Here are the climate-related sections of speeches by MPs during the Commons debate Energy Prices: Energy-intensive Industries.
Gareth Snell (Labour)
To ask the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero if he will make a statement on the Government’s approach to reducing energy prices for energy-intensive industries.
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Sarah Jones (Labour)
For energy-intensive industries overall, our clean power 2030 target is the key to long-term sustainable price reductions. Clean home-grown energy is the best way to protect bill payers and boost Britain’s energy independence. We are already bringing energy costs for UK industries closer into line with other major economies through the British industry supercharger. That will fully exempt eligible firms, including some but by no means all of those in the ceramics sector, from certain costs linked to renewable energy policies, particularly those exposed to the high cost of electricity.
Using more electricity and less fossil fuel is the future for UK businesses. The latest advice from the Climate Change Committee expects electricity to meet 61% of industrial energy demand by 2040, so we are developing options to enable businesses to do that.
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Andrew Bowie (Conservative)
Grangemouth, the Luton Vauxhall plant and now the Moorcroft pottery in Stoke-on-Trent—every single week, we hear of more job losses in energy-intensive industries and more British companies shutting up shop and laying off workers because of the toxic combination of high energy costs and this Chancellor’s devastating jobs tax. We have the highest industrial electricity prices in the developed world. Just this week, INEOS told us in no uncertain terms that carbon taxes and high energy costs are killing off manufacturing in the UK.
This Government have been warned by Opposition Members, by the GMB this week and by Unite. This week, they were warned by none other than Tony Blair. What was their response? Advisers in No. 10 Downing Street picked up the phone and begged him to row back on what he said. They asked him to row back on what we all know to be true—what the Minister, Morgan McSweeney, apparently, and an increasing number of the Government’s own Back Benchers know to be true: the current approach to energy and net zero is doomed to fail, and voters are being asked to make financial sacrifices when they know that the impact on global emissions is minimal. That is at the heart of this madness.
This Government are wilfully destroying British industry in oil and gas, ceramics, chemicals and metals when they know that it will not make a difference to global emissions. We will not use any less oil and gas; neither will we use any less steel, cement, bricks or chemicals. We will just import those things from abroad, at greater cost to our economy and the climate and with British job losses added to the bargain. As the Government are led by an ideological zealot, the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, and by a Prime Minister too weak to rein him in, we will continue down this path, and British workers will pay the price—in Aberdeen, in Grangemouth, in Luton, and today in Stoke.
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Sarah Jones (Labour)
The Conservative party is hiding behind this new-found scepticism of net zero to conceal its complete failure to support and grow our foundational and manufacturing industries on its watch. On its watch, we lost 70,000 jobs in the North sea and 1,250 jobs in the ceramics sector, chemicals manufacturing fell by 30%, and we produced only 30% of the steel that we use in this country. The Conservative party’s record on this issue is shameful.
This Government have a completely different approach. We are developing the industrial strategy, which will support those foundational industries. We are looking to make sure we can reach net zero by 2030, in order to provide the economic and energy security we need. The last cost of living crisis was caused by our reliance on global gas prices, as the hon. Member for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine (Andrew Bowie) knows, and as he occasionally says in some meetings when he flips and flops on his position on net zero. We will support manufacturing; we are developing our industrial strategy, which will be published in a few weeks’ time, and we are already providing more support to the energy-intensive industries through the energy supercharger than the previous Government did. We will act where the previous Government failed to act.
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James MacCleary (Liberal Democrat)
The Liberal Democrats believe that the future of British industry and our national security depend on a serious and sustained commitment to renewable energy. We want to see far greater emphasis on clean energy sources, particularly solar, in order to reduce our dangerous reliance on fossil fuels, strengthen our energy security, and tackle fuel poverty by bringing down energy bills for households and businesses alike. In the face of Putin’s barbaric war in Europe and with Donald Trump’s reckless tariffs threatening fresh economic turmoil, we cannot afford to be complacent. The future of energy-intensive industries, not least our steel industry, hangs in the balance.
