Tom Collins
MP for Worcester · Labour · United Kingdom
“In Worcester, I recently hosted a summit attended by representatives of over 30 organisations, from the national Government to regional agencies and authorities, and all the way to local charities and churches, which all pledged to work together to end rough sleeping in Worcester.”
House of Commons26 October 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I am working with a constituent who has been subject to bullying and prejudice in high-level amateur sport. Current whistleblowing protections apply only to employees of an organisation, but sports people often have just as much, if not more, to lose if a sporting organisation turns against them.”
House of Commons14 October 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“That is good, but if there is diminishing consideration of cases in which people do not disclose that they were victims of modern slavery straight away, or in which the victims had carried out criminal activity, that goes against the very basic, fundamental, “modern slavery 101” principles of how to tackle modern slavery.”
House of Commons13 July 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I echo the comment by the right hon. Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Dame Karen Bradley) that disclosure does not automatically mean a referral under the national referral mechanism. We should be fixing those operational problems.”
House of Commons13 July 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I have been campaigning on modern slavery for over 20 years. Back when I started, most modern slavery in the UK was sexual exploitation, and let me be clear that it was of girls. I put myself in the shoes of a parent whose child was in another country, suffering unimaginable abuse and exploitation.”
House of Commons13 July 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“We must tackle modern slavery head-on. We must strengthen our systems, which are failing at an operational level in their design, decision making and implementation, and we must bring in good governance. For that reason, I really welcome the further discussions with the Government following today to improve this Bill.”
House of Commons13 July 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
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“That has a small benefit for decarbonisation, but it has a huge benefit for allowing us to build out production of hydrogen, because it gives producers a large and available sink for their hydrogen to be produced and sold and it allows them to build large-scale production with the certainty of a market. Blending is therefore a key enabler not of decarbonisation but of building production for a future energy system with hydrogen playing a major role. It is also vital that we take action to fill the remaining gaps. Through my experience as an engineer working in research and development I have seen personally how powerful it is when the Government set goals and work in partnership with industry to try to meet those goals.”
House of Commons9 September 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“That price enabler is made stable by storage. The crux, therefore, of building this future energy system is to build transmission and storage of the key vectors that we want to use in the future. Therefore, it would be very valuable for the UK to develop a plan to commission and build out a strategic national clean energy reserve. That can be left to markets, but the Government need to drive it with an extremely strong and firm grip and with a clear vision. I urge the Minister to look at the ways that we can build on our current work in storage, while expanding it with a very clear and ambitious vision. We can also start blending. Blending is sometimes misunderstood. There are currently investigations into blending hydrogen into our natural gas supply.”
House of Commons9 September 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“We also know that global prices for energy will continue to fluctuate, and part of our Government’s strategy to make the UK rightly more energy independent is informed by our vulnerability to variations in international energy prices. Whatever our vector mix, and however we cut up the pie of our future energy system, we absolutely will need storage to navigate these variations. The transition has rightly been described as a chicken-and-egg problem: how do we build a new energy system out of an existing one? We are led by economics, which means that we need a price for the new system. We need a price that breaks the cycle by providing producers with a way to sell their energy and by providing people decarbonising at the end-use point with the ability to buy the energy they need for decarbonisation and to make long-term investments.”
House of Commons9 September 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Gas is doing the lion’s share of moving energy around the UK and supporting our electricity system, and oil, which is primarily used for transport and is our main vector for transport, sits at about the same level as electricity. That is the picture of how energy is split across the UK energy system. What we can learn from that is that UK energy demand is peaky. It varies very rapidly, seasonally and throughout the day, especially for heat applications. As we move into a renewable world, we need to recognise that renewable production is also subject to these synchronous peaks and troughs. The UK is a small enough country that one weather system can influence the production of all our renewables. We are therefore subject to fluctuations both in the supply of renewable energy and in demand.”
