Katie Lam

Time and again over the past few months, and, indeed, in this debate, we have heard Ministers talk about the importance of energy independence, and they are right to do so. No country has ever succeeded without cheap and abundant energy. For energy to be cheap and abundant, its supply must be reliable. If we are dependent on energy imports from overseas, the supply of energy will necessarily be unreliable, as the disruption caused by recent events in the Persian gulf has made abundantly clear. But it is profoundly dishonest to talk of energy independence while making us more dependent on energy imports from abroad. That is exactly what the Government’s plans to ban new North sea oil and gas would do. They should, at the very least, be brave enough to admit that to the public. Ministers say that there is no point in using our vast oil and gas reserves; they say that energy prices are set entirely on the international market, which means that increasing our domestic supply would have little to no impact on the overall prices. But that is not true. Gas is a highly localised market, specifically in the case of liquefied natural gas, which is gas that is turned into liquid, loaded on to ships and transported globally. The further those ships have to travel, the more expensive it becomes to deliver. If we rely on gas imports from the rest of the world, we will need to spend more money to bring that gas to Britain. The vast majority of homes in the UK—87%—use gas for heating. We currently import half of the gas that we consume. If we produced more gas domestically, it would be cheaper to buy gas, meaning that heating bills would, in fact, come down.