Jackdaw Gas Field

Lord Redwood Excerpts

Tuesday 27th October 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Curran (Lab)]

Yes, and of course the noble Lord will take the opportunity to put such matters on the record, because he knows that Jackdaw did not prejudge any other application and it will be looked at on its merits. I agree with his fundamental assertion and the generality that it is possible to still extract gas from the North Sea but also maintain our climate commitments, and we should not lose our energy on tackling the climate crisis. We have a responsibility here to tell the British public about what is happening and the potential difficulties and challenges that we face after this summer—we should all be alert to that. I share the noble Lord’s challenge to the Conservatives, who I think we are just about to hear from.

[Lord Redwood (Con)]

It was a great decision on Jackdaw. I see in the Statement that the Government want to decommission existing facilities at speed. Would it not be better to keep them and work with the industry to get more of our oil and gas out? That would be much lower CO₂, particularly than importing LNG.

[Baroness Curran (Lab)]

Decommissioning is an important issue to raise. The noble Lord will know that we have asked Shell to submit its decommissioning programme for the Energy Secretary to consider. The next stage of the Brent decommissioning process has been under review since 2017. A final decision will be made only once all relevant evidence, representations and legal requirements have been considered, so we are taking pragmatic steps to unblock long-standing decision processes such as this—but the noble Lord makes an important point about the importance of decommissioning.

Jackdaw and Rosebank Oil and Gas Fields

Lord Redwood Excerpts

Monday 7th September 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Curran (Lab)]

I thank the noble Baroness for her welcome and for that question. I recognise the work that she does and, as a former member, I hope I can continue to engage with Peers for the Planet. She makes a central point underlying the work that we do. The cost of energy is central to the Prime Minister’s mission in tackling these issues, and he has said that affordability will be at the centre of what he tries to do. She is also right to emphasise the de-linking of electricity and gas, and that will remain a priority of our work. I look forward to meeting her to discuss that and to continuing these debates in the House. I can assure her that that is a priority for our work going forward, as is affordability.

[Lord Redwood (Con)]

Why do the Government wish to increase world CO₂, and why do they wish to pay taxes to foreign companies and countries rather than to British ones by insisting on importing LNG rather than getting our own gas out of a pipe, which generates much less CO₂?

[Baroness Curran (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord for the question, but I cannot be tempted to answer it directly, as I perhaps would wish to, because of the implications of what I might say. I ask noble Lords to really appreciate the significance of this decision; we cannot jeopardise it by any loose words. I obviously do not accept some of the assumptions behind his question. This Government are committed to ensuring that all companies pay due tax and regenerate the economy. We will work with businesses in the North Sea and across Scotland to make sure that they are thriving. I plead with him to understand that the work this Labour Government are doing is contributing to a thriving clean energy sector as well, and that that performs competitively in the economy. No doubt that will be something we will discuss in the future.

State of Climate and Nature

Lord Redwood Excerpts

Tuesday 14th July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitehead (Lab)]

My noble friend sets the question for us all: how can we work across all the different sectors of government to get to our goal? The goal is not that action on climate change is a last-ditch attempt to try to produce a less miserable outcome for the future by mitigating, by a small amount, what is happening with global warming; it is finding a way to bring about a much better life for everybody in the context of the farming and industrial environments in which we live and the enjoyment of our personal and private lives. Joint action on adaptation and mitigation is a method of bringing about that better society. It is the most important thing we need to do to bring about a society that is not only bearable in the future but is instead a big improvement on what we have at the moment.

[Lord Redwood (Con)]

Why cut back and close jobs at home, shutting down oil and gas, food production and our factories when it increases world CO₂? This is self-harm on a crazy scale. Why do the Government want to lose jobs and investment?

[Lord Whitehead (Lab)]

I am not sure I recognise much of the noble Lord’s intervention. As I have said, it is not the case that the Government are bent on a process of deindustrialisation and losing jobs. Jobs are transferring from the high-carbon economy to the low- carbon economy, and one of the duties of government, which this Government are carrying out, is to make sure there are good jobs in both the low-carbon and high-carbon economies, and that skills are transferred from the high-carbon economy to inform the low-carbon economy. That is exactly what is happening at the moment, so I really do not recognise the assertions the noble Lord makes about the future of society. Quite the opposite is taking place.