House of Commons9 September 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“If we look more closely at that challenge and at the current UK energy system, we have seen electricity decarbonising, but if we look at electricity use in comparison with other vectors in the UK, it plays a relatively modest role. If we look at our energy use over the course of a year, our daily electricity consumption is pretty flat, but if we overlay on to that the amount of gas we use as a country—remember, gas is providing a vital part of our electricity production, and indeed the responsive part—and we see waves with peaks in the winter and troughs in the summer. The peaks of those waves are three times higher than our day-to-day electricity use.”
House of Commons9 September 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The hon. Member is entirely right. Ammonia is a very important part of the future energy mix. It is interchangeable bidirectionally with hydrogen and it is a very compact energy carrier. It is a liquid—it is relatively easily handled and stored—but it also, vitally, provides direct injection into the agricultural fertiliser chain. That makes it a vital asset in our future energy system, as agriculture currently plays a very large role in our total carbon emissions. How we get to the future energy system is similar to how we got to this point: economics is overtaking technology as the driver for change. It is not about choosing technologies; it is about choosing these key energy vectors and then facilitating markets to grow around them.”
House of Commons9 September 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“This is the time for Government to be agile, mission-led and work in partnership with industry to accelerate that, bring shared focus and work in closer partnership with industry, with a goal-setting approach, to cut through the administration and bureaucracy and, with confidence, build out the future economy that we can start to more clearly envisage. With ambition and decisive action, the UK can prosper, and a vital part of that is our hydrogen supply chains prospering.”
House of Commons9 September 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I have seen at first hand how powerful it can be when Government set goals and work in close partnership with industry, but I have also seen where there is room for us to strengthen our innovation offer around hydrogen to make this transition even more successful. There has never been a more important time for the agile, mission-led approach of our Government. There is a need for ambition in this space. Investment is currently following vision, and the UK has an opportunity to present a powerful vision. We have seen some of our work around hydrogen and the investment rounds slipping.”
House of Commons9 September 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“It is important that, while we have ambitious targets to electrify heat, we keep the door open to hydrogen providing that fallback, as gas does now for many electrified projects, to allow us to get there with confidence, rapidity and depth of decarbonisation. Our planning reform is doing fantastic things for the energy transition, allowing us to build out our electricity transmission system and future storage. There are opportunities for us to echo that in gas and liquid fuel transport and storage, alongside electricity, for hydrogen and ammonia in particular. As I have mentioned, innovation support is vital as we work cross-Department to bring this transition.”
House of Commons9 September 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Reviewing some of our safety regulations, which are slightly outdated for a world where hydrogen will become more commonplace, could make a big difference, particularly on exclusion distances and ammonia, which is currently treated as a chemical for storage. Introducing regulations that treat ammonia as a fuel and allow its storage under simplified guidance would make a huge difference. I have already mentioned blending. It is time for the Government to work in an agile and innovative way with other Departments—as they are doing—to build out this capacity. A longer-term road map for heavy transport and for heat would be very helpful. These are hard-to-abate sectors. I would like to see recognition that heat has proven one of the hardest areas of our economy to decarbonise.”
House of Commons9 September 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I thank the hon. Member for his point—he is entirely right. Hydrogen is a key enabler for industrial processes that need high temperature, high power and reducing atmospheres. It is a vital feedstock for a large part of our materials supply chain, and it is a key enabler for future heavy transport, with buses being an excellent example. I share his passion—my constituents will be the first to tell everyone how important buses are to me, and I desperately desire our current oil-fuelled buses to be replaced by some form of electrified transport, be that energised by batteries or by hydrogen and fuel cells. So, what next? There are quick wins available in the space of hydrogen.”
House of Commons9 September 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Before coming to this place, that was my exact area of work, and I can assure the House that the current regulatory framework has enabled the certification of these products. They have been shown to be safe; in fact, they are soon to be trialled up in Scotland, in Fife. So some of these barriers have recently been mitigated and reduced very quickly by UK innovation. The opportunity is there now to push forward into delivery.”
House of Commons9 September 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“It is therefore important that we show positive ambition for hydrogen and help the public to feel secure about a problem where the engineering has been solved.”
