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Annual Energy Statement

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making that point. He is absolutely right. If we are going to introduce minimum standards for offshore oil and gas—the Commission has been kind enough to say they should be modelled on those for the UK continental shelf—that should be on the basis of a directive, so that we can use our own legal means to enforce the standards, rather than a regulation. A regulation that would apply directly in all the member states would be inappropriate because countries' circumstances are inevitably different.