Carbon Budget Order 2026

Lord Redwood Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Redwood (Con)]

My Lords, as a Member of Parliament, I was unable to vote for the original climate change legislation. It seemed to be totally unrealistic, it was likely to be extremely expensive, and I thought it would be self-defeating. It was quite obvious that a large number of important economies around the world would not adopt this. It was extremely likely that an economy such as China would use the huge opportunity of our self-inflicted wound to export more and more to us—burning lots of coal and gas and marine diesel to get it here—and that we would deindustrialise too rapidly. Of course, that is exactly what is happening.

My noble friend on these Benches has just asserted that we have not deindustrialised, but he needs to look at the facts. We are losing massive amounts of traditional industry in petrochemicals, ceramics, glass and glass fibre. Many companies have gone down, many plants are being closed, and we are losing our traditional steel industry. It is true that we have had great success in industries such as pharmaceuticals. That may have been what my noble friend had in mind with the figures he was quoting, but he cannot get away from the fact that this is now doing huge damage: closing factories, closing plants, and causing a loss of jobs.

My first objection to the Government’s proposal tonight is that we should not adopt a very tough national carbon budget without knowing what the impact is going to be on carbon dioxide produced elsewhere in the world. You need to look at the net position, not just at the UK’s position. I suspect that the future will be like the last 20 years: there will not be a big net reduction in world CO. There will probably be an increase in world CO, because of all the extra marine diesel needed for the imports; because of a shift from gas down a pipe from our own fields to LNG, which my noble friend on the Front Bench has stressed is much more CO intensive; and because, for traditional industrial products, we will be more and more dependent on countries that may use methods that are more CO intensive—as well as all the obvious extra environmental costs those countries will incur, from the way they get the raw materials out of the ground, to the social costs of the conditions of labour that they use for producing the products, and the extra transport involved in the imports.

My second big objection to this order is cost. We are given a provisional figure of £880 billion, or £35 billion a year. My noble friend is right that this is likely to be a gross underestimate of the true cost. I challenge the Minister on how much he thinks grid expansion will cost, because the grid expansion will have to be on a completely unprecedented scale. When all the energy sources come from renewables, rather than the more dependable gas-fired sources—which do not need nearly so much grid—the Minister will need a much bigger grid to deliver the current amount of power that we need. Further, since electricity is still a minority part of the power we use, if we are going to treble or quadruple our use of electricity to replace the gas that we burn in our home heating, and the petrol and diesel we burn in our transport, the mind boggles at just how many pylons there will need to be around the country, and at just how much grid capacity there will have to be to deliver all that extra power.

The Minister also needs to understand that, while he is right legally that he can meet his commitments now by coming up with a—probably completely fictional—plan for the amount of carbon the country will produce over the next 12 to 16 years, he does not have to show in any detail how we might get there. My advice to all Governments is not to try to predict the future beyond 10 years, because nobody can. Everything is going to change. A year ago, we could not even predict who the Prime Minister of the current Government was going to be, but we meet tonight on the eve of a new Prime Minister. So how on earth can we predict how big the UK economy is going to be in 2040? How can we predict whether any of our industry of a traditional kind will survive or not? How can we predict what the technologies will be? It may be that the so-called new technologies around the lithium-ion battery—currently the main marketing ploy of those who favour this kind of policy—will be completely old hat in 10 or 15-years’ time. There may be something genuinely better. There may be an electric product that I want to buy because it works well and is genuinely cheaper.

My next challenge to the Minister is that I do not believe this line that electricity is cheap and will get cheaper with the more renewables we use. The evidence is there for all to see. We have gone further than most with renewables. We have the dearest electricity in the advanced world, and one of the reasons for that is the cost of renewable—a lot of renewable power is contracted at very high guaranteed prices. Worse still, we need the gas power stations, and we need to pay them for doing nothing, because you need the backup. Of course it is going to be a lot dearer to have electricity from renewables, because you have to pay twice to have two different lots of capital equipment. The Minister has wisely limited my time, so I will have to suffice with just those few very strong objections. I back my noble friend’s amendment.

National Emergency Plan for Fuel

Lord Redwood Excerpts

Tuesday 28th April 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitehead (Lab)]

Yes, the noble Lord asks me whether there is a crisis and there is one in place at the moment. However, we have considerable difficulty in determining exactly its direction and depth, precisely because we do not know what the position is and will be, particularly concerning the Strait of Hormuz, for the future. The response to that crisis, as far as the Government are concerned, clearly has to be to take every measure possible to ensure that the Strait of Hormuz is open—and open without tolls—for the passage of fuel across the world, but we do not know how long that will last.

