70,000 jobs lost on their watch were somehow irrelevant will not help, and it diminishes the scale of the challenge we face.

Slogans will not build the jobs of the future. The shadow Minister talked about a lack of turbines in Aberdeen harbour, yet his party would rip up the auction that delivers the contracts that will create those jobs—and he has the brass neck to say that that is a problem with our Government’s policy. It is his policy that caused the problem.

The shadow Minister talked about numbers on a spreadsheet, as if we do not care about the workers caught up in this. That is why we are building the transition and investing in the future, while they ignored it. When we started becoming a net importer—not in July 2024, as some Opposition Members would like to pretend, but in 2003—we should have been looking at the transition. I am willing to accept that the previous Labour Government should have done more on this. The Conservatives should accept that over 14 years, as they saw thousands of jobs disappear from the industry, they should have been doing everything in their power to build up what came next. They failed to do that.

We have heard a number of straw man arguments put forward today about the North sea being closed. The North sea, right now, continues to send gas into our gas network and it will continue to do so for decades to come. However, the transition is hugely important. It has been under way for decades and we have to acknowledge how important it is to invest in what comes next.

The events of recent weeks should concentrate minds. We should have learned the right lessons coming out of the invasion of Ukraine but we did not, and we must now learn the right lessons coming out of this present crisis. Doubling down on fossil fuels does not give us energy security; it makes us depend even more on the very volatility that has driven us into economic problems time after time. More than half the economic shocks that have faced this country have been caused by fossil fuels, and the Conservative party’s answer is to double down and have even more of it. That is not a plan for the future of this country.

[Graham Stuart]

The only doubling down being done is by the Minister, who insists that we import more from abroad. Where energy is produced makes no difference to how much we consume. It can either be produced abroad or it can be produced here, with jobs, tax and lower emissions. Why on earth would he choose for it to be done abroad?

[Michael Shanks]

I was going to come to the right hon. Gentleman’s contribution later. He is also very likeable—he kindly said that of me and I appreciated it. He talked about “lunacy made flesh”; in the past, he has remarked that his own party’s policy of cancelling auctions for renewables has been lunacy. The truth is that we need both: we need oil and gas for many years to come, but we also need to build what comes next. I am afraid that point is entirely lost on those on his party’s Front Bench.

The right hon. Gentleman spoke about the US earlier and said that the UK was a price taker, not a price maker. The difference is that the US is responsible for a quarter of the world’s gas; we are not. By all standards, we have a minuscule amount of gas in the international markets. I am not saying that we should not be hugely grateful to have that gas in the seas around our country, but it is a minuscule amount compared with the global gas take. Therefore, we will always be a price taker, not a price maker.

There were a number of contributions that I will not have time to come to, but I want to pick up on the point made by the hon. Member for Bromsgrove (Bradley Thomas). I think he quoted me to myself in saying that energy policy is not a theoretical exercise. I agree with him, and today’s motion states that we need to look at the reality of where we are as a country and how we deliver our energy security in an uncertain world. That means having a mix of energy and it means moving faster to deliver the clean, home-grown power that is the very thing that can protect households right now and allow us to take responsibility for our environmental impact.

Conservative Members used to be great champions of the need to tackle the existential challenge to this planet that is the climate crisis, and there was great consensus in this place and across our politics on that. They have rowed back from that in a desperate attempt to chase Reform down the cul-de-sac of being anti-net zero, but in doing so they are turning their backs on the tens of thousands of jobs that will be created in the future.

I spoke earlier about the importance of learning the right lessons from this crisis. As long as we are dependent on the volatile global fossil fuel market, we will always be vulnerable to the kind of price shocks that we are seeing today. When faced with events like that, the public rightly expect us to work out the pathway that reduces that exposure and protects their household bills long into the future. Today, we have heard no plan whatsoever for doing that from the Conservatives; indeed, we have just heard a plan to double down on the very exposure that households are paying the price for.

The alternative path is to invest in the clean energy transition and recognise that oil and gas will play an important part in that, but also to invest as quickly as we can in renewables, carbon capture and hydrogen, and in decommissioning our offshore assets, which will produce many, many jobs for a long time to come. That is why we have attracted £90 billion of investment since we began this challenge. It is why we are tackling the gridlock in the national grid that has held back projects for so long. It is why we are creating thousands of jobs across the country. Every wind turbine that we switch on, every solar panel that we install and every bit of grid that we build that was neglected by the Conservatives for far too long helps us to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels and helps us to protect bills.

There is an important debate at the heart of this issue, and I regret that the motion tabled by the Opposition does not help us to have it. It ultimately comes down to a choice: do we want to continue on the rollercoaster of fossil fuels, or do we want to take control of our energy future with secure, home-grown energy, creating jobs, cutting bills and strengthening our national resilience? At a moment like this, this Government are clear what path we are on. It is the right choice for the British public. I commend to the House the amendment in the name of the Prime Minister.

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