1: Clause 1, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
“(A1) The OGA must not invite any new seaward area production application licences until the Secretary of State has by regulations brought into effect a ban on flaring and venting relating to new offshore installations other than that required in an emergency.(A2) From two years after the day on which this Act is passed, the OGA must not invite any new seaward area production application licences until the Secretary of State has by regulations brought into effect a ban on flaring and venting relating to existing offshore installations.(A3) A statutory instrument which contains regulations under subsection (A1) or (A2) may not be made unless a draft of the instrument has been laid before and approved by a resolution of each House of Parliament.(A4) In subsections (A1) and (A2)—“flaring” means the burning of hydrocarbons produced during oil and gas extraction;“venting” means the release of un-combusted hydrocarbons directly into the atmosphere.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment prevents the invitation of new seaward area production licences until the Secretary of State has introduced a ban on flaring and venting by new offshore installations. It also requires the Secretary of State to prevent licensing rounds if a wider ban is not in place within two years of Royal Assent.
My Lords, it is a pleasure to open this Committee stage, and I promise to resist the temptation to relitigate any of the issues of principle that we discussed previously. I declare my interests as chair of Peers for the Planet and director of the associated company.
In moving Amendment 1, I will also speak to Amendment 2, but I look forward very much to hearing the argument on Amendments 9 and 10, in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Willis, and the noble Lord, Lord Randall of Uxbridge. I am grateful for the support of the noble Baroness, Lady Blake of Leeds, the noble Lord, Lord Randall of Uxbridge, and the noble Earl, Lord Russell, on Amendment 1. I would also like to thank those organisations that have supplied briefing, including Uplift, Oceana and the Green Alliance.
In the vein of trying to do what we can to improve a fundamentally flawed Bill, my Amendment 1 seeks to make progress on the important issue of greenhouse gas emissions from venting and flaring and builds on an amendment introduced in debates in the other place by Sir Alok Sharma. The amendment is a simple and pragmatic proposal, which seeks to give statutory force to existing voluntary guidance on this issue and to factor in the recommendations of the Environmental Audit Committee of the other place, made in January 2023, which recommended a ban on venting and flaring by 2025.
The amendment does two things. First, it says that there should be no invitations for new licences until the Secretary of State has introduced a ban on venting and flaring from new installations. Secondly, it would give the Secretary of State a maximum of two years to introduce a ban on venting and flaring from all installations if any further licensing rounds are to take place. The EAC’s report recommended a ban not later than the end of 2025. My amendment recognises that time has moved on since 2023 and amends the timeline appropriately. Adopting this change would help the Government to demonstrate that they are serious about maintaining their global leadership on climate action by turning their stated ambition into delivery.
My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 9 in my name and say a little about Amendment 10. I have also put my name to Amendment 1, about which we have just heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman—I thank her for moving that amendment so well—and Amendment 10 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Willis.
Amendment 9 is in my name and I am very grateful for the support of the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Willis and Lady Young. It would require the Secretary of State to publish a marine spatial prioritisation policy, and a spatial prioritisation test to be passed before future licensing could take place. It would mean that before any more oil and gas licensing is permitted, it would have to fit into what the North Sea of the future looks like, with space set aside for other priorities—the priorities of the future, I suggest: marine health and renewable infrastructure. Specifically, the plan would need to ensure that the targets under both the Climate Change Act and the Environment Act are prioritised and achieved.
For the purposes of this amendment, the test could not be passed unless a marine spatial prioritisation policy was in place. This is something the Government have committed to, but there is a risk that, without this amendment, we could be inviting future licensing rounds which will not take account of, or even be in accordance with, a strategy the Government are currently producing. I believe it is wholly pragmatic in its approach. The NSTA did not run licensing rounds while it waited for the now redundant climate compatibility checkpoint to be published, so there is a precedent here for this approach.
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I suggest that there is a need for a marine spatial plan because marine planning is currently reliant on obsolete plans, drawn up at a time of lower marine activity, which apply only regionally and do not take into account spatial needs or the cumulative effect of activities. This means that decisions are taken on a case-by-case basis without strategic oversight. Decision-making regimes for major seas activities are siloed, leading to bizarre situations such as one government department, Defra, banning bottom trawling in marine protected areas, while another, DESNZ, consents equally to environmentally damaging oil and gas activities in the same MPAs.
I always want to be helpful, and the Government could swiftly rectify this by issuing a new marine policy statement as a statutory instrument, prioritising marine activity and pointing towards subsequent strategic mapping to work out where those activities can best take place. This marine spatial prioritisation and planning would allow for the full range of marine activities, including the delivery of energy generation, to be properly planned in a manner compatible with legally binding targets for nature’s recovery.