The plans that we are therefore undertaking, particularly given the prices that may be an issue in global fuel scarcity, with various people trying to cannibalise everybody else’s fuel supply, are under our control nationally. We can therefore indeed intervene, if necessary, to make sure that those prices remain as stable as possible and, particularly as far as those who are in fuel poverty are concerned, that more people do not fall into fuel poverty as a result of those problems.

[Lord Redwood (Con)]

Two of our refineries have shut under this Government and the remaining four are at risk from high costs and very high taxes. What has emerged from government discussions with our refiners to expand our refinery output? That is the way to national security—not relying on product imports from dangerous parts of the world.

[Lord Whitehead (Lab)]

I do not quite recognise the noble Lord’s description that the four refineries in this country are at risk. Those are very large and stable refineries. As he knows, they continue to refine the forms of crude coming into the UK into petrol and other fuel products. Those refineries are set up to provide a particular kind of output based on the crude oil coming into them, and that is not necessarily a full spectrum of fuel products. Therefore, part of a strategy, as far as fuel is concerned for the future, is to look at where those refineries can expand and increase their production if possible, and to make sure that, where they are not able to easily refine the things we need, we have secure sources of those for the future.

Electricity: Domestic Pricing

Lord Redwood Excerpts

Tuesday 21st April 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitehead (Lab)]

The Government are looking actively at many different ways of going further and faster as far as the green energy revolution is concerned. Indeed, they are actively looking at the Greenpeace and Stonehaven report on not only delinking but strategic reserves for gas in future. My personal view is that what they are proposing is a little early in the cycle but, nevertheless, could be an important element later on, in how the system stabilises itself once it is mainly renewables and low carbon.

[Lord Redwood (Con)]

Is the quickest way to get energy prices down not to cut some of the rip-off taxes that the Government impose? How does imposing an extra windfall tax help?

[Lord Whitehead (Lab)]

Imposing an extra windfall tax, on those elements of the system that are within the renewables orbit but outside the CfD arrangements, takes away the excess profits that those elements make as a result of being aligned with gas in charging those volatile prices. So it is a very sensible thing to do, to make sure that excess profits are not taken from consumers but instead reside with them as lower prices.

Fuel Supplies: War in Iran

Lord Redwood Excerpts

Wednesday 25th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitehead (Lab)]

The issue of fuel supply through the Strait of Hormuz is relative to world supply and world prices; that is, because the UK obtains only a very small proportion of its supplies from the Middle East, the effect is more likely to be on prices across the world as other people seek to make up their supplies from different sources. The noble Lord is right that how we clear the Strait of Hormuz for those supplies has to be a question of disengagement, détente in the present conflict, and negotiation not in an ideal world but with those with whom we find ourselves in a negotiating position.

[Lord Redwood (Con)]

My Lords, do the Government understand that they have already presided over the closure of two of our oil refineries with their high-carbon taxes and unfriendly energy policy? Will they take urgent action to avoid the closure of the remaining ones, which would leave us without domestic supply and with shortages?

[Lord Whitehead (Lab)]

The noble Lord will not be surprised to hear that I do not agree with his analysis of why the two refineries that have closed in the UK have done so, but the four refineries that we have in the UK are all producing well and in a robust condition. The Government will continue to monitor that process, but there is no reason to believe that further refineries are likely to close in the near future.

UK Energy Sources and Cost of Energy

Lord Redwood Excerpts

Thursday 19th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hintze (Con)]

My Lords—

[Lord Redwood (Con)]

My Lords—

[Captain of the Honourable Corps of Gentlemen-at-Arms and Chief Whip (Lord Kennedy of Southwark) (Lab Co-op)]

We will hear from the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett.

Greenhouse Gas Emissions Trading Scheme (Amendment) (Extension to Maritime Activities) Order 2026

Lord Redwood Excerpts

Thursday 12th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rogan (UUP)]

My Lords, in common with my noble friends and Ulster Unionist Party colleagues at the Stormont Assembly, I cannot support this legislation, which is detrimental to Northern Ireland, given the Province’s huge reliance on sea transport. We note that ferry services for the Scottish islands are exempt from this provision. Perhaps if Ministers were chasing votes in Northern Ireland in May, as they are for elections in Scotland, the exemption might have been extended across the Irish Sea as well. The Irish Sea is nothing less than an economic lifeline for the Province, with around 90% of its trade and passenger movements coming via ferries and shipping routes.

