Speeches by Shanks.

“We said in our manifesto when we were elected as a Government that we wanted to significantly change the ownership of energy in this country. That remains absolutely our ambition. It has not changed. This plan is around how we take the initial steps to get to these projects going from, at the moment, a very low startin…”

“There are jobs already being created right now from projects the National Wealth Fund has funded. Today’s new strategy for the NWF was about doubling down on what its commitment is. I am really delighted that right at the heart of that is clean power projects across the country, and with a commitment to looking at the …”

“The third part is a reflection on the state of the country after a decade or more of austerity. The capacity in local councils, for example, which often drove some of these innovative projects, has been hollowed out, and so we are having to rebuild some of that capacity. We want to give communities a sounding board and…”

“It is for the NWF to speak about individual projects. Until those investment decisions are made, I am not going to put a figure on jobs, but they are in the tens of thousands. We have said that, for the amount of money—£100 billion—that the NWF is seeking to bring in through the private capital allied to the public cap…”

“I have not prioritised them. They are all important, and they are all critical. If we fix the regulation, but we do not sort out the financial aspects or the capacity, there still are not going to be the projects coming forward. They all play a part, and we need them all to work in tandem. They are all the responsibili…”

“I am not close enough to the individual offers. NESO is running that side of the process. The timeline has taken longer than any of us would have liked. Partly that is to do with the complexity of the individual offers. NESO has now completed its steps and it is with the transmission owners and, in turn, the DNOs to ma…”

“Yes, investors were a part of the summit and they are part of the discussions that I have had, for example, at the North Sea Energy Forum. I was in Belgium recently meeting European Ministers and industry. The truth is that the summit represents our ambition as Europe to work together to tackle, in an uncertain world, …”

“I have slightly more than three things working in tandem at the moment, but I will leave that there.”

“They are right. We have not solved the problem entirely, but we have made huge progress. There are two aspects to this that are really important. The first is that the queue itself had become an absurd thing. We had more than 750 GW in a queue that was never going to be realised and was not being dealt with. There were…”

“Yes, and not just the Department. Right across Government, the absolute priority from the Prime Minister to everyone is what we are doing to address the cost of living and particularly electricity prices. That is important for individual consumers, but it is also important for business and industry that we tackle that.…”

“We will say more on the plan, but we are not fixing a scheme.”

“A number of investors want to come and build and invest in the UK. Every single one of those is subject to a national security assessment and the proposal from Ming Yang is being actively considered on that basis. I cannot be drawn on the decision on that, which has not been made.”

“We certainly want to explore it. We want to be much more innovative than we have been in the past about thinking about how the grid work, but it is not without risks. If individual projects can be absolutely certain that their private wire will meet all the demand that they might ever need, that is one thing. Where we …”

“It is a really good question. It will play a part in helping the system overall and helping deal with constraints as well. Quantifying that is difficult, because the scale we have at the moment is so low that, over the whole system, it has very little overall impact. There are two things we are determined to do as a co…”

“The thread that runs through everything we are seeking to do as the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero is making sure we are also an industrial policy Department. Our energy policy does not exist in a vacuum. We are determined to rebuild the industrial heritage this country has. For too long, the previous Gove…”

“I do not want to parse my words in terms of what the project might look like, but if a local council was to support a community to deliver a project, but it was owned by the community, I would call that a community-owned project. If we are talking about a local council putting solar panels on leisure centres and connec…”

“That is a really good question. I do not directly have as much to do with the international climate work, but I know that a lot of the conversations are shifting from the macro questions about our energy mix to the questions about how the transition affects communities. I was at the G20 in South Africa, and one of the …”

“Emma might want to come in on some of those points, but let me take it head on. I am accountable for this to Parliament. On the question of who is responsible for it, we have set up Great British Energy as a publicly owned energy company to be our energy champion and for the public to own a share in it. It will drive f…”

“There is a lot that we can learn from all of that. Sometimes by necessity countries have skipped to a much more flexible, localised approach. We are seeing a lot of development of solar around the world, for example, in communities that have not had electricity on that scale at all and are building up from that. There …”

“I accept that point to a degree, but in fairness this is not a Department that has set ambitions and then not followed them. We have set incredibly ambitious targets for 2030, and we have gone at it relentlessly. We are now going to set ambitious targets—the biggest commitment to community energy that this country has …”