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Energy Security

I welcome this debate, which is topical and appropriate. I also welcome the fact that it began in a more consensual way than expected, given the comments by the hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark) in recent days and the bad weather in this country. The Secretary of State confirmed that we have experienced the highest demand ever. That demand was met in the last week, as official reports confirm, from various sources, with 45 per cent. of our electricity output coming from coal, 37 per cent. from gas and 15 per cent. from nuclear, with a small proportion from wind. So Britain, thank goodness, has diversity of supply. There has been a diminution recently in the amount of our own oil and gas that we have been taking out of the North sea, but as the Secretary of State said last night at the oil and gas industry reception, as the hon. Member for Aberdeen, South (Miss Begg) reminded us and as colleagues from Scotland know all too well from their constituencies, we still have a fantastic natural resource. We have used it, but it will continue for a significant number of years to come and we also have further unexplored oil and gas resources, particularly west of Shetland and around the coast of Scotland. We have been very blessed with our natural resources and that has given us a security that has seen us through in recent years and in recent days, too. Energy security is fundamentally important. In the parts of the world where it does not exist it is one of the greatest causes of political insecurity, conflict and worse—last winter, we saw in our continent the huge tension that arose between Russia and Ukraine—and therefore it is very important to obtain as much consensus as possible. The second consensual point that I shall make, before moving on to a comment about the motion that is a bit less consensual, is that we of course need more storage capacity—I do not think that there has ever been any disagreement about that, and the Liberal Democrats are not complacent. My hon. Friends the Members for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood) and for Northavon (Steve Webb) made that point when they served on the Energy Bill Committee in 2008. Their recollection is that there was a general consensus among all three major parties—I imagine the same could be said of the nationalist parties—about that. However, although we need more storage capacity, the important point is that there is no crisis—there is not the sort of crisis that the Conservative party would have us believe. Thus, I regret, as we all should, the tone and nature of some of the comments made by the hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells over the past 10 days.