I have raised the issue of the lack of competitiveness in air services between Northern Ireland and Great Britain on numerous occasions in this House. Flying to and from Belfast on domestic routes has become incredibly expensive. Given the ongoing events in the Middle East, prices will likely rise still further. Unlike most other parts of the United Kingdom, the use of sea transportation is therefore not optional for many people and businesses in Northern Ireland.

I fully appreciate the Government’s aspiration to advance decarbonisation through the use of alternative fuels. However, if the world has learned nothing else over the past two weeks it is that there will be a continued reliance on fossil fuels for the foreseeable future in the UK and elsewhere, whether we like it or not. As such, the consequence of this order is the creation of what can only be described as a carbon tax in Northern Ireland, which would not have to be borne in anything like the same degree by the rest of the United Kingdom.

Of course, this comes as the Province continues to struggle with the seemingly ever-growing burden of costs on its people following the imposition of the Irish Sea border. The previous Conservative Government claimed to have removed it by dreaming up the Windsor Framework. It did not work. In opposition, the Labour Party pledged to improve matters if it came to power. It has not. Indeed, we have yet more costs being slapped on the Province through the order to keep Brussels happy, because the EU sets the rules in Northern Ireland now, not our supposedly sovereign UK Government.

If this order was for any purpose other than pleasing Brussels, the Government could and should have chosen to direct its proceeds into the Northern Ireland economy, perhaps with an emphasis on supporting our shipping industry and its transition to alternative means of propulsion, but they have not done so. Instead, we have yet another example of Whitehall taking the simplest option, with all the damaging implications it will have for that part of the United Kingdom, about which it knows little and, I feel, cares even less.

[Lord Redwood (Con)]

I agree with the contributions from Northern Ireland. This order is discriminatory against Northern Ireland in favour of Scotland, and it will do considerable damage to consumers and business in Northern Ireland.

I also welcome the remarks of my noble friend Lord Moynihan, who told us that we are engaged in a much wider debate on this rather narrow instrument now that the Government are saying that this is an important part of the United Kingdom’s participation in a carbon border adjustment mechanism—or carbon tariff—and, through the ETS at European level, in a carbon taxation scheme, which is even dearer than the United Kingdom one we have inflicted on ourselves. I urge the Government to think again. This has carried very badly in every part of the United Kingdom, represented here, that will be affected by it.

However, it is part of a much bigger error that government policy is creating. Over the last decade, the United Kingdom has been a world leader in reducing its CO₂ output and has been dutiful to a fault to treaty obligations that actually relate to more distant years. As a result, we have seen a catastrophic deindustrialisation, which has gathered huge pace and momentum in the last two years with the intensification of the net-zero policies this Government have welcomed and introduced. To extend part of this system to the maritime sector would cause further damage.

Many years ago, I had the privilege to lead a big international industrial group. In those days, the group had its headquarters and most of its main factories in England. We were proud of that. We struggled to compete, but we did compete. Where we had a problem, we remedied the problem. We needed to raise our capital efficiency, so we had to spend money and investment on better plant. We needed to train our staff and use our staff better so that it was a better organisation. We stayed in the market, and we stayed producing. For example, we were responsible for a large part of the ceramic tile industry in the Potteries, with its very distinguished tradition of innovation—and domination, at times—in that very important market.

While I was there, we managed to make the investments and stay competitive enough, although the Italians were very good. I watched with sadness and shame as my successors gave up the battle through no fault of their own. At our current energy prices, we are so far away from being able to do even something relatively simple in industrial terms, such as making good industrial tile for all the homes with bathrooms and kitchens that need it. That is replicated sector by sector now.

We have heard the Green case, feeble as it is, briefly sketched today in this short debate. My response to that is that practically every policy initiative this country has taken to reduce its own CO₂ has contributed to an increase in world CO₂. Why on earth is that good for the environment, let alone good for our economy? We will not get our own gas out of the ground, and so we import LNG, which generates three or four times as much CO₂ in the process than using our own. It is crazy, and we must stop doing this.

We need to have better-paid jobs and more investment in the United Kingdom. We need to rebuild our maritime industry. We heard from a very well-informed noble Lord, who told us that over his lifetime, supporting what was once a great industry, we have seen it almost disappear and vanish. This great maritime nation cannot now carry its own goods, because it did not create the right tax and regulatory conditions to sustain shipping in this country.

I urge the Government to think again. This is a small part of a big crisis. This is undermining our capacity to do well and make the things we need in this country. Dear energy is a killer. This is part of a package of measures that lumbers us with energy so dear we cannot make things for ourselves.