It is unclear to me why Defra’s consideration of a possible marine spatial planning and prioritisation process, stated to be under way in January 2022, is taking so long to produce any public outputs, despite developers and NGOs issuing united calls for increased ambition in this area. Technically, I am not entirely surprised, because I know that these things take time, but it is about time something appeared.
In response to my honourable friend the Member for North Devon, the then Minister in the other place made a statement, which was repeated by my noble friend at Second Reading in the Lords:
“The soon-to-be-commissioned strategic spatial energy plan and cross-Government marine spatial prioritisation programme will ensure … that we take a strategic approach to identifying future sites for marine developments and energy infrastructure, and that these can co-exist with our environmental and wider marine priorities”.—[Official Report, Commons, 20/2/24; col. 645.]
The words “soon-to-be-commissioned” worry me slightly. I would like to know from my noble friend the Minister how long it will be until that plan and programme, respectively, are published and implemented.
Work on the programme was first announced in January 2022. It is over two years later, and it has not led to any public outputs. In my former capacity as a retailer, when I was asked when delivery would be, I would sometimes say “before Christmas”; I did not always say which Christmas. But it is about time that this was delivered. This amendment would speed up the process and would require a full marine spatial prioritisation policy to be in place before any new licences are issued. It could helpfully work to concentrate minds and speed up this process slightly, for which I am sure that both Ministers and the NSTA would be grateful.
I will address Amendment 10 very briefly, because I am looking forward to hearing the noble Baroness, Lady Willis, introduce it fully. It would prevent further licensing in marine protected areas, and I offer it my support, as it fits well with Amendment 9 on spatial prioritisation, which I am putting forward.
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Randall, very much. I will speak on the marine amendments in this group—Amendment 10 in my name and Amendment 9 in the name of the noble Lord. I also support the other amendments in this group.
Amendment 10 is really very simple: it would stop licensing in our marine protected areas. As I stated at Second Reading, these areas have been designated for protection and enhancement in order to conserve the critical species, habitats and ecosystems that they contain. Their protection is critical for many reasons, not least because we have signed up to this in both UK and international law. We now have 377 marine protected areas, which account for 38% of our seas.
In order to be included in the 2030 target—to protect 30% of our oceans by 2030—the Government’s own suggested criteria are that these MPAs need to have long-term protection and/or management in place that works against adverse pressures on biodiversity objectives. However, the interpretation of what constitutes adverse pressure on these MPAs is where there is the most disagreement, even between government departments, a point that is highly relevant to this Bill. Currently, there is nothing in the licensing process to prevent the North Sea Transition Authority from offering up licences in marine protected areas. Indeed, licences are currently being granted in marine protected areas: in the most recent licensing round, 22% of the licences granted were in such areas.
Is oil drilling in an MPA a problem? Well, it makes a huge difference. As I mentioned at Second Reading, the evidence suggests that it can have a large and irreversible impact. However, when asked about this, the Government have said, in various responses to the Parliamentary Questions looking at the impact, that the OPL Bill will not affect the UK’s ability to reach the targets for ensuring that marine protected areas are in a good or recovering state and that the licences will only ever have been awarded once the environmental regulator is satisfied that the activities would not negatively impact protected areas. This was reiterated by the Minister at Second Reading, when he stated:
My Lords, I support in particular Amendments 9 and 10, so ably introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Randall, and the noble Baroness, Lady Willis. I have quite a lot of experience of marine protected areas in the south-west and the Isles of Scilly. I recall having a useful discussion with the Environment Agency, English Nature and others about how one applies an MPA to a group of islands and whether one would be allowed to run any type of ship across them. The answer was, “Not really”. I said, “Well, who is going to enforce these regulations?” The answer was the Navy. That was even more interesting, because I asked, “Who is the most likely culprit?” They said that the most likely culprits around Scilly were people in kayaks. If one is trying to merge our latest aircraft carrier with people in kayaks, there is work to be done.
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The practice of venting and flaring is a serious issue. It takes place when extra gas is produced, usually as a by-product of oil extraction that producers need to get rid of, rather than sending back to shore. They do this by venting the natural gas, releasing it directly into the atmosphere as methane, or by flaring—burning the gas—which, as well as releasing methane, releases volumes of other greenhouses gases and pollutants such as black soot and nitrous oxide. Both practices are damaging and polluting, as well as being, in the words of the IEA, an “extraordinary waste of money”.
