Speeches by Murray.

“I believe I can. I apologise for that mistake. I will go and make sure I get those names.”

“Yes, I am very comfortable with that.”

“Yes, I think so. Now?”

“Thank you to the Committee for the opportunity to present this application for a debate. We have recently marked 30 years since the Nolan principles were laid out. They were established following a number of scandals in the early 90s and were designed to set high ethical standards to ensure integrity, accountability an…”

“On 23 February, the Cabinet Office confirmed that hardship loans would not be available to dependants or surviving spouses of civil service pension scheme members. That left one of my constituents alone, with two children and just one income after sadly losing their partner. Can the Minister explain how much it would h…”

“11. What estimate he has made of the cost of the civil service pensions recovery plan.”

“Given that the total pricing structure by suppliers is including the cost of the debt, going forward debt prevention would seem to be a sensible thing to do in the total system that might not necessarily put costs up for everybody if the suppliers were pricing in a way that included a social tariff. Is that part of the…”

“Citizens Advice also mentioned social tariffs. Is any work being done to look at social tariffs?”

“I absolutely agree. Although I am focusing on Scotland, it is Scotland as part of the UK and not Scotland alone. We want to make sure that we do not lose the skilled labour that is vital to a successful transition, because we would then have to pay more later to import the labour and expertise that we should have retai…”

“Finally, what role do you think that community energy schemes have in reducing the demand on the national grid to move power around?”

“I absolutely agree: the vision is there, but we take too long to make decisions. When that happens, our workforce make their own decisions, and businesses do not come that might have considered coming. We have to support the opportunity that is available to us. We must look seriously at how we encourage companies to bu…”

“The Liberal Democrats are keen that we move to a source of green energy. We are calling for the energy profits levy to be looked at again, as it was introduced as a windfall tax in particular circumstances, when there were very high profits.”

“Do the curtailment costs happen all over the UK? What proportion of that falls in Scotland?”

“You recognise that there is a Scotland-England bottleneck at the moment. When do you expect that bottleneck to be relieved? Will that remove some of these constraint costs?”

“I beg to move, That this House has considered Scotland’s contribution to energy security and net zero. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Huq, and a privilege to lead this debate on a matter that will have such an impact on Scotland’s economy, our cost of living and our national security. Let me be clea…”

“You have to work within existing policies. We have heard already about community benefit. Do you think that if communities could see more benefit from having the infrastructure on their doorstep, it would help with some of the potential delays that are coming to building this network?”

“I thank the hon. Member for his intervention, which I absolutely agree with. As I have just said, this is something that needs to be looked at, and there is an opportunity to make sure that communities all across the UK benefit from the power generation that they have to live with locally every day. Will Ministers comm…”

“I absolutely agree. We have a real opportunity with Great British Energy, in the current environment, to take advantage of what the commercial companies are offering with regard to reducing costs for individual homeowners and to use digital technology to ensure that community energy generated into the grid benefits the…”

“We keep hearing about 2030, and now we are hearing about some delays that are coming in the planning and delivery of those plans. How confident are you that, by 2030, this will get to the place that you are expecting it to get to?”

“Mr Leslie, £1.5 billion-worth of curtailment costs were passed on to consumers last year, and NESO estimates that these costs will continue rising through to 2030. How satisfied are you with the current rate of constraint management?”