Speeches by Downie.

“I want to move on to talk about interconnectors and their role in supply-side flexibility, but I am not even going to start the question because the bell is about to go—[Interruption.]”

“So it was not high enough up its list of priorities. Was there not enough pressure from businesses to say they wanted it?”

“By what percentage would costs be reduced? Is it in the order of single digits, double digits—where are we?”

“Having asked you to not generalise massively, generalise massively, please.”

“There needs to be some incentive. Finally, given our costs are much higher than most of our trading partners, are other countries doing something better than us in this regard? Are there any lessons we can learn particularly?”

“Do you know of any other examples where particularly commercial and industrial businesses have managed to keep their electricity costs down in this way?”

“Does that come back to your earlier point about the weather being the same, the conditions being the same, and you are going to see similar conditions regardless?”

“That is the balance.”

“How do we do that? Perhaps a better question is: what is the role of Government in doing that? Do we need to find a way for businesses to organise and ask Government? As you say, that is the largest group we need to get to. How do we get them? They want to do this, if they see a benefit. Is it Government support? Where…”

“Again, it is the Treasury’s measurement of what constitutes public good versus business investment: “This should be a business cost, therefore you are on your own,” or, “This is a public good, and you should”—”

“Would you see that changing in the future if we have more offshore wind farms, or do you think the target should be for the number of those to come down and the role of interconnectors to go up? Or is it roughly what you would expect?”

“Again, it is the Treasury’s measurement of what constitutes public good versus business investment: “This should be a business cost, therefore you are on your own,” or, “This is a public good, and you should”—”

“My hon. Friend is being incredibly generous with giving way. Oddly, I was told by a Scottish Education Minister on the BBC recently that a diagnosis was not required in Scotland either to get the right support—we all know from our experiences that that is not the case. In Fife, we have more than 40,000 children waiting…”

“Last week, I was delighted to lead a debate on the very topic of the High North and Arctic security, highlighting that, because of our geography, the UK should be considered a frontline nation in the ongoing war with Vladimir Putin and that we cannot afford to sleepwalk unprepared into a geopolitical High North and Arc…”

“The risk is that by calling it an agenda, we have made it a target and you can shoot it down. It is something you can use to undermine, as we have seen politically recently. The consensus around the need to tackle climate change and a warming planet has become—because it encompasses so many things, anything that is bad…”

“The risk is that by calling it an agenda, we have made it a target and you can shoot it down. It is something you can use to undermine, as we have seen politically recently. The consensus around the need to tackle climate change and a warming planet has become—because it encompasses so many things, anything that is bad…”

“Do we need to stop talking about one overarching thing, net zero? Should we now just say, “We are making your energy bills cheaper”? Do the public care how we are doing it? Do we need to get beyond the climate idea? That is one of the purposes, obviously, but do the public just need to know we are doing a good thing an…”

“To pick up on some of what Melanie Onn was saying, there are certain words and terms that the Government use that mean absolutely nothing to anybody else or through repetition—“innovation”, “sustainability”—at some point they lose all meaning. They are defined as a good thing but no one knows what they mean. Is the ter…”

“Do we need to stop talking about one overarching thing, net zero? Should we now just say, “We are making your energy bills cheaper”? Do the public care how we are doing it? Do we need to get beyond the climate idea? That is one of the purposes, obviously, but do the public just need to know we are doing a good thing an…”

“Consumers will not read that. They will see the price cap moving and changing. Again, this is about helping people to understand how the price cap is got to. They will just see their energy bill going up or down.”