Steelmaking is not just an economic asset; it is of vital strategic importance to the UK. We need steel in order to build the infrastructure required for a sustainable, secure future, from wind turbines and railways to hospitals and homes. Without it, our ambitions for net zero and national resilience will collapse. As such, will the Government give a clear, unequivocal commitment to their net zero plans, and will they ensure that no option is off the table when it comes to safeguarding our steel industry and the future of British manufacturing?
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10:44 Sarah Jones (Labour)
I thank my hon. Friend for her championing of her constituency. I am still to visit, and I must do that, because I know she has many exciting places for me to see. Electrifying industry is crucial. The Climate Change Committee has said that that is the route and that 61% of industry will need to be electrified. We need to make sure we do that. We are looking through the spending review process, as I am sure she would expect, at how we can support industries to make that change to electric and how we can help with some of the capital costs, which will lead to lower costs in the longer term. Making that leap can be difficult, and that is what we are looking at through the spending review.
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Mark Pritchard (Conservative)
On net zero, I think there is a national consensus on making the environment better, creating green jobs and improving energy security, but will the Minister recognise that for many people, consumers and companies out there—particularly small businesses, by the way; it is not all about large ones—there is too much happening, too soon and too fast? Rather than having regressive and punitive taxes on industry and small businesses, there should be more education and more incentives to change consumer and company behaviour.
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Seamus Logan (SNP)
Despite Scotland’s growing abundance of potentially cheap renewable energy, businesses in Scotland’s energy sector are dealt a double blow, whereby energy-intensive businesses in the renewables supply chain are hammered by high energy costs in production and extortionate transmission charges. When the Minister looks at this problem, as her colleague told me he would the other day, will she bear in mind that this is entirely linked to the high cost of producing energy and all the other ways in which the current energy market model serves Scotland poorly?
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Desmond Swayne (Conservative)
A vital ingredient of any net zero policy is an understanding of the word “net”. Ultimately, we are going to have to grapple with technology that we have had for over a century to remove carbon directly from the air, aren’t we?
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Ellie Chowns (Green)
Given the huge economic and environmental effects of burning fossil fuels, it is clear that the future of energy has to be clean, green, cheap renewables, plus energy efficiency. All of us who care about fact-based, truth-based politics should call out the outrageous misinformation from those who suggest that net zero is the reason for high energy prices, when it clearly is not. Gas prices have gone through the roof in recent years, and we all know why: because of Putin’s outrageous invasion of Ukraine. That is why companies and businesses are struggling.
There are two specific things that the Government can and should do to help precisely those businesses: first, decouple the price of electricity from gas so that the true costs of generating electricity are reflected in the price that consumers pay; and secondly, implement a carbon tax in order to be able to use those revenues to assist industries to make the just transition from fossil fuels to the clean, green, cheap energies of the future.
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John Cooper (Conservative)
The pretence is that Britain is somehow caught in a storm- tossed sea of international gas prices, which drives up energy costs, but when INEOS reports that it is paying £127 million a year in carbon taxes, rising to £2 billion by 2030, is it not the case that we are seeing the cascade of jobs losses because Labour has made decarbonisation deindustrialisation?
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10:54 Blake Stephenson (Conservative)
Talking of experts in deindustrialisation, over 1,000 jobs at Luton’s Stellantis plant have been lost, impacting my constituents, because this Government did not respond to concerns about energy policy. If the Minister does not agree with us on net zero, does she agree with the general secretary of the GMB, who says that the Government’s energy policies amount to
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Charlie Dewhirst (Conservative)
The Minister has told the House that the Government would not impose any new costs on the ceramics industry, but we know that they are going to increase carbon taxes, which will kill off energy-intensive industries. Does she not see that this is a totally incoherent policy position?
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