Mr Alistair Carmichael

I beg to move, That this House has considered Government support for the marine renewables industry. I thank the Backbench Business Committee for the allocation of time for this important and, as we head towards allocation round 7, timely debate. I hope that we will be able to influence some of the Minister’s thinking. It is good to welcome him to his place in the Chamber. It is also good to welcome you to the Chair for the first time, Ms Jardine. You and I have known each other for many years, and I anticipate—I might yet be shown to be horribly wrong about this—that the next few hours may witness the longest I have ever been able to speak in your presence without interruption. [Laughter.] I should also place on the record that my hon. Friend the Member for Taunton and Wellington (Gideon Amos) is celebrating a significant birthday today. What better way to celebrate the acquisition of a bus pass than an afternoon spent in Westminster Hall? This debate is particularly timely. As well as coming in the run-up to AR7, we anticipate in the next few weeks the publication of a fairly comprehensive piece of work by one of Scotland’s finest universities, the University of Edinburgh. Its school of engineering is about to publish a report on the future economic potential of tidal stream and wave energy in Scotland. I will not spike the release of the report, but it is an enormously significant piece of work, which will significantly progress the debate as we head towards AR7. Among the headlines from that report may be an indication of the potential of tidal stream and wave energy in Scotland and across the whole United Kingdom. Marine energy could contribute £37 billion gross value added to Scotland’s economy by 2050, and £28 billion of that, most significantly, is from exports. When the Minister speaks to colleagues in Government about the opportunities to grow our manufacturing base, contribute to the economic growth to which we are all committed and, as a consequence, improve export performance, this is the direction in which he might want to point them. Marine energy has the potential to create 62,400 jobs—to put that in context, the wind industry currently supports in the region of 20,000 jobs—and we have the potential in Scottish waters alone to deploy 9 GW of tidal stream and wave energy by 2050. The opportunities for tidal stream generation come from the fact that as a brand-new industry—how often do we get to say that?—we can shape the supply chain and then export the expertise and products from that supply chain around the world. Tidal stream is not unique to Scotland or the United Kingdom; when we show that it can be done here, others will want to do it in other parts of the world. Devices that are currently in the water have produced a UK supply chain input in the region of 80%. Not many technologies are in a position to make that boast. The vibe in the industry, if I can put it like that, is fairly positive and upbeat: there are opportunities coming down the road. However, this “overnight success” has been at least 20 years in the making. It has been a long march, and progress is never linear. We have had false dawns and disappointments, but in the last few years it has been demonstrated beyond any measure of doubt that obvious and visible demonstrations of Government support make a real difference in getting this industry towards the point of commercialisation and the opportunities that that will bring. At the time of the fourth allocation round, the then Government committed to the first ringfenced pot for tidal stream generation. That had a massive impact, not just as a consequence of the opportunity that it provided, but as a signal that the technology was taken seriously by Government and was being given opportunity and support from Government. It is to that series of signals that we now need to look, because although we have made significant progress, we are not yet at the point of commercialisation. We do need to do a little bit more in order to get there happily.