Lord Wilson of Sedgefield (Lab)

My Lords, I thank noble Lords and the noble Baroness for their questions on this. I will confront head-on the issue that is tangential to this whole debate, which the noble Lord managed to make a substantive point of in his speech. Obviously, I have known Tony Blair for a long time, longer than most people in Parliament, and the one thing he taught me was that the one thing you should be is always loyal to your Government. That is what I intend to be today. I start off by saying, as I said during the debate, that fees regulations will enable OPRED to recover eligible costs for the provision of regulatory services under the offshore oil and gas environmental legislative regime, as opposed to such costs being passed on to the taxpayer. The change to the hourly rate will increase OPRED’s annual fees from something like £7.3 million to £8.9 million per annum, reflecting the current cost of providing environmental regulatory activities to the offshore sector. On chargeable activities, OPRED considers the environmental implications of all offshore oil and gas operations before issuing permits and consents covering areas as diverse as seismic surveys, marine oil discharges, and permits and consents to local permissions for offshore installations, for example. I will try as best I can to answer the general points made on the use of the offshore North Sea fossil fuels. It is the position of this Government that we want to wean ourselves off it. We will be using North Sea oil and gas for decades to come, but we need to become self-sufficient in what we do. Workers in the North Sea are obviously an important issue. This is a massive change in employment, as there was in the north-east of England, where I am from, with the coal industry in the 1980s. The then Government did very little to ameliorate that; this Government are doing a lot more to secure jobs in the North Sea. We are stepping up support for workers with the North Sea jobs service, which offers tailored end-to-end support for oil and gas workers seeking new opportunities in growing industries, such as clean energy, defence and advanced manufacturing. We are supporting the expansion of the energy skills passport, an industry-led initiative overseen by RenewableUK and Offshore Energies UK, and supported by the UK and Scottish Governments, to help workers from carbon-intensive industries access opportunities in new clean energy sectors. As I think the noble Lord knows, the North Sea is a highly mature basin. Its natural decline would not be reversed by further licensing, as new licensing awards in the last decade have made only a marginal difference to overall oil and gas production. Approximately 10% of licences from our licensing rounds over the last 10 years have resulted in wells being drilled, and even fewer reached production. I am obviously in no position to talk about the Jackdaw field, for example.