Great British Energy Bill (First sitting)

Torcuil Crichton Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 8th October 2024 Public Bill Committees

[Andrew Pakes (Peterborough) (Lab)]

This is registered, but I have been told to say it out loud: I am a member of the GMB, which is appearing before us later, and before the election I was the deputy general secretary of Prospect, which is also speaking to us this morning.

[Torcuil Crichton (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (Lab)]

I am also a member of the GMB.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero (Michael Shanks)]

I am also a member of the GMB.

--- Later in debate ---

[Torcuil Crichton]

Q Good morning, Mr Maier. Following on from Catherine’s questions, can you highlight how GB Energy will involve communities in the renewable transition? What kind of benefits will there be? The Secretary of State spoke about a mandatory community benefit.

Juergen Maier: Thank you for the question. We have laid out the five key priorities of Great British Energy. One is to invest and co-invest; another is to enable and help to accelerate development; the third is very much about the local community energy that your colleague talked about earlier. That will be through community energy schemes. The reason we are so keen on that is that it is where community engagement really comes in. That will not be the gigawatts of renewable energy— the gigawatts will be in floating offshore wind—but I passionately believe that by engaging with local communities, whether that is with local solar, with onshore wind or with tidal-type schemes, you can really get that community engagement and community acceptance. Indeed, you can really deliver the local social benefit that those schemes can deliver.

[Torcuil Crichton]

And economic benefit too, we hope.

Juergen Maier: Of course.

[Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)]

Q Good morning, Mr Maier. It is very good to see you here. I have some questions about the overall aims that the Bill and the company are trying to achieve. You have just said that it will be an enabler, so we have to imagine it as something that will happen before any contracts for difference are attributed. It is an enabler to make people and companies ready to bid into the CfDs, for example. Is that how you see the role? People are used to the status quo, and the CfDs have been very successful. Some companies are wondering how it is all going to fit together.

Juergen Maier: Certainly the enabling part of what we do will be pre-CfDs, as you say. That is also where our partnership with the Crown Estate comes in. This is where we will be doing a lot of the early consenting and engaging on the willingness to co-invest and give confidence, but we will also be there past the CfDs. As and when the schemes get developed, there may be opportunities to come in and be a co-investor. We would also be supporting that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Harriet Cross]

Q We have heard a lot about public investment and the importance of private investment for meeting net zero. Is there anything in the Bill that encourages you that the amount of public investment going in will attract the amount of private investment that is needed? We have to take this Bill in the round with other energy policies coming forward. How does it sit alongside those in ensuring that we continue to attract private investment into the energy sector?

Marc Hedin: I may be playing devil’s advocate here, but there is a slight risk if a public company were to invest in a utility scale project. At the moment in GB, we manage to attract quite a lot of capital to deploy renewable projects, for instance. There is also a risk of perceived unfair competition that would be detrimental to future capital attractiveness, so I would add that to the global reflection around this topic.

Ravi Gurumurthy: To come in on that, it is very common in other countries for the state to co-invest. I have spoken to a lot of other organisations, and we need to attract £350 billion to £500 billion of capital into power generation in the next 10 years. I think it is perfectly possible for the state to play a role in that. Everything that GB Energy is trying to do is to reduce the risk and increase the predictability of the investment environment. If you take the developer role, at the moment the private sector, when it bids in for a seabed lease, has to have the uncertainty of whether that project will ever get commissioned and the long delay in planning and consenting, grid connection and environmental surveys. If we can actually have the state do some of that and de-risk it, I think it is more likely to get that private sector investment. That is what happens in the Netherlands and it is what the Danes are moving towards, and it is also partly what happens in Germany. There is a good track record of these sorts of environments working well to attract private sector investment.

Shaun Spiers: That is right. You cannot dictate the culture of a company in a Bill. There was a criticism of the Green Investment Bank, for instance, that it invested in rather established technologies and had an insufficiently high appetite for risk. It will be important that GB Energy does pump-prime private investment and not replace it.

[Torcuil Crichton]

Q You anticipated my question. To pivot back, Ravi, you talked about innovation, and you talked, Shaun, about closing that 20% towards net zero. What can this Bill and GB Energy do to drive that private sector investment?

Shaun Spiers: Ravi has written the report on it.

Ravi Gurumurthy: Your question is: what can it do to drive private sector investment?

[Torcuil Crichton]

Yes, what can the Bill and GB Energy itself do?

Ravi Gurumurthy: I have already articulated what it can do on the development side to get rid of some of the risks to do with planning, consenting, grid connection and so on. On the more novel technologies—small modular reactors, floating wind, tidal range and so on—I think we have also talked about how if the state is co-investing in some way, it signals a degree of commitment and insulates companies slightly from the risks. In both the investor and developer roles, GB Energy can play a role in accelerating things. The biggest way in which the state can de-risk investment and increase private sector contribution is through the National Energy System Operator, providing a clear, strategic plan and forward visibility of what is happening in terms of technology and location. That is how I think we will get the investment—not just in the assets, but in the supply chain as well.

