Speeches by Shanks.

“Our clean power action plan is to decarbonise the power system, so it is not going to be our position that, post 2030, we should see unabated gas. That is very clear from us, but there is a need for us to provide capacity for the data centres that we want to bring to this country, for hugely important economic growth r…”

“Inevitably, it is largely from our European neighbours, which have been doing this for a very long time. I had a fantastic visit to Denmark to visit, I think, one of the first community-owned offshore wind farms, Middelgrunden, which was excellent. We learned from that that ambition should not be micro-scale generation…”

“I would challenge that. I see my job as a Minister not to just sit behind a desk and say yes or no to things, but to drive forward the outcomes of what we have said. Before I was an MP and before I was a teacher, I worked in an organisation that was all about outcomes, not about activity. It was about saying, “You can …”

“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…”

“In terms of the ingredients, if you like, for what is going to make this plan work, without revealing anything that is in the plan, because these things are all what came out of the consultation and what you will have heard in evidence from everyone, it is a combination. First, the regulatory system needs to make it mu…”

“I will say a few things, and then Emma might want to come in on the KPIs point. The local power plan sets out the narrative on why we are doing this and the case for it. It will also have a whole series of actions that have very clear outcomes to them. We will then be judged on how we have achieved those outcomes. They…”

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

“The way that we have sought to deliver the clean power mission is partly how my Department is driving everything, which is to say that, in the past, Government have set out an objective, then gone away and let others just deliver it in the background, and hoped that the outcome would be achieved at some point. The clea…”

“I do not know quite how to take that.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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 …”

“I am not going to give advice to them. What we have said is that we want to strategically plan where our AI growth zones are, so that we are making use of constraints, wherever possible, and benefiting from things that we are currently spending money on. Secondly, we want to try to connect as many demand projects to th…”

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

“I did not see all of the previous panel, but if I understand the point, it comes down to defining community energy, which is something that we will do. That is not quite the same, and so we do need to come up with a definition of community energy. Many people think, “Why is that complex?” The reason it is complex is th…”

“I will answer it in a second. Emma was just going to come in on the last question, if that is okay.”

“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…”

“In terms of the ingredients, if you like, for what is going to make this plan work, without revealing anything that is in the plan, because these things are all what came out of the consultation and what you will have heard in evidence from everyone, it is a combination. First, the regulatory system needs to make it mu…”

“I cannot say what is specifically in the local power plan, but it definitely will be a balance of local and community energy. We have been clear on that. We will set out the fact that this is a Government commitment, but it is a shared enterprise between Great British Energy, Government and communities.”