Caroline Lucas: The UK already has the lowest tax take anywhere in the world from an offshore oil and gas regime, so it is perverse that the Government’s new investment allowance will essentially incentivise yet more oil and gas exploration at a time when we know that we absolutely need to leave fossil fuels in the ground. Given that the Secretary of State himself has said that it will take up to a decade...
Caroline Lucas: It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Leeds East (Richard Burgon), whose new clause 1 I am happy to support. I rise to speak in favour of new clauses 8 to 10 tabled in my name. First, new clause 8 would require the Government to produce an assessment of the revenue that would be generated if the level of taxation on oil and gas companies were permanently raised to the global average...
Caroline Lucas: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, particularly since it helpfully highlights a party policy of the Greens, who were, as he knows, in coalition Government in Germany. It has absolutely been their policy to introduce those kinds of incentives, and they are being massively taken up because they are incredibly popular. I was talking about the investment allowance and just...
Caroline Lucas: Again, I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman. Those are precisely the kinds of forward-looking policies that we need rather than the backward-looking, dinosaur policies that seem to think that digging out more and more fossil fuels is the way forward.
Caroline Lucas: The hon. Gentleman puts it perfectly succinctly and I very much agree. It has been estimated that existing decommissioning relief deeds could enable the extraction of the equivalent of 1.7 billion barrels of oil that otherwise would have remained unextracted, and that will only increase if we continue with the vicious cycle of handsomely subsidising fossil fuel companies to exploit oil and...
Caroline Lucas: Will the hon. Member give way?
Caroline Lucas: I am grateful to the hon. Member for giving way—I am intervening on a previous point on which he was intervened on. Is he aware that the 65% tax that the Government are proposing is still below the global average? The figure in Angola is actually higher at 70%, so there is not any real logic to what he is saying. These oil companies are already operating in places where the tax is higher.
Caroline Lucas: First, the hon. Member seems to think that just because gas is exploited in the UK, it will get used in the UK, yet he must know that it gets sold on global markets and therefore might get used anywhere. Secondly, he talks about our environmental standards being higher than others. He will know that we get most of our gas from Norway, where, actually, its carbon footprint is significantly...
Caroline Lucas: We sell it on international markets.
Caroline Lucas: The Government are introducing this Bill in response to the extraordinary profits being made by the oil and gas sector—profits that are not earned but are a consequence of high global gas prices, fuelled by Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine. As families across the country are struggling to make ends meet, faced with rising energy bills and a cost of living scandal, energy companies...
Caroline Lucas: The issue is not just that the Government are not bringing forward good stuff fast enough—in other words, the delivery gap that the Committee on Climate Change referenced. The Government are also doing bad stuff. The Committee on Climate Change said that the Government’s plans for more new oil and gas projects in the North sea did not make economic sense. Will the Minister listen to that...
Caroline Lucas: indicated dissent.
Caroline Lucas: The hon. Gentleman is making a powerful case. Does he share my surprise that in a debate on energy costs there has been no reference yet to nuclear power, which is eye-wateringly expensive? We are just hearing that Hinkley Point is going to be a year late and cost yet another £3 billion. Does he agree that the money that is being sunk into nuclear could be much better spent in exactly the...
Caroline Lucas: I am all in favour of fossil fuel companies creating funds, but would not another way of achieving that be for the Government not to give oil and gas companies such an extraordinary subsidy, as part of the windfall tax—the so-called 80% investment allowance, which incentivises precisely the opposite kind of behaviour that the hon. Gentleman is speaking so eloquently about?
Caroline Lucas: rose—
Caroline Lucas: I certainly agree that incentives and greater financial support will be crucial. However, does the hon. Gentleman agree that another way of tackling the issue that the hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire (Richard Fuller) raised would be to make very sure that there was a requirement to up the energy performance certificate rating before the house next changed hands or was put on the...
Caroline Lucas: The right hon. Member is talking about the recalibration that is needed in the Department. Does he agree with me that one area where that is extremely true is the need for a proper home insulation programme? We have never seen this Government get that right, in spite of the £11.7 billion allocated to the energy bills support scheme, which is of course welcome. What we need is a proper home...
Caroline Lucas: Just two months ago, the Prime Minister stood at the Dispatch Box at Prime Minister’s questions and told me: “of course sexual harassment is grounds for dismissal.”—[Official Report, 27 April 2022; Vol. 712, c. 759.] Yet in 2019 he kept the right hon. Member for Tamworth as Minister, and this year he gave him powers over MPs’ welfare as Deputy Chief Whip, despite knowing that a...
Caroline Lucas: rose—
Caroline Lucas: Does the Secretary of State understand why so many people would accuse this Government of the most rank hypocrisy? First, this is a predictable outcome of the agreement that they negotiated when they did not give a fig for the situation in Northern Ireland, frankly. Secondly, if they were serious about negotiations, they could be using article 16. Thirdly, at the very same time that the Prime...
