Question to the Department for Energy Security & Net Zero:

To ask the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, what assessment he has made of the potential impact of net zero policies on employment in the oil and gas sector in England.

The North Sea basin is super-mature, and production is in natural decline. Oil and gas production fell by 72% between 1999 and 2023. Direct jobs in oil and gas extraction fell by around a third between 2014 and 2023.

The clean energy transition creates an opportunity for our expert oil and gas sector to play a central role in the future of energy supply.

Robert Gordon University estimates that the renewables workforce could grow from 39,000 in 2024 to 84,000-153,000 by 2035, subject to realised deployment across those technologies and proportion of UK content delivered by the domestic supply chain.