13:30 Brandon Lewis (Great Yarmouth) (Con)

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate. Does he agree that we have such a wide range of energy platforms, whether offshore, nuclear, biogas or similar, that the skills could be transferable? We need not be single-minded about skills in specific offshore or onshore renewable energies. East Anglia is the epicentre of the green coast, as I said in my maiden speech. The case for a technical college covering both Norfolk and Suffolk is compelling, ideally with the help of the new local enterprise partnership.

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13:44 The Minister of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change (Charles Hendry)

The Government have a key role in ensuring that we can make the transition to a low-carbon economy, but it is not up to the Government alone. The business world also has a critically important contribution to make, and the Government believe that it is our job to try to facilitate that transition and investment. We are introducing a range of measures that we believe will take that forward. First, electricity market reform will totally transform the attractiveness of investing in the low-carbon energy sector in this country, and will be the biggest reform of that market for 30 years. We believe that it is critical if we are to secure the essential investment— £200 billion—that will be required over the next 10 to 15 years. That will include issues such as setting the carbon price and moving on from the climate change levy, as announced in the June Budget, to give people long-term security about the market in which they will be investing.

The Crown Estate has awarded development rights for the East Anglia offshore wind farm zone, under the third round of offshore wind development. Initial studies have identified a target capacity of more than 7 GW, which would be enough to provide clean, green energy for 5 million homes. I am delighted that the first project in the zone has already been identified with a scoping application recently submitted. Known as the East Anglia ONE Offshore Windfarm, covering an area of about 300 sq km, it could support up to 1.23 GW.

My colleague, Lord Marland, has been in contact with 250 organisations to explore the scope for reducing and simplifying the burden of red tape imposed by my Department. The ideas generated by his contact with organisations and what the Department of Energy and Climate Change plans to do as a result has already been put on our website. I give an absolute assurance that, if there are barriers to investment that should not be there which Government can remove, we will focus on those.

We have had a valuable debate about an issue that is critical to the whole East Anglian area. I congratulate my hon. Friend and my other hon. Friends for their contributions to this debate, but more importantly for the contributions that they are making to the sustainable energy future of their counties.

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