Shaun Spiers: On clean, flexible power, what Green Alliance has proposed is a sort of vaccine taskforce-style operation to crowd in all potential technologies for this. It is not clear who would fund it, if GB Energy did not. That is a really important part of 2030 power decarbonisation. There is also the local power plan. The previous Government had a plan—I think it was in 2014—to power 1 million homes by community energy, which was abandoned four years later with about 67,000 homes powered. There is a clear remit here for making community energy economically viable and getting local investment in community energy.

[Wera Hobhouse]

Q I want to come back to what Shaun said a little earlier about the slight risk of the great power that the Secretary of State has. Do you think that there should be some protection in the Bill for communities, so that they can have a say? We also know that quite a lot of the delivery of our new transition infrastructure might be delayed because communities are not entirely certain, for instance. Is there a risk, and should there be something in the Bill that protects communities, so that they can be confident they are part of the transition and are being listened to?

Shaun Spiers: I think a nature recovery or nature protection duty in the Bill would be helpful in reassuring communities. The investment in community energy, where people really have a stake in the energy, will take some of the sting out of the opposition to renewables, but I would not overload the Bill with things that are better dealt with in the planning system. This is a Bill to enable a lot of investment in achieving a decarbonised power system and long-term energy security. To try to overload it with things that are best dealt with in other parts of government, or other legislation, would be a mistake.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Chair]

We are getting away from the Bill a bit.

[Torcuil Crichton]

Q Good morning, gentlemen. Dan, you have argued in the past that GB Energy should have a very focused mission. What is your view of the objects for GB Energy set out in clause 3?

Dan McGrail: I firmly stand by the idea that GB Energy, at least in its initial phase, should do three or four things excellently, with some fundamental underpinning. It should champion the UK supply chain; it should act to promote skills; it should enable innovation. The market segments in which it operates should be focused on and defined early. Its budget of £8.3 billion is a lot of money, but to get value from that in the context of the energy sector, GB Energy needs to focus on two or three areas in which it can really deliver additionality. I think the place for that is in the business plan, rather than in the legislation. As the legislation is currently framed, it allows the team the space, when they begin the work of the company, to define those two or three areas; it does not narrow them down. My view is that the legislation as drafted gives it that space.

[Josh MacAlister]

Q Dan McGrail, this is a question for you. What are the views of your private sector members about the role that GB Energy can play in de-risking investments and crowding in private sector investment? What are they saying at the moment?

Dan McGrail: Occupying space where there is a highly liquid market for private capital is unlikely to bring much additionality. Offshore wind is one of those places —fixed-bottom offshore wind, to be precise. That is a mature market; there is capital that will flow to projects if the wider investment conditions of those projects are right, and that is more Government policy-related. However, there are other markets. For example, onshore wind in England has basically been under-invested in for the past decade. There will still be nervousness within the private sector: “Do I want to be the first developer to test local planning? What does the risk profile of that look like?”

I see a clear role for GB Energy to partner with the private sector to help to accelerate the return of investment in that market, or for example within the growth of the floating offshore wind market, where there are clear opportunities that go beyond just the energy sector and into transition, such as floating offshore wind in Scotland or in the Celtic sea, where we know that there is a much bigger economic growth story. Those are areas where I think we could see public and private capital working very comfortably together.

Making Britain a Clean Energy Superpower

Torcuil Crichton Excerpts

Friday 26th July 2024 Commons Chamber

[Torcuil Crichton (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (Lab)]

I congratulate you, Madam Deputy Speaker, on your appointment, and it is an honour to follow the hon. Member for Mid Buckinghamshire (Greg Smith) and to hear so many other maiden speeches today. They make faraway places such as East Thanet and Lowestoft, with which in fact my constituency has old herring connections, seem closer to us. It has also been a pleasure to hear so many maiden speeches this week from my 35 fellow new Scottish Labour MPs. I realise that that number somewhat brackets the Under-Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, my hon. Friend the hon. Member for Rutherglen (Michael Shanks), who blazed a trail for us. I am delighted to see him on the Front Bench, just as I am delighted to see my hon. Friend the Member for Inverclyde and Renfrewshire West (Martin McCluskey) bar the doors so that everyone has to hear what I am about to inflict upon them.

With your indulgence, Madam Deputy Speaker, and my translation, I begin: Mar urram dhaibhsan a thànig romham agus iadsan chleachdas i as mo dhèidh, tha mi togail mu ghuth nam chànain fhèin airson Na h-Eileanan an Iar. In honour of those who became before me, and those who will surely use my native language after me, I raise my voice today for the people of the Western Isles.

The commonest question I am asked in this House, apart from how to pronounce the name of my constituency, is how I manage to travel from Westminster to the Western Isles. Of course, the easy answer is by Tardis, but the honest answer is that here we are a mere hop and a skip away from Glasgow, and then I travel by a small jet—on schedule, hopefully—to Stornoway. As I board that small, tubular jet, I feel almost like a character in “Succession”, but I know that there is gold at the end of the flight.

