Robert Marshall-Andrews

|

Minister refuses meeting with Member of Parliament over coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth

The Minister of State for Energy, Malcolm Wicks, has refused to meet with Bob Marshall-Andrews QC, Labour Member of Parliament for Medway, to discuss the application presently before the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (and likely to be decided within weeks).  The application has caused national and international controversy and was the subject of a Greenpeace demonstration earlier this year.  If granted permission the new coal-fired power station will emit 4.5 million tons of CO2 per annum accounting for over 5% of the target carbon reduction by 2020.

 

In April 2007 wrote to the then Secretary of State, Alistair Darling at the Department for Trade and Industry and in February 2008 Bob Marshall-Andrews wrote to John Hutton, Secretary of State at BERR, indicating his grave reservations about the application.

 

Fresh  controversy arose as a result of emails obtained by Greenpeace under the Freedom of Information passing directly between E.ON and a senior official at the Department, Gary Mohammed, Manager of Power Stations and Pipeline Consents (see articles in Financial Times and Guardian, Friday 1 February, and Observer, Sunday 2 March).  In the emails Mohammed agrees to remove conditions relating to carbon capture from draft conditions of the application.  This agreement is contained in an email six minutes after communication from the company protesting at this exercising of the Secretary of State’s powers.

 

Bob Marshall-Andrews said: “This is an extraordinary state of affairs which requires clear explanation and I have put down a Parliamentary Question in order to obtain it.  The fact that Senior Managers are refusing to meet with Members of Parliament (as a matter of “propriety”) while senior officers in their Department are apparently in close and daily contact with the multi-national applicant company raises obvious matters of the gravest concern.  This is particularly the case where the application poses such vital questions as to the Government’s environmental credentials.”

 All supporting documents are available on request.

 

PARLIAMENTARY QUESTION

 

TO ASK THE SECRETARY OF STATE FOR BUSINESS, ENTERPRISE AND REGULATORY REFORM IF HE WILL MAKE A STATEMENT EXPLAINING THE APPARENT WITHDRAWAL OF CONDITIONS RELATING TO CARBON CAPTURE CONTAINED IN EMAILS PASSING BETWEEN SENIOR DEPARTMENT OFFICIALS AND THE APPLICANT COMPANY, DATED 12 JANUARY 2008 AT 10.21 A.M.; 16 JANUARY AT 8.16 A.M.; 16 JANUARY AT 8.22 A.M.