Contribution
I thank my hon. Friend for those points, which he has previously raised with me. I can certainly take away the point about the public sector decarbonisation scheme. Bizarrely, as he knows, it is not part of my brief, but that does not matter. This Government work across Departments and across barriers, and I will endeavour to look into it. The point is well made that it can be challenging when a company has small margins and big up-front costs, especially in these industries where there has not been infrastructure investment for a long time. A lot of places need general infrastructure investment, and we are looking actively at this issue through the spending review process.
Happily, I can say that we are looking to answer all the questions asked by my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent North. I cannot promise what the answers will be at this point, and I cannot promise that we will do everything we seek to do, but we are well aware of all his points and are looking at them in depth.
We are looking at subsidies on energy costs. My hon. Friend said that the Department for Business and Trade and the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero should work together. I sit in both Departments, so I have conversations with myself about these issues. There are competing vantage points that we need to grapple with, but the advantage of my sitting in both Departments is that officials from the two Departments meet to find solutions before speaking to me, which is helpful. They are working well together.
We are also looking at the energy-intensive industries exemption scheme. As my hon. Friend knows, grid connections are an issue across the board. We are working on how to remove undeveloped, speculative programmes from the grid connection queue and prioritise others. One of my roles as the Minister for Industry is to point to the need not to forget our existing industrial base and the need for it to connect to the grid, as well as the need for the important data centres, artificial intelligence and new technologies and new investment that we want to come to the UK. If we cannot get our own industry connected in the way we want, we are getting something wrong, so my hon. Friend is right to make that point.
I met representatives of the energy-intensive industries last week, including Rob from Ceramics UK, and I am following up on all these things with the Treasury and with officials. We agreed on a couple of things at that meeting, and one is to have a session with the industrial strategy team and the energy-intensive industries to make sure we are all working towards the same outcome. Another is to talk to the Treasury about the challenge we face in how the ETS and the CBAM align and fit together, or not, depending on policy. These things are enormously complicated, as my hon. Friend knows, and CBAM is a Treasury lead. However, I am very aware of the need to get that relationship right; otherwise, the system does not work at all.
My hon. Friend talked about hydrogen, which is very important and is part of my brief in the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. We are developing a kind of hydrogen network. We have had what we call HAR1, or hydrogen allocation round 1, which was the initial agreement to fund 11 hydrogen projects—electrolyser projects—around the country. There is hydrogen in the carbon capture and storage clusters that we are developing, and we are currently looking at what the next phase of the hydrogen roll-out will be.
My hon. Friend knows that hydrogen is currently very expensive. We need to work out a path to reduce costs, which is what we are grappling with at the moment, in a climate where it is difficult to bid for money in the spending review. How can we unleash the hydrogen industry and give certainty to businesses that want to invest but need the right signals? How can we do that and use money wisely? And who pays for it? People are very interested in hydrogen, whether in steel, in transport or in the green energy space—it has a lot of uses. We need to make sure we are making the right decisions. I will speak to the hydrogen team about ceramics, and I will ask what we are looking at in that space.