14:19 The Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills and President of the Board of Trade (Sajid Javid)

“As this milestone shows, the Green Investment Bank is going from strength to strength and is having a major impact supporting renewable energy projects across the whole of the UK.”

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14:55 Angela Eagle (Labour)

Clauses 30 to 32, in part 7, deal with the UK Green Investment Bank. The bank has only just been established and the Government are now seeking to flog it off—or, as I think the Secretary of State said, “set it free”. In the light of the Paris climate conference, where Governments, investors and businesses across the world agreed to accelerate the transition to a low-carbon economy, it is absolutely extraordinary that he has allowed the Chancellor to sell off the bank, setting back efforts to build a greener low-carbon economy.

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15:37 Hannah Bardell (Livingston) (SNP)

A number of the bank’s investments are relevant to Scotland, including a £2 million investment in a sewage heat recovery system installation programme in locations across Scotland; nearly £30 million of equity investment in the construction of Levenseat Renewable Energy Ltd’s energy waste recycling plant; and a £6.3 million loan to Glasgow City Council to enable the replacement of its streetlights with lower-energy lights. The list goes on. All those projects are significant to the local communities of Scotland and to Scotland as a whole. We do not want any of these opportunities to be lost to yet more privatisation.

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17:26 Greg Mulholland (Leeds North West) (LD)

Let us remember that the Green Investment Bank has been a huge success. This bank, which was a direct result of Liberal Democrat policy, has invested £2.3 billion into the UK green economy, which then attracted a further £7 billion of private sector money. This means that it is already profitable. Considering that it was set up only in 2013 with a statutory purpose, the fact that it is being privatised now with such indecent haste really exposes the ideological decision making behind this rather than what the Green Investment Bank was set up to do. I pay tribute to my colleague in the other place, Lord Teverson, and congratulate him and other colleagues on inserting their clever initiative on special shares being looked after by green guardians. I ask Ministers to think about what message is being sent out by this Government’s record on hitting our climate change targets.

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