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Energy Security

I take on board your strictures, Mr. Deputy Speaker. This is a timely debate on energy issues, but perhaps there are only 45 minutes left. When it began, we had only a two and a half hours for debate, but the Front-Bench spokesmen took an hour and a quarter. As you suggested, Mr. Deputy Speaker, I shall keep my comments brief. We have had an interesting debate, and we have had a good tour d'horizon of a number of issues. I do not want to pursue that too much, because I want to make some points about the energy situation, and point out—this has not been referred to very much—the effect on industry of high energy prices, which are absolutely crippling. Energy prices for consumers have increased dramatically. On TV the other day, someone from the gas industry said that domestic consumers could expect price increases of 40 per cent. in the not-too-distant future. Those increases in gas prices and the squeeze on gas affect electricity prices as well, because we made the mistake a good few years ago in 1988 of generating a lot of our electricity from gas. I was interested to hear the hon. Member for Rutland and Melton (Alan Duncan) begin his history lesson on the British energy situation in 1997. He should have started in 1988, when we privatised it and liberalised the markets, because that is when many of the problems started. We went into a privatised energy market, and we did away with the coal industry shortly afterwards in 1990. We tried to privatise the nuclear power industry in 1990, but we failed. When the City looked at the books—and the former Select Committee on Energy, on which I served, saw those documents and reports by Rothschild, Kleinwort Benson and the other major finance houses—it saw how much the industry cost, and it ran a mile, so the Government could not privatise the nuclear industry. Many of the decisions that we are debating and the issues that we face go back much further than the past 10 years or so. At the same time that energy prices, including electricity, have increased, commodity prices have increased around the world. The price of everything is beginning to increase, and much of that is down to the increased cost of energy and the increase in demand. The amendment discusses the"““imbalance between supply and demand””." Presumably that refers to developing countries such as China and India, which have been mentioned, and whose economies are growing at a remarkable rate. Those countries, particularly China, are drawing in many raw materials and commodities, and demand many energy resources, too. Many of China's—and, to some extent, India's—energy resources are based on coal. Those countries are perverting the world supply and demand for gas and oil, because they are building their economy—as we have heard, by a gigawatt every week or so—on coal. There was a good article in The Guardian last week devoted to carbon capture. It stated that last year, China built about 100 large coal-fired stations, and India built 30. Supply and demand for those countries is therefore based on coal. I am told by the UK's major energy-intensive companies that supply and demand for energy in Europe are pretty much in equilibrium, so the industry there is not suffering the same high energy prices that industry in this country is suffering. That makes our industry dramatically uncompetitive. The reason why Europe does not have the problems that we face goes back to the fact that we have a liberalised energy industry.