Speeches by Murray.

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

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

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

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

“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?”

“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?”

“What I picked up from NESO was that community energy generation schemes are an additional challenge for it, as opposed to a particular benefit. People’s general conception about community generation is that they will benefit from it. They think they will get that power and therefore they will not need to take power fro…”

“The complexity of the system is clear. SSEN has described itself as a strong advocate for community energy prioritisation into the grid queue. You have been talking about projects that directly benefit customers. Would it be possible for community energy schemes to put power straight into those schemes, or does it stil…”

“Continuing on this similar topic, how confident are you that GB Energy’s plans for community energy are well designed and deliverable?”

“Thank you.”

“Do you think that that solution is workable if a similar outage came again? I suppose, in addition to that, BT has taken the cost of that. Who do you think will ultimately bear the costs of these outages?”

“The contract for the service should include delivering the wider service when things go wrong?”

“I would like to change to asking you specifically about the resilience that is or is not built in and how effective Starlink was in meeting the needs of local people. I am just wondering whether there was a cohort of people who were better supported when Starlink came in and whether other people were not as well provid…”

“Transport in Scotland is devolved, but Labour’s new electric vehicle tax is not. Scotland is home to the largest constituencies by area in the UK. This will mean that many rural Scots, who already pay more for electricity at home, will pay more tax despite having less access to charging infrastructure. Can the Secretar…”