House of Commons9 September 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Once again, I intervene only because I have painful personal experience of this situation. The Redcar trial was subject to a distinct, explicit and targeted campaign seeking to bring about its failure. It was extremely frustrating to experience, as the trial was testing both electrification of heat and conversion to 100% hydrogen—two key pathways for decarbonising heat that need to be validated. It was very frustrating to see that, and it was the result of a targeted campaign, but we have also seen that where the engineering is well explained and consumers are able to understand that this is just a different gas—in fact, a gas that already circulated in UK gas pipes prior to the conversion of the 1960s—these things can be done successfully.”
House of Commons9 September 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The hon. Member is entirely right. One of the key questions often asked about green hydrogen is cost. There are many projections showing cost coming down dramatically in future, and part of that comes from the fact that hydrogen production is able to utilise renewable electricity that would otherwise be constrained or not used. He is entirely right that geographical and time constraints on when energy is produced are vital, but create a low-cost source of energy for the production of hydrogen, which brings the cost of hydrogen down, so I thank him for his point.”
House of Commons9 September 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“It is not often we hear industry asking Government to be more hands-on, but here they are. The need for that in building storage is very clear. They want Government to have a very clear vision and high ambition, and the Minister has been good today in helping to articulate that on the Government’s behalf. We are a Government of partnership, and now is the moment to build on that partnership and break down silos. In taking these steps, now is the moment when we can change gear, put our foot on the gas and bring about a rapid and ambitious transformation of our hydrogen supply chains. Question put and agreed to. Resolved, That this House has considered hydrogen supply chains.”
House of Commons9 September 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The consensus that we have heard in the room today, for which I am very grateful—I am grateful for all Members’ fantastically knowledgeable contributions—shows that we are at the turning point where this transition is being led by economics rather than debates about technology. Electricity, hydrogen and ammonia form a pyramid of complementary energy vectors whereby we can provide sector coupling, flexibility and a dynamic future energy system that allows rapid and deep decarbonisation. I have had the opportunity to meet representatives of industry and hold workshops with a very diverse cross-section of industry, and the urge for the storage piece to be built urgently and in a decisive way, sponsored clearly by the state, is very clear, with that backed up by transition.”
House of Commons9 September 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“He is a strong and powerful proponent, and I am grateful to him for the opportunity he has given me today. The debate has reflected the huge opportunity that hydrogen presents for the UK in growing our economy and facing the challenges of decarbonisation and new energy systems. It has reflected the versatility of hydrogen, the importance of building a system where it is abundant, the need for us to support industry not just in classic industrial heartlands but in towns across our country, and therefore the need for us to transition the gas networks to hydrogen in the future as well.”
House of Commons9 September 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Mr Betts, I will be brief. I am grateful for your generosity with time, and for the generosity of other Members in allowing me to intervene. I thank the Minister for his response. He reasserted the fundamental role that hydrogen will play in our future energy system and the vital need for storage. I really appreciate that. I am excited about the hydrogen strategy, and to see that built with our new Government’s approach to partnership and with a clear vision for our future hydrogen system. That was reflected in his speech when he reasserted our firm commitment to working in partnership with industry. I again thank my hon. Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (James Naish) for securing this debate and for his continued championing of the energy sector and all our work in it.”
House of Commons9 September 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Friend agree that in sport, diabetes should be managed at an elite level, so that there is a real opportunity for people with diabetes to own the condition and their sports performance?”
House of Commons3 September 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Diabetes is a disability that is often hidden and not well understood, and people with it suffer from all the stigma that my hon. Friend has described so well. It is complex to manage, especially being metabolic, and especially in relation to sport, so listening to parents and families, and young people and others with diabetes, is vital. We have benefited in Worcester from the fantastic Warriors Foundation and the Chris Pennell rugby academy, and I have seen the incredible advantages they have brought for people with type 1 diabetes in our area. They have shown how sport can facilitate community, better awareness and better management of the condition for people with diabetes. Does my hon.”
