16:58 Ed Miliband (Labour)

At the heart of the debate is the following question: how do we shape a just transition to a low-carbon economy? I believe that this transition is right and necessary, and I support the Government in their endeavours to make it happen, but a just transition means fairness to workers in affected industries. Hatfield’s early closure is not, in my view, just, fair or right.

I also want to use the debate to raise specific issues on which I hope the Minister can be of help. As I do so, I hope she will consider the context. Historically, we have asked the miners throughout our country to put themselves at some risk, in dangerous conditions, to help the rest of us to power our country. We therefore owe them a special duty of care. The miners at Hatfield were led to believe that they would have another 12 months of work and could therefore plan their futures. However, that situation changed in large part due to a Government decision. Inevitably, this chain of events leads to a deep sense of grievance against the Government. That grievance is compounded by the fact that the Treasury has benefited to the tune of £300 million from the high carbon tax. Our ask, therefore, is that the Government accept their share of responsibility and use a small part of the Treasury’s windfall gain to help the miners and their families. One option is to extend the life of the mine, but there are other things the Minister could do and I want to raise them with her.

Those are some specific asks about Hatfield that I put to the Minister, but I want to make a broader argument about Hatfield and the low-carbon transition and what we should learn from this episode. Coal is definitely a polluting fuel, and it is right that environmental standards are applied to it as part of the battle against climate change. That means that there is no viable future for unabated coal, but there is a future for clean coal technology through carbon capture and storage as part of our potential armoury in the transition to a low-carbon economy. [Interruption.] As my hon. Friend the Member for Easington (Grahame M. Morris) says, there are tens of thousands of jobs along with it.

However, the Government’s energy policy does not add up. There is a plan for a CCS plant at Drax by 2020. It will be burning coal, and it could be coal from Hatfield colliery, which is less than 20 miles from Drax. Yet it will not be: it will be coal imported from thousands of miles away, from Colombia or Russia, with all the associated environmental costs.

Projections from the Department for Energy and Climate Change say that by 2029 we are set to burn 26 million tonnes of coal or natural gas through CCS, but none of that will be from deep mines in the UK. I think people will look back on this and wonder how we got to this position. I would like the Minister to reflect in her reply on whether she believes that is a rational or sensible state of affairs and on what it says about the Government’s energy policy. I would like her to reflect, too, on how we got here.

The first CCS plant was due to be up and running by 2014. The last Labour Government committed to two to four CCS projects, and agreed a small levy to fund them. At the time, when I was the Secretary of State, I remember the Conservative Opposition criticised me—Oppositions tend to do this—for not being nearly bold enough. They said there should be four projects—never mind two to four—and asked why I was not getting on with it. What then happened is that the coalition Government came to power, dithered for two years and decided to scrap the previous Government’s plan and start all over again. As a result, as the Climate Change Committee noted in its report earlier this week, CCS will be up and running not by 2014 as projected, but by 2020.

That delay has been fatal for Hatfield and the other deep mines in our country. I say that not to score points, but because I hope the Minister will learn lessons for the future. My constituency has an interest in a gas-fired CCS project at Hatfield—the Don Valley project, which has secured European resources. Yesterday I met the director of Sargas Power, which owns the site and is now overseeing the project, and he emphasised above all the need for timely decision making by Ministers, so we cannot afford more dither and delay.

If we look at the history, we find that until 2007 there was no Government Department that even had “energy” in the title—and there had not been since 1992. Why was that? It was because the prevailing assumption had been that energy could be treated more or less like most other markets. Of course, that is all changed by climate change, because without serious intervention by the Government we will not make the low-carbon transition. Part of the incoherence of energy policy at the moment is that we are stuck in a halfway house where at times the Government pretend that this is a market-oriented system, when the truth is that in large part it is not any more.

There is another tension that the Government need to resolve. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, who drives so much of what the Government do, famously said, referring to climate change,

He has presented environmental progress and a strong economy as being in conflict, but in my opinion he is dead wrong. It is that view that has led to uncertainty, dither and ambiguity in the Government’s approach to the environment. We have seen that in the delays on CCS, and in the recent decision on onshore wind.

[Source]

17:13 The Minister for Small Business, Industry and Enterprise (Anna Soubry)

I want to deal briefly with the question of carbon capture and storage. It has been claimed that the closure of Hatfield is short-sighted because it could have been used to supply the proposed new power station at Drax, which will be fitted with carbon capture and storage capabilities. The long-term future of coal is inextricably linked to CCS, and the Government have committed significant resources to facilitate its commercialisation, including committing £1 billion to our CCS competition, plus operational support under contracts for difference. However, on current plans, the coal-fired CCS project at Drax, one of the two CCS projects being supported through the Government’s competition, is unlikely to be generating until 2021, so that would not have been of assistance to Hatfield. I reiterate—

[Source]