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Oil industry executives were leaned on by the UK government to voice support for its North Sea oil legislation ahead of an imminent House of Commons vote as the controversial policy faced fresh criticism from a senior Tory MP.
The Offshore Petroleum Licensing Bill requires the North Sea Transition Authority, the industry regulator, to hold annual licensing rounds for drilling for oil and gas.
MPs had been poised to discuss the legislation and vote on it on Monday night, although this was postponed at the last minute after a separate Commons debate on the Post Office over-ran its allocated time.
The bill has been dismissed as a political stunt given that the NSTA already carries out licensing rounds in most years as a matter of course.
The regulator’s board agreed at a private meeting in September that the new mandatory annual process was unnecessary and would make no difference to its attempts to maximise the recovery of UK petroleum.
The government believes that legislating in support of North Sea oil sends out a potentially popular message to the public about economic growth and energy security — in contrast to Labour’s plans to halt any new drilling licences in the basin.
Senior oil and gas executives have privately confirmed that government aides had been in contact encouraging them to put out positive statements about the new legislation. “It’s fair to say the government was keen to have support for this,” said one.
But one government official said that it was “not really out of the ordinary” to encourage third-party quotes around policy announcements.
In a sign of further unrest among Conservative MPs over the legislation, Alok Sharma, a former energy secretary who went on to chair the COP26 climate talks in Glasgow, became the latest senior Tory to hit out, pledging on Monday morning that he would vote against it.
“What this bill does do is reinforce that unfortunate perception about the UK rolling back from climate action,” he warned, reinforcing criticism from environmentalists that the government is sending out a message that Britain is getting cold feet about the transition to net zero by 2050.
The former cabinet minister argued that the extra drilling would have virtually zero effect on people’s energy bills given UK fossil fuel production is controlled by private companies and sold on global markets.
His intervention came as Chris Skidmore formally submitted his resignation as an MP on Monday triggering a by-election in protest at the bill. The former junior minister also said he would quit the Conservative party when he announced his intention to leave parliament early at the end of last week.
Jeremy Hunt, chancellor, has defended the bill, arguing the UK would still need to get a “significant proportion” of its energy from fossil fuels as the economy transitions to net zero and that domestic oil and gas was “four times cleaner” than imports.
David Whitehouse, chief executive of Offshore Energies UK, said that Britain’s oil and gas output was still forecast to fall but that it was right to prioritise homegrown production to support energy security, jobs and the economy as they “manage production decline”.
But Beth Walker, senior policy adviser at the independent think-tank E3G, said: “This bill is no more than a political stunt from the Conservatives. It will do nothing to tackle energy security, lower prices for consumers, or create new jobs.”
Skidmore is understood to have applied for the vacant role of chair of the Climate Change Committee, the government’s independent climate advisers. But several sources in government and at climate NGOs said the frontrunner was Lord David Willetts, a former Conservative minister who is currently president of the Resolution Foundation think-tank.
Skidmore did not respond to a request for comment. Willetts declined to comment.