Of course, we are connected; we are not in the middle of nowhere but at the heart of the Atlantic. We have the wealth of wind that will deliver the benefit of jobs, growth and energy security for this country in years to come. Those Atlantic islands and the western seaboard are what will give GB Energy meaning and reality in that transition from east to west, away from the North sea and away from the myth that we will not be there in another two generations. Two generations of my constituents have earned energy security for this country from the North sea, and two generations more will continue as we make that just transition to renewables.

That will be done with the heft of two Governments—the UK Government and the Scottish Government—and will require the muscle, investment and expertise of commercial developers. Vitally, it must involve the consent, involvement and power of communities. Just as the Labour Government of ’97 established, from the pre-devolution Scotland Office, a community land unit enabling communities to have the means and wherewithal to take over their own land, setting in chain the land reform revolution in the highlands and islands, I am encouraged that this Labour Government are open to ideas such as a community energy unit, to enable communities such as mine to take their stake in that wealth of wind, and create a template that can be used across the whole of Britain. These are themes to which I will return, alongside the unfinished business of land reform—I read today that a highland estate is for sale at £12 million, with carbon capture and the Ponzi scheme of peat restoration attached, and I know that that is unfinished business.

Of course, wild weather and radical land politics are not the only things that the Western Isles have to offer the United Kingdom. There are deep connections to the country and to this place itself. The tide of the Thames that rises and falls outside, marked by Mary Branson’s “New Dawn” high up there in St Stephen’s Hall, is the same tide that covers and uncovers “Sheol an Iolaire”, a tidal installation that I installed in Stornoway harbour, along with my good friend Malcolm MacLean, to mark a wartime tragedy and the loss of a ship of that name.

That same tide that sweeps into the Viking bay of Stornoway also laps Tarbert in Harris, Lochmaddy, North Uist, Lochsboisdale and Castlebay in Barra. That Hebridean archipelago of nine—or is it 10— islands guards our western approaches. Were they to be transposed on to a map of mainland Britain, they would run from London to Sheffield in length—with better scenery, of course. That is why I am reluctant to enter the traditional rivalry between maiden speakers of declaring their constituency the most beautiful in the country: when they come, they will see that there is no competition.

I do not intend to give a Cook’s tour of my constituency, but Barra, the jewel of the Hebrides, is where Angus MacNeil, the former MP for Na h-Eileanan an Iar, resides: fior Ghaidheal—a true Gael—and a generously spirited man, whose chairmanship of many Committees in this House was testimony not just to his political acumen, but to his ability to befriend people across the Chamber. That is one characteristic of my predecessor that I hope to emulate.

I will not take the House around the whole of the Western Isles, because time is short, but there are some other political monuments that deserve mention. I have no fewer than four former Labour MPs in my constituency on whom to lean for advice: Dame Anne McGuire, the queen of Stirling; Ian Davidson, the former Chair of the Scottish Affairs Committee, who is still campaigning for Labour; Calum MacDonald, the former Labour MP for the Western Isles and our community wind farm expert; and, foremost among them, Brian Wilson, a former Energy Minister, whose counsel I commend to those on the Front Bench, and who has been a guiding light for me since he hired me at the West Highland Free Press as a journalist many years ago.

In passing, I cannot but pay tribute to those above us. I do not mean the angels; I mean the devils in the Press Gallery, among whom I danced for many years as a journalist for the Daily Record and The Glasgow Herald and as a freelance broadcaster for the BBC. Of course, it is Friday and nearly lunchtime, so they are not there. When I was in the Lobby, it was always nearly Friday, and always nearly lunchtime.

In a double transfer deal, which performed that rare feat of uniting the Westminster Lobby and Downing Street, I am joined on these green Benches by my hon. Friend the new Member for Rochdale (Paul Waugh), who was my Lobby roommate upstairs and will now join me here. On the old maps, my constituency might have been marked “Here be dragons.” My hon. Friend the Member for Rochdale slayed one to get here.

I will not detain the House with descriptions of whisky, salmon, scallops that reach Singapore in 24 hours, Harris tweed or beautiful bays, but I remind the Minister that the people of the Western Isles have the tenacity, the wherewithal and the resourcefulness, embodied in the Arnish yard near Stornoway, to act as a stepping stone in the journey to renewables and to clean energy.

It has been a long road from there to here. Many people have helped, and since I have arrived I have had many messages of support, and prayers and passages too. As I come from one of the most religiously observant parts of Britain, that comes as no surprise. One passage, from an old friend, has stayed with me. To save the Hansard reporters, who are probably struggling with the accent, never mind the translation, I will do the task for them. She said: “May your conversation always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to deal with anyone”—biodh ur comhraidh an-comhnaidh grasmhor, air a dheaneamh blasta le salainn.

Seasoned with salt, Madam Deputy Speaker. I like that. I hope that all our exchanges in this House will be gracious and seasoned with the salt air of the Atlantic and our common future, because in this Chamber and in this kingdom, we are all islanders.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

I call Adrian Ramsay to make his maiden speech.