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Brick Industry

: I thank my hon. Friend for making those salient points. I hope that the Minister was listening because I shall certainly reinforce them later. The Carlton Bricks of this world are much smaller than the Ibstocks. The brick industry is a broad church. We want to ensure that it remains so, and that it can maintain brick manufacturers of the size of Ibstock as well as smaller manufacturers such as Carlton Brick. In a recent report commissioned by Centrica, Global Insight calculated that users of gas in Britain will pay an extra £10 billion this year because energy markets in continental Europe are failing to liberalise fully. That figure is half of the total gas supply bill for the UK. The report said that since the opening of the European gas interconnector, British Gas spot prices have been highly influenced by movements in European gas contract prices, which were directly linked to changes in oil and oil product prices. Trevor Sikorski, the lead author of the report, said:"““Our analysis shows that there can be little doubt that UK consumers are paying the price for Europe's failure to sufficiently open its energy markets as we become increasingly dependent on gas imports.””" The Minister knows that I wrote to his colleague, the Minister for Energy, my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon, North (Malcolm Wicks), about this problem on 6 December 2005. I am grateful for the Minister for Energy's response, dated 20 February, which intimated some of the initiatives that the Department has embarked on to try to resolve this issue, including the establishment, in 2004, of the gas prices working group, which is chaired by the Secretary of State. I know that the Minister for Energy met representatives from the industry at No. 10 on 9 November 2005. His letter states that"““at the end of November, Ofgem announced the steps it was taking to ensure that the causes of recent movements in wholesale gas prices reflect changing supply and demand factors rather than market abuse or other distortions.””" The letter then details those steps, the first of which is"““writing to the European Commission asking them to investigate why the interconnector has not been flowing at full capacity when UK gas prices are much higher than those in Europe””." The second step is"““asking the Commission to look at market arrangements in other countries that may be distorting trade””" in gas.The third step is"““asking National Grid to make sure that arrangements are in place to allow other companies to deliver””" gas"““through the Isle of Grain if the companies who bought capacity at the terminal are not using it.””" The last step is"““asking Interconnector UK to provide us with information about who holds import capacity this winter to assist our ongoing analysis.””" EU energy market liberalisation has to be a key priority as we become a net importer of gas. We need fair network access and greater integration of national energy markets, including more cross-border infrastructure to establish a level playing field across the whole of Europe. I hope that in his response, the Minister will expand on what progress is being made in this regard and what further steps need to be taken. I opened the debate by talking about the industries in Grimethorpe that were closed under the Conservative Government: the pit, the Coalite works, the power station and the fluidised bed plant clean-coal technology. In its last six weeks of production in 1993, Grimethorpe colliery made an operating profit of a quarter of a million pounds. Clearly, that pit was closed because of political dogma rather than economic necessity. There are 60 million tonnes of known workable coal deposits embedded in the ground beneath Grimethorpe, which, hopefully, will be used at some point in the future. It would be ironic if the one long-established industry left in Grimethorpe which survived the Thatcher years were to close under a Labour Government because we could not establish a properly regulated, competitive energy market across the European Union. I look forward to hearing the Minister's response.