Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what estimate he has made of the number of (a) shore-based maritime, (b) seafarer and (c) supply chain jobs that will be created in the UK as a result of decommissioning activity in the North Sea in each year until 2025.

With increasing numbers of offshore oil and gas fields reaching the end of their economic life, forecasts from industry estimate that the annual expenditure for decommissioning over the next 5 years will be in the region of £1.7 to £2 billion. With recent estimates from industry suggesting that decommissioning will represent around 11 per cent of total expenditure on oil and gas for 2017, and the industry will have provided over 300,000 jobs in total in the UK, decommissioning is already supporting a significant number of UK jobs.