𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Kemi Badenoch will force a crunch vote on oil and gas in the Commons on Tuesday. The Tories have called on the Government to approve the Rosebank and Jackdaw oil and gas fields.

The party leader said: “Labour and Ed Miliband are killing our oil and gas industry for no good reason. Drilling our own oil and gas is good for energy security, it’s good for economic security, it’s good for our national security. Today, Labour and SNP MPs can choose to stand up for workers in Aberdeen and across the north-east of Scotland and protect the jobs and livelihoods of tens of thousands, or they can continue to blindly follow Miliband and Starmer as they cause untold damage to one of our critical national industries.”

The Government’s proposed Energy Independence Bill would ban new oil and gas licences. The Conservatives say this policy has already accelerated the decline in investment, with no exploration wells drilled in the UK in 2025 for the first time since 1964.

Their proposed amendment to the King’s Speech calls on the Government to drop its opposition to new oil and gas licences and instead support a presumption in favour of approval.

Scotland’s offshore energy sector supports 128,400 jobs, including 111,800 in oil and gas alone, and contributed more than £24billion to the Scottish economy in 2024.

Some 24,000 people are directly employed in oil and gas in Aberdeenshire, where the impact of declining investment is being felt most sharply.

Shadow Energy Secretary Claire Coutinho said: “Ed Miliband is deluded if he thinks shutting down the North Sea gives us energy independence.

“We are losing thousands of jobs across Scotland, hammering the local economies in Aberdeen and the North-east, and sending billions of pounds to Norway for the same gas we could drill ourselves. It is the ultimate hairshirt climate policy, which isn’t helping the environment or the economy.

“Today we are forcing a vote so that Labour and SNP MPs have the chance to back Scottish workers, a common-sense approach to energy, and to send Ed Miliband and his dangerous ideology packing.”

Mr Miliband insisted last month that the Government is taking a “pragmatic” approach to exploiting the oil and gas resources in the North Sea, which has seen ministers come under pressure from Reform, the Tories and US president Donald Trump to maximise.

Speaking on Sky News in April, Mr Miliband said: “Our position has always been a pragmatic, sensible position that says we don’t want to turn off the taps, but we’re not going to extract every last drop.”

Questioned repeatedly on whether Labour, which pledged no new licences to explore new fields the North Sea in its manifesto, would allow new drilling in the basin, he pointed to previous announcements on allowing “tiebacks”, which would enable new production linked to existing fields.

But he said there had been a “total and wilful mischaracterisation” of Labour’s position.

He said: “Our position has always been a very, very sensible position, which is, we say: ‘Yes, we’re going to use this resource, but what we’re not going to do is drill every last drop, which will be a climate disaster for the country and for the world.’”

He also refused to be drawn on whether he would allow the controversial Jackdaw gas field and Rosebank oil field to go ahead, after their initial approval was withdrawn following a Supreme Court ruling on fossil fuel developments.

“We’ve got a proper planning process, and as you would expect, we’re going to look at all of the facts, which is what I’ve got to do as a decision-maker, and come to a view,” he said.