G20 and COP26 World Leaders Summit

Jack Dromey Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd November 2021 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I thank my hon. Friend for everything that he has done with ASEAN—Association of Southeast Asian Nations—partners. He has absolutely been leading the charge for us in that region, particularly with Indonesia, and they are great partners of ours. What is coming out of COP is the idea that countries who are finding it tough, as he said, to move beyond coal need a coalition of countries to help them, with a portfolio of programmes that they need to get done, whether it is hydropower or carbon capture and storage—whatever it is—that we can help to finance and de-risk, in order to leverage in the trillions from the private sector, as we did with wind power in our country. People are seeing this model as the way we can do it—not with endless grants and handouts from Governments in the richer countries around the world, but through stimulating the private sector to come in and deliver a quantum leap in the infrastructure concerned.

[Jack Dromey (Birmingham, Erdington) (Lab)]

GKN-Melrose has announced its intention to proceed with the closure of the Erdington plant, which employs 519 loyal, long-serving workers in an area with the fifth-highest level of deprivation in Britain, and to export production to Poland, which is still burning coal on a grand scale for years to come. Does the Prime Minister therefore understand the dismay of the workers concerned? With the automotive industry in transition to an electric future, does he agree that we need a supply chain here in Britain, employing workers here in Britain, manufacturing here in Britain, as part of a green industrial revolution here in Britain?

[The Prime Minister]

Yes, I passionately agree with that. GKN does an amazing job across the country, particularly in delivering some of the most difficult solutions, such as sustainable aviation. We need to ensure that we have the ecosystem of gigafactories and electric vehicle manufacturing capabilities, and all the supply chains here in Britain, but with an energy cost that allows those businesses to be competitive. That applies to steel, automotive and everybody else, and I am afraid that, at the moment, the differential between our domestic users’ electricity costs and industrial energy costs is too high, and we have to fix it.