Methane is a highly potent greenhouse gas. It is the second biggest cause of global heating after CO2 and has a far higher warming effect in the short term. However, its short lifespan in the atmosphere compared with other greenhouse gases means that taking action to cut methane now is one of the fastest and most cost-effective ways to limit global warming in this crucial decade.
It is also a very wasteful practice. Green Alliance research has found that just 18 of the highest polluting oil and gas platforms in the North Sea are losing enough gas through venting and flaring to power 140,000 homes, equivalent to a city the size of Aberdeen. The North Sea transition deal commits the industry to a voluntary cut in emissions of 50% by 2030 on a pathway to net zero by 2050. The Climate Change Committee described those targets as weak and significantly lower than its sixth carbon budget advice—but, even so, the industry is not on track to meet them. Added to that, the North Sea Transition Authority emissions monitoring report of 2023 shows that UK oil is more polluting than average, compared to that of other major producers, including gas imported via pipelines from Norway and other nations operating in the North Sea.
The Government agreed in 2020 to phase out routine venting and flaring by 2030. There is guidance in place from the regulator, the NSTA, which expects the industry to adhere to zero routine venting and flaring by 2030, and where all new developments should be planned on the basis of zero routine flaring and venting.
In response to Sir Alok’s similar amendment in Committee in the Commons, the Minister argued against putting its ambition into legislation. However, this is not groundbreaking: Norway has had a ban in place since 1971 and even the US Bureau of Land Management is now taking action. Voluntary guidance is just not doing what is needed; it is not always followed by industry or the regulator. Just last year, the NSTA granted approval for the Affleck oil and gas field, permitting the operators to flare unwanted gas until 2037, in spite of the guidance that new developments should have zero venting and flaring by 2030. Progress to reduce methane emissions in the UK has, according to the Government’s 2022 methane memorandum, been very slow, particularly in the energy sector, where percentage drops year on year have stayed flat.
The CCC, the EAC and the net-zero review have all highlighted that the UK is not going fast enough on methane reduction. There are no technical barriers to ending routine venting and flaring, as the IEA has said. As for cost, industry spending on reducing emissions from venting and flaring is subject to a tax break of £1.09 for every pound spent. As the Government’s 2022 methane memorandum put it,
“Action on methane is … recognised as the ‘last low hanging fruit’ in tackling climate change because measures are readily available and in some cases very cost effective”.
If the Government are serious about their commitments to reduce methane, there really is no excuse for not using this Bill to make faster progress to reduce the emissions from oil and gas production. At Second Reading, the Minister said that he would listen carefully to views on this, so I look forward to his response to the debate that we are about to have.
I move on to Amendment 2, which is also in my name. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Knight, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Norwich for adding their names. At Second Reading, many noble Lords highlighted the need to address the long-term employment prospects of those currently working within the oil and gas sector. My Amendment 2 seeks clarification from the Government on their plans for workers currently employed in our declining North Sea basin to transition to the sustainable jobs of the future. Rather than losing the 30,000 or so direct roles in oil and gas and the valuable skills of those workers, who may be forced to move elsewhere, we need to nurture their transformed skills into the new net-zero roles.
My amendment proposes that there should be no new applications for licences until the Secretary of State has published a green skills retraining plan setting out what support the Government will provide for those in the oil and gas sector who wish to transition to work in green economy jobs. Specifically, it proposes the introduction of a skills passport for workers, which will provide financial and practical support to access training so that those workers can, easily and without additional cost to them, reskill and retrain for the future and be part of the green economy.
The Government recognised in Committee in the Commons that the skills and expertise of the oil and gas industry will be needed to support the net zero transition; however, action to achieve this appears to have stalled. The CCC has pressed for more to be done on net zero skills. It noticed in its 2023 progress report that its earlier cross-cutting policy recommendation for an action plan for net zero skills was “overdue”. It focused on the need for a strategy for those
“workers and communities affected by industries that are expected to experience job losses as a result of the Net Zero transition, including by providing reskilling packages and tailored support to transition to alternative low-carbon sectors”
A recent POST briefing note on green jobs noted that the UK Government’s green jobs delivery group planned to publish a net zero and nature workforce action plan in the first half of 2024. Can the Minister provide an update on when this is likely to be published and any insight into what it is likely to offer? The North Sea transition deal involved commissioning an integrated people and skills plan, which was followed by an Offshore Energies UK 2023 Workforce Insight report that promised to deliver a skills passport so that people can move seamlessly between sectors. Can the Minister provide an update on the skills passport and when this is likely to be produced? Can he confirm that it will provide financial support for workers looking to move into green jobs?
