he Labour Party revealed its green energy strategy on Monday, including the news that it will offer £500 million a year for the low-carbon sector but allow North Sea oil and gas production to continue “for decades”.
Speaking on Monday (June 19), Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said his party would allocate the huge sum to clean energy companies for each of the first five years of government as part of the Green Prosperity Plan. The money would provide capital gains to companies in low-carbon industries such as wind and solar energy, and carbon capture.
The companies would be required to prove that they are creating high-quality jobs in the UK to be eligible.
Labour said the incentive system would be particularly beneficial to areas that are associated with past or current coal, oil, and gas production. It estimated that 65,000 new jobs would be created.
During his speech in Edinburgh, Sir Keir said the Tory government and the Scottish National Party (SNP) had failed to secure green jobs in the country. “Britain has the second largest offshore wind capacity in the world, a close second only to China, yet across the North Sea in Denmark they’ve got three times as many jobs. How do you explain that?” he said.
“How do you explain Scottish wind turbines built in Spain, in Holland and Indonesia, as the workers in the fabrication yards in Fife – who would be proud to build something great in their country – look out their window and watch others putting them up in the [river] Forth? There is no justification.”
Sir Keir’s pledge underpins the party’s mission to make Britain a clean energy superpower. Labour says it wants to make energy in the UK “cheap and secure, so that the British public never again face spiralling bills”. It also wants to boost jobs, invest in every region and nation of the country, and grow the economy.
The Green Prosperity Plan aims to establish a new and homegrown publicly owned energy company named GB Energy, upgrade 19 million homes to help them with energy bills, and achieve zero-carbon electricity by 2030.
On North Sea oil and gas fields, Sir Keir said that while new licences would be halted, the existing ones issued by the Tories would not be rescinded. This has upset environmental activists.
Ed Miliband, the shadow climate and net zero secretary, told the Guardian that Labour’s policy was in line with scientific advice on staying within 1.5C of heating.
The party’s promise has been criticised by union leaders. They believe that Sir Keir’s plans to halt new licences are “naive” and pose a threat to existing and future jobs in the field.
