It is a great privilege to follow my hon. Friend Mr Yeo, the Chairman of our Select Committee. As he rightly said, we have been involved in producing a wide range of reports. Subjects such as energy can be quite dry, but every 10 or 15 years, they become the most exciting portfolio across all Government Departments.

I welcome the new Minister to his post, which he takes at a time when energy is perhaps one of the most important and interesting issues that the country faces, with energy security absolutely at the heart of that. I look forward to his first appointment with the Committee, which I am sure will be in the near future.

I also follow my hon. Friend the Member for South Suffolk in recognising the extraordinary work and success of the Minister’s predecessor, my hon. Friend Charles Hendry, who was an exemplary Minister with a reputation both here and abroad. I am sure that the new Minister realises that his post is, in many ways, a sales job. It is about knocking on doors around the world to try to ensure that we find the investment we need, which is close to £200 billion. I am sure that fellow members of the Committee will join me in hoping that my hon. Friend the Member for Wealden has an interesting future beyond the portfolio that he has left.

Energy security involves two competing issues, in that we face a significant increase in energy consumption but, at the same time, a decline in UK production. I do not want to make too much of a political point, but that situation did not arise only yesterday—we have faced it for the past 15 or 20 years, so it has been straightforward to predict. It is unfortunate that we are now racing to try to achieve some policy certainty and reinvestment in the energy sector when it has been quite obvious that we have been facing this problem for many years.

Globally, some would say that the last century was dominated by the politics of ideas. This century will be about the politics of resources. That is what makes the energy security debate so important, because it is about much more than the energy sector. It is also about our future industrial growth, our competitiveness and keeping the lights on, and in a much less benign environment than before. There is demand for energy, food and water from domestic audiences, whether they are in the UK, China, Russia, or even countries where democracy is not necessarily the watchword. For the UK and all these other countries, access to resources will be absolutely crucial and will determine their economic success.

No one is proposing energy independence, but I have a personal experience that illustrates why I am particularly sensitive to the issue of energy security. I worked in the energy sector for about 15 to 20 years. Before I came to

this place, I worked for the Georgian Government in the Caucasus, advising them on the Baku-Jehan pipeline. The second time I was in Tbilisi, I came out of my hotel room and saw a man who was not much further away from me than my hon. Friend the Member for South Suffolk is now. Somebody then went up to that man and shot him in the head. That was related to a large energy deal that was being proposed by a Russian company. The Georgian businessman had turned down the deal, and instead of a shareholder meeting, a P45 or any form of renegotiation, there was a murder in the main street of Tbilisi. That might sound unusual to people in Whitehall, but it is not necessarily unusual in parts of the world where energy is politics.

In addition, when I was sitting having a nice meal in Georgia, the lights went out for 20 minutes. It was apparently a message from the President of Russia to the President of Georgia—“Please will you give me a ring?” He gives him a ring, and 20 minutes later the lights go on. The Georgians then turn around to each other and say, “So, we have lost a bit more of our sovereignty.”

Those examples might seem extreme, but this is where politics and resources come together. Although we might not be exposed to the politicisation of energy, the international market will be, and we must clearly understand that the world of benign energy trading might become a bit more difficult.

Unlike for many countries, it will be not the insecurity of supply that we have to address, but the cost of the supply. The cost of volatility in our energy sector will greatly affect the desirability for inward investment into this country. In India, the electricity went down for three or four days, and that was a massive blow to the country’s attractiveness as an investment market. We might not have the actual lights out, but we will have a problem when it comes to cost, and the cost to our industrial base is crucial. As a result, we should be looking for consistency and predictability to the same extent as considering the lowest cost at which we can deliver energy.

What does a secure energy environment look like? I agree with the Chairman of our Committee that it looks like a truly mixed energy economy, because that will deliver us the greatest resilience. We need to consider increased domestic production, because international volatility will be one of the most destructive economic factors for British business. Our domestic production will, of course, include nuclear—I am a great proponent of nuclear, but we need to get the investment profile and environment right—wind, gas with carbon capture and storage, and coal.