House of Commons3 September 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“You have a slight disadvantage compared with, for instance, the Nordics, such as Sweden and Finland; they have a lot of hydro and stable baseload renewable power. On the fundamental side, especially for power, I think there are other places that are currently a bit more competitive. However, many of the other elements, such as feedstock supply, labour and knowledge, are quite similar. The biggest differentiator is probably the legislative and regulatory landscape. You are creating a market through mandates, which I think is extremely powerful. If you also increase investment certainty through an RCM, that element is unique and, at this point in time, very helpful.”
House of Commons15 July 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Q You have just mentioned that you are looking broadly at SAF production and how that is going to play out into the future. Compared with other northern European countries, the UK has excellent access to renewable energy, and we had a very early responding hydrogen industry. What do you see as the UK’s unique opportunities in SAF production? Ruben van Grinsven: There are two elements. One is the fundamentals: affordable renewable energy, other feedstocks, then the cost of building plants, labour, and everything else. At the moment, in terms of the fundamentals of renewable electricity, the UK does not have a clear advantage because power prices are slightly more expensive, and most of the renewable power in the UK is intermittent. That is an important thing that needs to be overcome.”
House of Commons15 July 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“What you are doing, very sensibly, is trying to level those bumps in the road. That worked for offshore wind and it should work for this, but there also needs to be support through other mechanisms, such as R&D and mechanisms designed to support small and medium-sized enterprises, so they can get the research they need, to go from “Wow! That’s a brilliant idea!” to being world leading. This is a great mechanism, but the Government need to use the other mechanisms to fund those companies to develop as well.”
House of Commons15 July 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Q As someone who works in research and innovation, you will be familiar with the UK pain point, where we are often excellent at planning the technologies at low technology readiness levels, and then we lose them to that mid-level valley of death. The UK is strong in sustainable fuels at the research level; this mechanism is intended to help us to navigate through the valley of death, and to reach scale and economic viability. Do you think it is a good mechanism for that and that it will help us to break that trend in the UK? Professor Maslin : Other levy systems that have been used in the energy sector have been very successful, so I am personally very positive about this because it gives a guarantee. We have seen what I call the solar rollercoaster: suddenly everyone has solar panels, and then suddenly all the companies go bust.”
House of Commons15 July 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Q Obviously, Innovate UK is our key player in that space. Do you see it as active in this space? Is there anything you would like to see us doing slightly differently to support SMEs and innovators better? Professor Maslin : I have been very lucky, because in the past I have been able to get funding from Innovate UK and even from the TSB before that—that is how old I am. Innovate UK needs direction, with top-down prioritisation of this sector for the UK. Sometimes Innovate UK has stuff coming in, then selects what it thinks is good, but I think you need to mandate, in concert with the Bill, that it focuses on SAFs and makes that one of its priorities.”
House of Commons15 July 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I thank my right hon. Friend for placing this issue on the agenda. Nothing could be more existential or vital than tackling our climate and nature crises, because we live within the natural system, not outside it. We and nature are in this together, and nothing could be more important, or better for building the foundation of how we shape our communities and economy into the future. Industry understands that, and I have had the chance to convene industry and bring forward ideas such as the diversification of technologies, which we support, and the build-up of strategic national clean energy reserves. Would the Secretary of State meet me to discuss those ideas that are coming from industry?”
House of Commons14 July 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Like any serious incident, this one had multiple causes, both operational and relating to design. I urge the Minister to ensure that the lessons learned are applied not only to electricity transmission and distribution sites, but to energy storage sites, for which we have an absence of standards. He rightly mentioned the need for redundancy and flexibility in our electricity systems, and the need to avoid having single points of failure. That applies well to large pieces of essential infrastructure, but is harder with our distributed critical infrastructure, for example around telecommunications, so we need diversity in our energy system as a whole. Does he agree that in our energy system, we need widespread availability from multiple parts of the energy sector, with electricity being backed up by, for example, hydrogen and ammonia?”
