Chamber and committees

My apologies to you, Presiding Officer, and to the member. He was so confident in his approach that it had entirely slipped my mind that it was his first speech in this chamber.

I very much welcome Stephen Gethins to his place on the front bench as energy minister. I want to ask him about the renewable energy that he is talking about, which Scotland has benefited from and which is funded by subsidies that are currently paid for by 70 million people across the United Kingdom. If he dismantles the UK energy market, as he proposes, will that not mean that those subsidies will need to be paid for by the 5.5 million people living in Scotland? What would that do for bills that are being paid by consumers here?

I thank Mr Barratt for that sedentary contribution.

We do, of course, miss both Annabelle and Fergus Ewing, and I hope that Mr Barratt will be equally independently minded when it comes to members of his front bench.

Mr Gethins opened the debate. I congratulate him on his new role, and I welcomed his confident delivery of his speech. It was so confident that I omitted to realise that it was his first speech in this Parliament. However, I have to agree with Daniel Johnson’s analysis of it, because, although the delivery was good, the content was simply pie in the sky and lacked any credible detail.

In recent decades, Scotland has seen massive investment in energy, particularly in the renewables sector, with the construction of a huge range of offshore wind projects, which have created jobs and helped with our energy security. However, that is possible only because the investment is supported by the generous UK-wide subsidy regime, which is funded by the bill payments of 70 million consumers across the United Kingdom. That simple fact exposes the fallacy at the heart of SNP policy—the single UK energy market supports investment in industry, and breaking that up would be a disaster. I thought that there was perhaps a wry smile on Mr Gethins’s lips when he accused others in this chamber of being isolationist. It is not us who are proposing breaking up the UK energy market and splitting away; it is Mr Gethins and his colleagues.

Of course, the SNP claims that independence would reduce energy bills by one third, but there was no explanation from the minister as to how that would come about, because, in fact, independence would increase energy costs. The reason for that is that, despite what we sometimes hear from SNP members, renewable energy is not cheap. The most recent contracts for difference round showed that the cost of offshore wind projects—the most significant area of expansion in Scotland in recent years—is now set at nearly double the wholesale cost of gas, and that is before we factor in all the additional costs that renewable energy brings.

The problem for Lorna Slater and those who make such arguments is that we will need oil and gas for decades to come. The choice is not about whether we use oil and gas, because we will need it; the choice is about whether we produce it here or import it from other countries and, therefore, export our carbon emissions to them. To me, that makes no sense—we should have the jobs here, in Scotland.

Duncan Massey made some good points about the cost of renewable energy. It is not just the strike price and the subsidy that we have to look at; we have to look at the on-costs that arise from developing renewables. Our grid needs to be upgraded. SSE in Perth is investing tens of billions of pounds in grid expansion to accommodate new renewables projects to deal with the issues that we have been talking about today regarding constraint payments. Every pound that we are spending on that is coming from bill payers across the United Kingdom and is adding to fuel poverty.

Renewable energy is intermittent, so we have to be able to provide storage and back-up. That is why we see proposed battery projects across Scotland, and every one has to be paid for through our electricity bills. As Alan Brown said, SSE is progressing a massive pump storage project at Coire Glas in the Highlands at a cost of billions of pounds. Who is paying for that? Energy bill payers. All the costs of transmission, storage and back-up for intermittency must be factored in, which gives us what energy economists call the whole-system cost. The whole-system cost of renewable energy is many times higher than the whole-system cost of oil and gas.

There might be good reasons to decarbonise our energy supply—I accept that—but let us not kid ourselves that doing so will reduce our bills. It will not reduce our bills but will make them more expensive. The only reason why we can do this is that there are 70 million people across the United Kingdom who pay their energy bills. If the costs had to be shared among 5.5 million people in Scotland, bills would rocket.

The second issue that we need to address is the future of the oil and gas industry. Scotland has lost three oil and gas jobs for every one clean energy job that has been created over the past decade. A recent report from Robert Gordon University suggests that the number of oil and gas jobs could halve by 2030 to 60,000—a direct result of the policy that is being pursued by the UK Labour Government and backed up by the SNP in Scotland.

The SNP now says that it is against the energy profits levy. When the energy profits levy was introduced, the SNP said that it was not high enough. The SNP was calling for it to go even higher, but, fortunately, it seems to have changed its tune, with it now agreeing with us that the EPL needs to go, and it is right to do so.

However, the SNP is no friend of the oil and gas sector. When Nicola Sturgeon was First Minister, she called for the presumption against oil and gas to be formalised. She was clear that new fossil fuel developments were not in the interests of either the climate or the North Sea workforce. In that respect, Labour and the SNP are cut from the same cloth. We know that Mr Flynn might take a different view, but the view of the Scottish Government, consistently repeated, is that there should be a presumption against new oil and gas fields. It is no friend of the oil and gas sector.

That flies in the face of Scottish public opinion. According to recent surveys, 84 per cent of Scots support the continuation of North Sea oil exploration and drilling—and no wonder.

Will the minister take an intervention?

I thank all those who made their first speeches during this debate: Duncan Massey, Jack Middleton, David Barratt, Mark Simpson, Pauline Stafford, Heather Anderson, Kristopher Leask, Alan Brown and Sanne Dijkstra-Downie. All of them made well-informed and helpful contributions, and we heard a wide variety of opinions. That is as it should be in a Parliament such as this.

I do not want to single anybody out, but I very much enjoyed the contribution from my fellow Fife representative David Barratt, although I was absolutely horrified at the revelation that he first visited this building as a primary school pupil. That makes some of us feel very old.

As Liam Kerr said, where is the sense in importing Norwegian oil and gas from the North Sea basin when we could be producing it ourselves and benefiting from having the jobs here? That is the Conservative approach. That is how we cut bills and support jobs. That is the point that is made in Liam Kerr’s amendment, and members should support it.

I, Murdo MacKenzie Fraser, do swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to His Majesty King Charles, his heirs and successors, according to law. So help me God.