Keir Starmer has signalled his government will drastically increase its green investment plans in an attempt to avoid a rerun of 1980s-style industrial decline by safeguarding jobs in heartland manufacturing communities.
On a visit to a Merseyside glass factory on Friday to unveil billions of pounds in funding for carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects, the prime minister suggested there would be more public money made available for new technologies.
“It’s just the start,” he told workers at the Encirc plant on the banks of the Mersey, between Chester and Runcorn.
“I’ve always believed clean energy is a golden opportunity for our country: a chance to bring security and hope for working people, to relight the fires of hope in those areas that were hit so hard by deindustrialisation.”
At the end of a week when the last coal-fired power station in Britain closed, and virgin steelmaking ended in south Wales, Starmer said Labour would prioritise investment to kickstart a moment of “industrial renewal”.
It is understood a string of funding pledges involving public and private sector capital will be announced over the coming days, for projects across the country, before the government hosts a global investment summit on 14 October.
Rachel Reeves, who was in Merseyside with Starmer and Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, is also expected to pave the way for an increase in public investment at her budget on 30 October, involving changes to the Treasury’s self-imposed fiscal rules to help lay the foundations for economic growth.
Starmer said: “Investment is how we will change the country. We have to start. We have to be pragmatic. We have to invest only where we have clear and undeniable potential, to make sure like today there’s a place for long-term growth.”
The government on Friday said it would commit almost £22bn over 25 years to two CCS projects: one on Merseyside, and another on Teesside. The technology, which involves trapping emissions and burying them under the seabed, is controversial because it has never been used at commercial scale in the UK before. Climate scientists say big energy firms could use it to extend the life of their fossil fuel assets.
Private sector firms, including the energy giants BP and Norwegian energy company Equinor, are expected to spend £8bn alongside the government funding.
Successive governments have pledged to fund carbon capture projects in recent decades, only to pull back at a later stage. While Rishi Sunak’s government promised £20bn of investment in 2023, Labour says the Tories never budgeted for it and no contracts with industry were signed.
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Starmer sought to draw a link between investing in clean technologies and preventing a rerun of the 1980s when whole communities were cut economically adrift by Margaret Thatcher’s government amid rapid deindustrialisation.
“If you take that away from people without a plan to replace it, it’s like losing a part of yourself: a limb, an open wound, the heart ripped out of the nation,” he said.
The prime minister said CCS was vital for maintaining jobs in industries where some form of carbon involvement would be required long into the future, including glass and cement manufacturing.
Speaking on the Encirc factory floor, where up to 30,000 bottles are made an hour, he said: “You can’t bury your head and hide from the future, that’s how you go backwards. But what you can do is use the power of government, the strength and skills of the nation, to shape that future in your interest. That’s what we do today in CCS. That is the country’s heritage.”