Melanie Onn

I welcome the Government’s proposed powers to enable the Crown Estate to drive greater investment in the country’s future to boost energy security, nature recovery and economic growth. It should be allowed to access private sector funding to expand and get the greatest benefit possible from its access to financing, and not retreat to markets having to survive on their own and not delivering, or recourse to the public sector for critical funding to grow industries. I want to focus on clause 3, which deals with sustainable development, and to pick up some of the comments that were made in Committee in the House of Lords. My constituency is at the forefront of the delivery of practical skills in the day-to-day operations and continued maintenance of the offshore wind sector, and my constituents benefit from apprenticeships, introductory training, continuous professional development and, critically, long-term, well-paid employment in the sector. The Bill has the potential to open up possibilities for broader community engagement through the promotion of various educational opportunities in numerous workstreams. Having worked with the Crown Estate in a previous role before returning to this place, I must say that I have had a slightly different experience from my hon. Friend the Member for Mid and South Pembrokeshire (Henry Tufnell). I know that in recent years the Crown Estate has sought to expand the areas of work in which it actively engages, and has provided immense support for the renewables sector. We should bear in mind that there has been a collective understanding—not just within our Government—that for energy security purposes we must, as a minimum, look at renewable energy sources to supplement our other energy sources as we progress, and as we view the global economics and the changing impact of the energy industry and the way in which others are maximising this change to encourage wealth into their countries. We know that not just the present Government but Governments around the world, and previous Governments in this place, have recognised that we should accept and embrace this move, seeing it not as something divisive or prohibitive to other sectors but as something that will be the mainstay of this country. Simply objecting to it and saying no will not help to move things forward. We should be working together, as I think the renewables sector has been endeavouring to do and has been enabled to do in a much stronger way through the partnership that the Crown Estate has facilitated, to unite the many different relevant parties in seeking appropriate solutions to some of the most testing and challenging issues that the industry faces, including people and skills, environmental impacts and derogations, the unlocking of the UK supply chain, spatial squeeze, offshore asset security—which has not been discussed today—and aviation impact, which has not been referred to either. The Crown Estate has played a critical role in ensuring that the voices are heard in each of the areas where this new industry is having an impact—and it is having an impact, as I think the industry itself recognises—in the knowledge that this must be done in collaboration and co-operation with the other existing organisations, industries and operators in those sectors. Through the evidence and change programmes, it became clear to everyone involved, including those who might have been less than happy that a new industry was making things different and challenging in certain circumstances, that the earlier these issues were considered as part of the Crown Estate’s planning and scoping, the easier it was to fulfil the existing and basic expectations of both the Crown Estate and the renewables sector from a Government perspective. Earlier consultation and partnership working on common difficulties and challenges meant that agreeable solutions were found earlier, and it was then possible to build acceptable frameworks for future use. Some of that is in evidence now, in the context of the Celtic sea developments and the fishing communities in those areas. The right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael), who is my co-chair on the all-party parliamentary group on fisheries, rightly raised the issues and concerns that the fishing communities will have. However, in Committee in the Lords, there was a conversation about the regional wealth funds that the Bill will create. It seems to me that there is a prize opportunity for support and training for the fishing industry, to make it work alongside the renewables sector and to look at the opportunities that will come from the decarbonisation happening in that sector when it comes to offshore vessels and flexibility of service, so that a fishing vessel is not just a fishing vessel. Can it be used for multiple purposes? Can it be used for surveys? It can, because fishing vessels are already being used for surveys. There is an opportunity for the Bill to support those other industries, and we should not lose sight of that. With these new ways of working, there is a great opportunity to expand the level of knowledge and understanding of the sector, to be able to teach the next generation of young people about how things really work in practice. To date, that has been a bit more experimental, I think it is fair to say, but because the sector is maturing and all the organisations involved have become more experienced, there is much more collective learning, and there are clearer lines of guidance that the Crown Estate has a definitive interest in ensuring a wide and common understanding. I would like to focus on the people and skills area of work, which the Crown Estate has had some engagement in. There is an acceptance that the workforce will grow and needs to grow substantially. For areas such as mine and other coastal communities, ensuring that we have a skilled workforce ready to go is imperative. It is much more effective to ensure that people have the skills to get the jobs to earn their own way and have some pride in their life, working in an industry they are proud to be working in, than to simply rely on other community benefits that may well be short-lived and do not have the long-term impact that growing a brand-new industry around the country delivers. We know that the workforce will need more than three times its current numbers—I had written in my speech “over the next decade”, but I do not think that is true; actually, it is over the next half a decade, which is hardly anything at all—to meet the needs of the industry, and that is across all the different areas I mentioned such as environmental impact and aviation.