Graeme Downie

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Twigg. I congratulate the hon. Member for Bristol Central (Carla Denyer) on securing this debate. I may disagree with her, but it is very valuable that we continue these conversations. Too often, this debate is framed as a binary choice: people are for oil and gas, or they are for renewables. I spent more than a decade working with renewables businesses before I came to this place, and I can say that that is a false choice. The question is not whether we decarbonise; it is how we do it and who we take with us. Let me be clear: this is not an issue for Aberdeen or even just for Scotland. While in my constituency I have businesses such as TechnipFMC and Oceaneering, which employ hundreds of skilled people in subsea engineering and manufacturing, we are nowhere near the North sea’s front door, and that story is repeated across the country. We will not decarbonise our economy or remain world leaders in decarbonisation by switching off one industry and hoping that another switches on. The engineers, welders, technicians and businesses—that whole ecosystem—will build floating offshore wind, carbon capture and the grid of the future. Those skills do not sit in a drawer waiting to be used. If the work goes, the skills go, and the capability goes with them. In Fife, we know very well what happens when an industry closes down without a plan. When pits closed, whole communities lost not only their jobs, but the sense of who they were. For communities across the UK, energy is part of their identity and their pride, and it should be part of their future. The Government took the right decision on Jackdaw, and the Treasury’s own forecasts have assumed that Rosebank would go ahead since at least 2019. Through the energy wealth fund, that revenue can be reinvested in a low-carbon future. Think of a young person, in my constituency or across the country today, deciding whether to start an engineering apprenticeship. For generations, oil and gas has been the front door to that technical career; many who walk through it go on to offshore wind, nuclear, renewables, defence or other industries, but they need to see that that door is open. Close it, and we do not just lose an industry—we lose the next generations of engineers that every other industry depends on.