The second part of my amendment probes another recommendation of the Workforce Insight report: the creation of a green skills retraining task force to co-ordinate the retraining provisions that are required across the UK. Will the Government be progressing this recommendation? If not, how will the required skills transition be delivered? I hope the Minister will be able to provide some insight into the Government’s thinking on this important issue and give much needed assurance to workers in the oil and gas sector that their skills are valued and needed, both now and in the future. I beg to move.
“We already have a robust regulatory framework in place to ensure that marine protected areas are effectively protected. Licences will be awarded only after ensuring that the environmental regulator OPRED is satisfied that activities will not have negative effects on those important protected areas”.—[Official Report, 26/3/24; col. 657.]
However, that overstates the case. The more I have looked into the processes for assessment of the environmental impact of oil drilling on MPAs, the more convinced I have become that we simply do not have in place a system that is fit for purpose, certainly not to protect these marine protected areas.
This is because the process and the responsibility for environmental regulation currently sits with OPRED, which is part of DESNZ and is advised by the Joint Nature Conservation Committee, but there is a very complicated and convoluted process and path by which the expert advice from the JNCC reaches the Minister. First, as a statutory consultee, the JNCC’s advice must be considered when OPRED produces an environmental assessment, but OPRED is under no duty to follow the JNCC’s advice, which is also not published. Then, in an instance where OPRED advises the Secretary of State not to issue a licence, the Secretary of State can disregard it if they believe that there is an overriding public interest.
A secondary problem is that the assessments do not consider cumulative impacts in a robust way. For example, OPRED will look at a pipeline and say, “Well, a pipeline in the grand area of an MPA is a tiny footprint”, but of course it is not just the pipeline that we are looking at. The cumulative effects of all the different things going on will have, and has been shown to have, a significant impact on the MPA.
The third and final problem is that OPRED assessments often have a tendency to assume that, if there is no scientific evidence, there is no problem, instead of adopting the precautionary principle. In fact, irrespective of what the environmental assessments from the JNCC say, OPRED and the Secretary of State can decide to grant licences to MPAs anyway. Looking at the evidence base, we can see that that is exactly what is happening. For example, in the past three years, the JNCC has objected to 54 development applications in MPAs from the oil and gas industry, yet not a single one of those applications has been turned down. In fact, I did a trawl over the past 17 years—since 2007, when the first MPAs came into place—and could not find a single licence that had been turned down on an environmental basis. That would suggest that the environmental assessment system in this case is not working.
What I find most concerning is that the JNCC has expressed its concerns. For example, in a letter to DESNZ on the recent 33rd oil and gas licensing round, the JNCC wrote a strong letter stating that it was unable to agree with the conclusions that the projects would have no adverse impact on site integrity. The committee strongly advised that no new oil and gas infrastructures should be located anywhere within an MPA. It also pointed out that the Government’s approach to licensing oil and gas activities was inconsistent with the approach taken with other industries—for example, wind farms. Those three statements are extremely concerning. Our Joint Nature Conservancy Committee is making strong statements about these issues and yet, somewhere along the line, this is not being taken into account. Remember that no licences have been turned down, as far as I can see, based on environmental impact.
This process does not seem to be working and will result, and is resulting, in damage to the MPAs, which the Government have heralded. I join them in that, given that we now have marine protected areas in the oceans around the UK. Therefore, the onus is on the Government to show how increased licensing in the MPAs, as part of this OPL Bill, will not cause harm and to publish the evidence base that supports this. They also need to outline in detail exactly how these harms, once they are caused, will be mitigated while still meeting our 2030, now 2040, targets, which we and Defra are very much holding everyone’s feet to the fire on. If the Government cannot do this, the solution surely must be to put this amendment into the Bill.
I also want briefly to turn to the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Randall of Uxbridge, to which I have happily added my name. We need both these amendments. Without a proper seabed plan and a land use strategy for the sea—I wish that the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, were here—MPAs will not live up to their name. We know that we require multiple resources from the oceans around us. However, we need to be able to plan those in tandem, rather than in a somewhat random approach, where one thing is trumping the other—and trumping it sometimes through financial gain without properly considering the other requirements. Until we have a spatial prioritisation plan in place, we should not be granting any licences. We need to know what we want to take from where and how we ensure that the best use is made of the precious resource that we have around us. Until the Government come up with this spatial plan, which, as the noble Lord, Lord Randall, mentioned, they promised a while ago, we should not go forward with any of these licensing rounds.