Treaty of Lisbon (No. 2)

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Northavon (Steve Webb) and my hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough (Sir Stuart Bell) and to have this opportunity to contribute to the debate on an issue that is of real and growing importance to all our constituents. Despite the fact that the United Kingdom, thanks to our own liberalised energy market, has for many years been enjoying, on average, lower energy prices than those across the rest of the EU, in recent months all of us will have heard complaints from our constituents about the severe prices rises facing consumers following the wholesale price rises across the globe. At the same time, we have seen for many years the rightly increasing concern among the British public about the impact of climate change, and therefore the need to change—indeed, to reduce—our energy use. I intend to develop a point made by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform in his opening speech: that the need for more action in Europe on energy issues is one reason—for me, one of many reasons—to welcome the Lisbon treaty and the Bill. Some years ago, when I was Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, I presented to the House this Government's first energy White Paper. We confronted the decline in Britain's North sea oil resources; we examined the policy implications of Britain ceasing to be self-sufficient—or largely so—in energy supplies and becoming a net importer of energy; for the first time we put climate change and carbon emission reductions at the heart of our energy policy; and we argued that in future, energy policy had to be central both to our relations and actions within the EU and, more broadly, to our foreign policy.