13:30 Mr Philip Hollobone (in the Chair)

Yesterday, the Chancellor announced £2 billion for zero-emission vehicles, batteries and associated supply chains over five years, but those five years begin in 2025. That was part of a £4.5 billion fund for advanced manufacturing. We do not yet know, but we assume, that the £2 billion extra is in addition to the £850 million already in the automotive transformation fund. Presumably, that fund will be the mechanism through which new funding is invested. There have been problems in the way the fund has been administered, and there are crucial questions about the timing of the funding, because the Government have only a very short window to get the advanced manufacturing money moving.

I am grateful for that question. Although I do not have the specific details of the opportunities in the constituency of the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), the spirit of the Committee’s report is that we need to be using industrial policy to do three things: to de-risk supply chains, to decarbonise, and to decentralise the sources of economic growth. That is why we are so clear about the need for the Government to designate strategically critical sites for gigafactories in the future. As to quite how many we need, the Minister and I may have different views, but we know how much capacity we need, and that can perhaps be delivered by between five and eight gigafactories, depending on how much each factory can produce. But the broad point is that we cannot be producing batteries simply for the automotive industry; we need a wide range of applications for them in the future.

That is frustrating because, from what I sense from the report and more widely, we have an energy advantage in the UK—indeed, we should have a huge energy advantage over other nations. In my constituency, National Grid reminds me of what we can do by bringing green energy to this country through the interconnectors. We also have organisations such as Warwick Manufacturing Group, which is at the forefront of the development of new battery units. We have two great advantages, but because of what the Chair of the Select Committee describes as a lack of industrial strategy, we are way off the pace.

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