Meeting of the Parliament 26 November 2025
Today is a really dark day for the oil and gas industry and for the north-east of Scotland. We have seen headline after headline in The Press and Journal this week on the damage that the energy profits levy is having. I assure Labour Party MSPs that that was not scaremongering—we must all brace ourselves for what is coming next.
My party has called it an “oil and gas emergency”, and that is by no means overdramatic. It is an emergency, and we need to brace ourselves for a tsunami of job losses across the sector after today’s budget.
As the Office for Budget Responsibility revealed earlier, the EPL will remain, but the intake from it is tailing off dramatically as it kills off the industry and thousands of jobs with it. It is completely wrong.
I have met many energy companies over the past few weeks—I guess that the Cabinet Secretary for Climate Action and Energy has done so as well, but no one from the Labour Party ever seems to attend the meetings that are called. The energy companies tell me time and again how bad things are, that they are not replacing people who leave, their order book is reducing, they are focusing on work overseas, they are moving their skills overseas and they are downsizing and getting rid of offices. The sad and frustrating part is that that decline is self-inflicted and driven by political policy. It is a classic case of shooting ourselves in the foot.
It is not just the north-east that is suffering—the news from Grangemouth and Mossmorran is a result of the North Sea contracting, with less product flowing to them. I was at a meeting last night about Mossmorran, and I was told that the reasons for closure are Government policies. The plant pays carbon tax of £20 million per year, with that amount due to double. It has high energy costs and there is less ethane available because of the North Sea shutdown. We were told that the ethylene that Mossmorran produces is 50 per cent more expensive than that of its competitors abroad. How can the plant compete in that market?
When global companies are choosing to walk away from Scottish energy and manufacturing because policy is hostile and uncertain, that is not a transition—it is economic vandalism. We should brace ourselves for more, because as Governments force the decline of home-grown hydrocarbons, more and more large pieces of infrastructure will become unviable. The gas plants, the pipelines and the terminals are all at risk.