The Conservatives will on Tuesday force a vote in Parliament
calling on the Government to approve the Rosebank and Jackdaw oil
and gas fields and Get Britain Drilling to boost energy security
and bring in tax revenue that can be used to bring down bills.
The Party has laid an amendment to the King's Speech, urging the
Government to drop its opposition to new oil and gas licenses and
instead legislate for a presumption in favour of approval. This
will help protect jobs and investment in the North Sea and make
us less reliant on imports of foreign energy.
In the King's Speech, the Government committed to banning the
issuing of new oil and gas licenses through the new ‘Energy
Independence Bill'. This policy is already having a terrible
impact on the economy in Aberdeen and the North East of Scotland.
A thousand jobs a month are disappearing from the oil and gas
industry thanks to Labour's refusal to make use of our own energy
resources. And things will only get worse if Labour continue to
block new investment and new drilling.
In recent months the Chancellor has suggested drilling should
proceed and even thanked Norway and Canada for increasing oil and
gas production – yet the Energy Secretary is determined to stop us drilling our own. The
Conservatives are therefore calling on the Prime Minister to
stand up to Miliband and his net zero zealotry, and put our
energy security first by giving the green light to drilling.
Experts say that backing the North Sea could bring in an
additional £25 billion in tax revenue over the next decade –
money that could be used to shrink the deficit and cut taxes,
lightening the burden on hardworking families. Every molecule of
gas that we get from the North Sea goes into our pipes. Whatever
we don't extract ourselves means we have to import more LNG from
places like Qatar or the United States – with four times the
emissions of using our own.
The move comes as the Government prepares an energy bill bailout
for benefits street. Rather than dealing with the root of the
problem – that Britain has the highest electricity prices in the
world – Labour want to raise taxes on struggling working families
to spend more on welfare.
In contrast, the Conservatives' Cheap Power Plan would cut bills
by £200 for the average family, including by scrapping VAT on
energy bills, ditching Miliband's green levies and axing the
Carbon Tax – without costing the taxpayer a penny.
In March, the party took the rare step of publishing a draft Get
Britain Drilling Now Bill to promote investment in oil and gas
and remove the net zero barriers preventing us from drilling. The
Bill would significantly reduce the legal obstacles to approving
new oil and gas projects in the UK, clearing the way for the
extraction of the resources Britain urgently needs and stopping
activist lawyers obstructing drilling.
The Bill forms one part of the Alternative King's Speech the
Conservatives published this week, which also features a Cheap
Energy Bill that would bring in the measures needed to lower
people's bills, and a Save British Industry Bill that would scrap
the Climate Change Act and ditch Net Zero rules that are crushing
industry.
MP, Shadow Energy
Secretary, said:
“The Government is about to ask struggling families on £30,000 or
£40,000 a year to pay more in tax to fund an energy bill bailout
for those on benefits. They are determined to do anything but
address the root cause of the problem – the levies and taxes that
make our electricity prices the most expensive in the world.
“Meanwhile is about to introduce an ‘Energy Independence Bill'
that will make us more dependent on foreign countries for our
energy supply by shutting down the North Sea. This is
unforgiveable, especially during an energy crisis where we should
be maximising our own production.
“We will give Labour MPs the chance to do the right thing,
overrule their ideological energy secretary, and back the North
Sea. If we truly want to make Britain more energy resilient then
we must make electricity cheap, double down on secure nuclear,
axe the Carbon Tax and Get Britain Drilling.”