House of Commons2 July 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“As an engineer, I am incredibly excited by the vision of engineering, industrial and innovation renewal that the Secretary of State is describing. In Worcester, we have a mission to make ourselves the best city in the best country in the world to start and grow a business. Time and again, though, the funds and research facilities intended to support innovation have not worked for our local businesses, and there has been a lack of support for mid-technology readiness level technologies. How will this strategy help businesses across the country to bridge the valley of death and grow in this decade of renewal?”
House of Commons23 June 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I take this opportunity to wish my hon. Friend and office mate a very happy birthday. This is a very important debate, and I am grateful to him for securing it. I am looking forward to the discussion and I have much to share later, but for now I emphasise how timely the debate is as we face uncertainty in national security and a huge energy transition that will create opportunities as well as challenges.”
House of Commons18 June 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The key signal to unlock all that is reassurance from the Government that the gas system, having transitioned to low-carbon gas, has a future for decades to come. That single declaration—one line that says, “We can see clean gas playing a role in the energy future of our towns and cities”—would be transformational. With it, we can ensure that the industrial economy spread across our country has a sure and hopeful future of opportunity and renewal. With it, we can ensure that the UK’s energy system is resilient, robust, secure and a source of strength, not vulnerability, in our national security. With it, we can deliver a deep and rapid energy transition through agility, partnership and UK innovation. With it, we will be on a strong pathway to making the UK a clean energy superpower.”
House of Commons18 June 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“It provides a price and a sink for producers to make clean gas, and a price and a source for users to plan their transition. It could be delivered by establishing and planning a progressive build-out of a strategic national clean energy reserve, which could utilise private capital but, crucially, be publicly commissioned, operating in the national interest for resilience and stable markets. For those markets to develop, storage must be backed up by transportation. Fortunately, that solution already exists in our world-leading gas networks and can be completed through the delivery of a national hydrogen backbone. We could make a decision on blending now, and that would unlock those markets and allow for the large-scale production of clean gas.”
House of Commons18 June 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“However, our previous Government, who should be congratulated on putting the UK in a leading position for a few years in the 2010s, then created a cloud of uncertainty that has left our gas industry in limbo. Our mission to make the UK a clean energy superpower should be a powerful beacon that burns that uncertainty away, but it must include a tangible future role for the gas networks in our envisaged energy system. Ambition must be converted into some techno-economic goals that are clear and certain. For gas, that means committing to two things: storage and transportation. The prize is for the UK to once again lead and be an innovating leader in a new global energy outlook. It has become dazzlingly clear from my discussions with industry that storage is a key enabler.”
House of Commons18 June 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“A system that can produce, store and utilise clean gas is vital for electrification to be successful. Although gas is seen as cheap and dirty today, it does not have to remain so tomorrow. Its versatility means that it will be a valuable resource in the future. While forecasts are for the cost of clean gas to reduce dramatically in the future, its role will be one where its value is recognised, and cost parity with today is not a prerequisite for a future clean gas market. Private capital has successfully been released to deliver billions of pounds of investment into our gas networks, making them safe, fit for the future, and ready for future gases such as hydrogen and methane. More capital stands poised and ready to be invested.”
House of Commons18 June 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Alongside that, installation times are shorter, and homeowners avoid the need to install hot water storage tanks or replace radiators. Industry has already indicated that it will be ready, in four years, to make all its boilers 100% hydrogen-ready. It also indicated to a previous Secretary of State that it would provide price equivalence with the products in existence then. I recognise that the Climate Change Committee has tried to move us along by suggesting that there is no role for gas in the future of heat, but as someone who spent my entire career trying to decarbonise heat, I would humbly say that, although that guidance was well intended, it might be misguided. Even as electricity remains our primary energy vector, reliable energy generation depends on large-scale energy storage, and that means gas.”
