Michael Shanks

I will come to jobs in the North sea in just a moment—a section of my speech is about that, given its importance. I have to say that I am absolutely incredulous: I can almost understand it from the Tories—thinking that a moment of windfall profits was the moment to cut taxes on oil and gas companies—but now we have a partnership of the SNP and the Tories who believe that now is the moment not to help people with their energy bills but to cut taxes for the biggest companies. That is an interesting lesson that we have learned. The energy independence Bill is about how we go further. A number of hon. Members have raised fuel poverty. Fuel poverty in this country is not a misfortune; it is a scandal. More than a third of school pupils have told their teachers that they are cold at home. In one of the world’s largest economies, a third of children go to school to get warm. We must bring this to an end with new minimum energy efficiency standards for renters, a new warm homes agency to ensure that high home grades are not, as they have been for too long, the preserve of just the well off, and a strengthened Ofgem with the powers of a genuine consumer champion, not just a regulator in name. That is what fighting the corner of working people looks like. Let me say something about the people who power this country. I speak at industry conferences regularly and I always talk about my pride in the North sea, not as a Minister reading from a brief, but as someone who has friends and family who work offshore and as a Scottish MP who knows more than many about what the sector means. It is about people right now doing skilled, dangerous and vital work—work that this country has depended on for decades, and which does not get taken for granted—[Interruption.] We are not taking it for granted, actually; that is just nonsense. The question in front of us is how we secure those people’s long-term future. The answer is not, as some on the Opposition Benches have suggested, to pretend that the North sea is not a maturing basin in natural decline. It is not about nostalgia for some new age of discovery. We are neither a “turn off the taps” nor a “drill every last drop” party. Neither is a credible plan. We will introduce transitional energy certificates, as industry has called for, to enable tiebacks and manage existing fields for their lifespan; for the first time, we will give the North Sea Transition Authority a statutory responsibility to consider workers, communities and supply chains; and we will launch a new North sea jobs service to support people through every stage of the transition. This energy transition only works if we bring people with us on what we are building next, and that is already taking shape.