(Brighton, Pavilion)
(Green):...Members of this House can benefit financially from the
fossil fuel sector in other ways, too, as the right hon. Member
for Chipping Barnet () presumably did when she
held £70,000 worth of shares in Shell for
five years when she was Environment Secretary, as published in
the Register of Members’ Financial Interests in August 2023. I
have done the courtesy of alerting any Member to whom I am
referring in this Chamber, by emailing them to let them know. The
right hon. Member for Stratford-on-Avon () also did in the shape of
payments from oil company clients to business advisory service
Zahawi & Zahawi, pieced together in research carried out by
journalists Jonathan Watts and Pamela Duncan for The Guardian,
from his shareholdings in an oil and gas exploration and
production company, and the £1 million worth of donations he
received from fossil fuel companies, including a regular monthly
payment of £30,000 that stopped only when he became a Minister...
...In this debate, I want to highlight some of the ways in which
fossil fuel influence is exerted in our politics and to propose
how it should urgently be curtailed. I want to start with a case
study, featuring the little-known fossil fuel lobby group
Offshore Energies UK—OEUK—whose members include North sea
operators such as Equinor, Harbour Energy, BP and Shell
and whose activities have resulted in a windfall tax that
actually rewards companies for digging up more oil and gas, and a
“price floor” introduced entirely at the industry’s behest. Let
me explain how that has happened. According to analysis of data
in the public domain, OEUK and its members met UK Government
Ministers more than 210 times in the year following Russia’s
invasion of Ukraine—that is nearly once every working day. In
June 2022, in that one month, when the Energy (Oil and Gas)
Profits Levy Bill was drafted and consulted on, the industry went
into lobbying overdrive: OEUK and its operator members had twice
as many meetings with Ministers as they did in the month before
or after. It also held a parliamentary reception, in the name of
the all-party group on the British offshore oil and gas industry,
for which it provides, conveniently, the secretariat. The main
message for the MPs and peers in attendance was that the windfall
tax would “undermine and disrupt” investment in the sector. In a
meeting a few days later with the then Chancellor, now Prime
Minister, the industry spelt out what it wanted to see in the
Bill. Its recommendations, also put in writing to the Treasury,
included protection for petroleum revenue tax repayments, which
are, in essence, an existing tax break that can pay fossil fuel
firms back for taxes they have paid in the past. The subsequent
legislation did exactly as OEUK requested. Moreover, it
introduced an enormous 80% “investment allowance”, which,
combined with existing tax breaks, means that fossil fuel
companies can claim £91 back for every £100 they invest in UK oil
and gas extraction. As a result of that climate-wrecking
loophole, Shell
for example, went on to pay no windfall tax at all in 2022...
For context, OPEN HERE
