Speeches by Shanks.

“It is really important.”

“Is it me? I agree with that. I agree with myself. There are multiple ways of looking at this. There is a straightforward way of communities benefiting directly, and you heard earlier on about the reforms that will allow communities to net off supply versus demand so that they do benefit from that. There are also ways—a…”

“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…”

“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…”

“First of all, you should not compare different periods of the price cap.”

“Seasons make a difference in the price cap. If you take—”

“I understand that, but, if you take an average of the past two years, energy bills are lower in real terms than they were the year before. There is more to do. That is why £150 is coming off the cost of bills in April to make a real commitment to people. The job is not done. The cost of living is our absolute north sta…”

“I am not sure I fully understood the issue. I suspect it is partly that there is capacity on one part of a substation, which has allowed a project to connect.”

“That is a fair question. I will follow up on the individual example. We did a widespread piece of consultation, indeed called Barriers to Community Energy Projects. We had a significant number of contributions to that and we also did workshops across the country to really get into detail on some of those issues. It is …”

“I am happy to take away the point and consider it. I understand the rationale for raising it. It is a fair consideration. Even for nationally significant infrastructure projects that make it to my Department for decision, although we have an overall national goal of meeting certain targets, those individual application…”

“We will look at the funding schemes that we put in place for local energy, which will include an element of support for local councils. That will not be on an “every council has an allocation” basis but by allocating to projects that we think are valuable to take forward. In truth, there have been some fantastic exampl…”

“In terms of decisions, I would imagine that the overwhelming majority will not come to Government at all. They will be decided through the Town and Country Planning Act by local councils. In terms of policy frameworks, it is a shared role. DESNZ feeds into the national policy statements, but they are held by MHCLG.”

“It is a combination. If we look at the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, for example, I was there alongside Matthew Pennycook on that Bill because there were a number of changes that were needed to planning specifically for the energy system. We work in tandem. The DESNZ planning department works really closely with MH…”

“I would need to check on the specifics, but many of the things that you have mentioned are considered in a broader sense in the planning application. By necessity, a planning application has to be based on the impact of that individual application on a local area.”

“The local power plan will not cover this, but we have a separate consultation that we will respond to soon on the question of mandatory community benefits. We will set out in that what our response is both to the levels and to whether it should be mandatory or voluntary. We think there should be more ambition in this s…”

“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…”

“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 …”

“It certainly is not. We want to phase out the use of gas. Gas will continue to play a strategic role in the capacity market, where we absolutely need it, but it will be less than 5% of our need.”

“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 seen any proposals for individual projects, but we have been very clear that, post 2030, this country should have decarbonised its power system, and we are doing everything to make that happen.”