10:56 Valerie Vaz (Labour)

The Leader of the House said that an announcement about the Swansea bay tidal lagoon would be made “soon”, which I do not think is good enough for the thousands of manufacturing and highly skilled technical jobs across south Wales and the west country. Moreover, renewable energy is the energy of the future: it will power our future manufacturing industries. May we have a debate in Government time about the renewable energy industry?

As the hon. Lady will know, we are ensuring that the UK has a diverse, secure and affordable energy mix. We are looking carefully at the potential to harness the UK’s natural resources to make our energy mix sustainable and affordable for the future. Through competition and innovation, the leadership that we have shown has resulted in dramatic reductions in the cost of renewable energy projects. Over the last two years, for example, the cost of offshore wind has halved, which means that we can secure a larger amount of electricity generation for every pound of bill payers’ money. That is absolutely essential. The UK is doing incredibly well in renewables, in both European and world terms.

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