House of Commons18 June 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Industry, transport and heat are all transitioning with uncertainty about the final mix of technologies. Government can secure the successful transition not by picking technologies to win or lose but by specifying a clear set of core energy vectors for the transition and investing in their core infrastructure. I put on record that those might be, for example, electricity, hydrogen and ammonia. As a case in point, my hon. Friend mentioned that his installation of a heat pump was fairly typical, costing around £15,000. My discussions with industry indicate that the installation of a hybrid heating system, even a new one, would typically come in at under £7,000—a significant difference in the up-front cost, which is a major barrier for homeowners.”
House of Commons18 June 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Those businesses are spread across our nation, not just in clusters, so a national gas system is the only way for UK industry to not only survive but thrive. Secondly, our national security depends on us having a multi-vector energy system. The UK has always ensured that homes, businesses and critical infrastructure have multiple energy sources available, typically electricity and either gas or oil fuels. As the world becomes increasingly uncertain and dangerous, now is not the time to roll back on the essential principles of security and resilience. Thirdly, as we face the challenge of rapidly delivering an energy transition, gas provides us with vital flexibility and optionality, which means that we can make it over the finish line in our target time.”
House of Commons18 June 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dame Siobhain. What better birthday present could my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase (Josh Newbury) have than debating such a crucial and timely topic? I anticipate that perhaps, as he blows out the candles on his cake, as someone who cares deeply about the energy transition, he might wish for something remarkably similar to a clean and green national gas network. Electrification is inevitably going to be a go-to tool for decarbonising many parts of our economy, but it is equally clear that it cannot do everything. First, gas can do things that electricity cannot. Industry needs it: around half a million businesses in the UK currently rely on gas for their operations, and around 30% of those say that electrification is simply not feasible for them, technically or economically.”
House of Commons18 June 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The incredible outdoor educators we have in and around Worcester, including the Bramblewood Project, have shown just how transformative outdoor education can be for students who would otherwise struggle to engage with education. We have seen incredible impacts on children with special educational needs and disabilities, but every child and every person can benefit from a real and living relationship with nature. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that outdoor education should be not alternative provision, but provision?”
House of Commons11 June 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I thank my hon. Friend for securing this debate. Last week, the residents of more than 40 flats in Barbourne Works, Worcester, were suddenly evicted after an inspection of unremediated cladding found such severe fire hazards that an immediate prohibition notice was issued. How that was able to happen is a question that must be answered. In the meantime, does the Minister agree that the building managers—in this case, FirstPort—must put residents first, and must not be allowed to let legal disputes or the allocation of blame slow down the urgent work of making the building safe and allowing residents to return home?”
House of Commons10 June 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Families in Worcester have spent years in limbo, grieving the loss of loved ones while navigating decades of delays and bureaucratic mazes that were handed down by the very systems intended to support them. I therefore welcome this statement of ambition in urgently delivering compensation and justice to those both infected and affected. The changes outlined at the end of March relating to people who lose their spouses as a result of infected blood are causing anxiety in my constituency. My constituents are concerned that the injustice of delay will be extended to them more severely than to others. Will the Paymaster General reassure widows and widowers whose spouses die from April this year that they will not be waiting years and years for support payments?”
House of Commons14 May 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The question changed when the world woke up to renewables and we, an island nation with exceptional wind resource, favourable geology and a skilled energy sector, realised that we could become a clean energy superpower. The prize is lower bills, increased security and the re-industrialisation of our economy, with all the jobs, innovation, trade and growth that come with it. To win that prize, our electricity system will need to double in capacity, accommodate dispersed, wild and unpredictable generation, and support varying demands that will become more mission-critical for our economy and everyday lives.”
House of Commons6 May 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I beg to move, That this House has considered energy resilience. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Efford. I submitted this motion before the power failures at Heathrow and the Iberian peninsula, before the latest run of cyber-attacks, and before international conditions led us to increase our spending on defence. A more volatile and uncertain future is changing the question that we expect our energy system to answer but, as an engineer who spent years working on low-carbon energy technology, I know that the question changed before that. The question changed when offshore wind became our cheapest source of electricity and when the payback period for photovoltaics dropped below just a handful of years.”
