14:37 The Chief Secretary to the Treasury (Mr Simon Clarke)

I do so quite readily when I look at the extraordinary potential of our local economy. We have all the new jobs coming in at the Teesworks site, the former Redcar steelworks site. We have the hope and potential of green industry, which the hon. Member champions, as I do, with all the jobs in carbon capture, utilisation and storage as well as hydrogen. There is the new GE Renewable Energy factory, which will employ 2,500 people. Its construction starts incredibly soon, and it will be fully operational by 2023. Those are the reasons for hope and optimism. Of course, I will never apologise for talking up Teesside, just as we should never apologise for talking up the UK economy. We have done an extraordinary thing in this country: we have got through the pandemic—we have weathered the storm—and now we can move on to the recovery.

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15:02 Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)

As an aside, my hon. Friends the Members for Kilmarnock and Loudoun (Alan Brown) and for Aberdeen South (Stephen Flynn) have been pursuing the ridiculous transmission charging regime, which makes it more expensive for us to connect the clean, green energy produced on our doorstep in Scotland to the national grid. It feels as if Ministers could not be less interested in fixing that disproportionate scandal.

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17:41 Matt Western (Labour)

It is fundamentally a failure of long-term Government planning over the past decade that we, as a country, are so exposed and vulnerable to rising gas prices. We should have been building energy resilience, instead of being one of the countries most reliant on foreign gas. We should have been investing in domestically produced renewable energy. Instead, we squandered 10 years burning fossil fuels. When I was working on Warwick District Council as a councillor seven years ago, I proposed the Warwickshire energy plan to save people money, create energy resilience and address energy poverty. Sadly, there was not the gumption to follow through on that, and I am disappointed it never materialised.

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18:18 Richard Thomson (Gordon) (SNP)

It is a pleasure to take part in this timely debate, as we surely head towards a cold Tory winter of discontent, of high prices, shortages and rising unemployment. I am privileged to represent a constituency in the north-east of Scotland, which is generally regarded as a prosperous area. It has certainly suffered from the oil and gas downturn over the past few years. It is still to benefit from the transition to renewable energy technologies that we all fervently hope to see, and it has certainly borne the brunt of the austerity agenda we have experienced in recent years. My constituency is a mix of urban and rural, taking in a slice of the north of the city of Aberdeen and extending out into the rural countryside, with its mix of small towns and villages. Although the economic statistics might show that it has one of the highest levels of gross value added in Scotland, never mind the UK and never mind Europe, that hides the reality of the experience for far too many who live there. Someone who went to the go-to data set of the Scottish index of multiple deprivation and looked at Aberdeenshire might pick out a handful of streets that would show a concentrated amount of deprivation, but that misses out important parts of the picture. It misses the individual stories hidden within, because the reality is that there is a significant amount of rural deprivation and a range of intersecting factors that contribute to that.

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