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Energy Security

I, too, agree that this impressive debate has shown the House at its best; the contributions, coming from people with great knowledge, forcefulness and passion, have been superb. I know that some people who wanted to speak have not been able to. My hon. Friend the Member for Copeland (Mr. Reed) failed to have an intervention accepted by the hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark). My hon. Friend is a superb and unique representative of his constituents and a person with great knowledge of the nuclear industry, and we would have benefited from his contributing to this debate. The same could be said of my hon. Friend the Member for Blaydon (Mr. Anderson), who got in with a couple of telling interventions about the coal industry. He is a doughty champion for the coal sector in this country. I pay tribute to and thank our energy sector and its workers for ensuring that energy supplies have been maintained. Over the past 10 days, we have experienced severe weather and the most prolonged spell of freezing conditions across the United Kingdom for 29 years and there have been record levels of gas demand. The UK's energy system has coped well. There have been no unplanned interruptions to gas supply, despite the record demands. As has been widely reported, some industrial customers on commercially interruptible contracts had their supplies reduced temporarily. That was in line with commercial arrangements and is part of the normal working of the market. That market has also worked well, with imports responding to the need for extra gas in the UK—I include liquefied natural gas and flows through the interconnector in that. In particular, I wish to thank the National Grid Company for its role in balancing the gas system during these challenging times. Let us not forget that the electricity infrastructure has also performed well, with the faults caused by the most severe weather on 6 January being quickly addressed and the supply restored—the last few customers had it restored over the weekend. The UK electricity industry has an excellent standard of service—the reliability for 2008-09 was 99.989 per cent. That typifies the robustness of the UK's energy system and we fully intend it to be maintained this year, next year and every year.