House of Commons6 May 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Yes, diverse energy sources will be critical for future system resilience. The Minister has clearly shown that the operational constraints for a robust electricity grid are known and in hand. The challenges of a future electricity system go far beyond those we face today. Three quarters of a century ago, when our energy systems were built in the shadow of world wars, resilience was front and centre, but the guiding star was efficiency, ensuring that energy taken from the ground was transferred with minimal loss. The defining challenge of tomorrow is to take energy that appears in places and at times determined by the weather, and deliver it in places and at times determined by the people who depend on it.”
House of Commons6 May 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Policy has been asking whether the answer in various sectors is electrification or hydrogen, but the design answer is resounding and simple: it is both. These two energy vectors are complementary, with hydrogen power stations able to provide our grid with headroom, responsive generation and inertia, and hydrogen storage able to provide our national asset of inter-day and inter-week energy storage. Our future electricity system needs hydrogen, and at a vast scale. The truth of the matter is that hydrogen will be as cheap and abundant as we design it to be.”
House of Commons6 May 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“There is a fuel that is carbon-free and 100% interoperable with electricity, and capable of being manufactured from electricity and cleanly converted back into it again at will: hydrogen. The Government, and others, have spotted the unique potential of hydrogen to fuel a clean and secure future for British industry. I would argue that they could go further, enabling industrial renewal in and around national clusters, but also in our towns and suburbs. As we seek to secure a material supply chain, the UK could deploy our immense wind resource and become a circular economy material recovery superpower of Europe. Over recent years, however, the debate has become paralysed by an either/or question. Electrification and hydrogen have been presented in some sectors as mutually exclusive. Hydrogen has been presented as scarce and expensive.”
House of Commons6 May 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Those fuels intrinsically store energy indefinitely and carry vast amounts of energy through simple infrastructure, such as pipes and tanks. Our gas system currently carries three times as much energy each year, and up to four times as much in a day as our total electricity system. It shares its energy storage capability with the electricity system through gas power stations, our core electricity resilience assets. We have found our dependency on gas to be a weakness, but only because we depend on it for our system’s strength. So, we face a crux. How might we win the energy resilience prize, benefiting from the clean versatility of electricity and the stabilising, security-critical storage capability of fuel? There is one answer that the UK has itself pioneered.”
House of Commons6 May 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The system must be resilient against market-induced price instability and commercial failures, both for our security and for those markets to function healthily. That all misses the single largest and most novel component of our future energy system: clean, long-duration energy storage at scale—storage, not just for seconds through inertia, not just for minutes through demand-side response, and not just for a day or night through in-building storage, but intraweek and longer to ride through long stagnant weather events or other major disruptions. Today, our energy resilience is assured by the incredible flexibility and capacity of fuels: oil in transport and off-grid heat, and methane gas for heat in buildings and industry.”
House of Commons6 May 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Either our grid must not depend on signals such as dynamic pricing to keep working, or those signals must be multiple-fault tolerant. With distributed generators playing a larger role in future, avoiding cascade failures requires them to support graceful degradation instead of disconnecting in the face of uncertainty. This dynamic, digitally enabled future can introduce other risks, not only for resilience but for social equity. It must not penalise those who cannot afford battery storage, and each internal system boundary and each new pricing location threatens overall value. Alongside markets, our systems must incorporate core features that function primarily in the public interest.”
House of Commons6 May 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“In the future, we expect markets to play a bigger part in our electricity system, working in shorter timeframes and in a more distributed way. When we think about resilience, the design of our economic and commercial energy system and the digital systems that enact it will be absolutely critical. The commercial energy system will be as critical as the physical one. Whereas markets may be good for some resilience attributes such as flexibility and diversity, they are often bad for others, such as redundancy, continuity and headroom. Also, our new digital communications channels offer potential single points of failure for our system. This is a fundamental question of national security. In the light of a string of cyber-attacks, it is crucial that when our digital world fails, our heating, lights, sanitation and vehicles must not.”
House of Commons6 May 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