Peak Cluster Pipeline and Project
House of Commons · Westminster Hall · 15 Jul 2026 · 34 speeches · Official Report
Before I call Esther McVey to move the motion, and then the Minister to respond, I remind Members that they may make a speech only with the prior permission of the Member in charge of the debate. No such notice has been given. There will not be an opportunity for the Member in charge to wind up the debate, as is the convention for 30-minute debates.
I beg to move, That this House has considered the impact of the Peak Cluster Pipeline and project. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Roger. It is good to see the Minister in his place. I hope to get some meaningful answers from him today on this project; up until now, those have proved elusive from his Department and the Government. The Peak Cluster is a carbon capture and storage project. It will take carbon dioxide from cement and lime plants in Derbyshire and Staffordshire, pressurise it, and transfer it 125 miles across Cheshire, Wirral and then off the coast from Wirral, where it will be stored beneath the seabed. It has been made clear to me by scientists and engineers that the project is wrong-minded and wholly unnecessary.
I fully support the right hon. Lady’s efforts on behalf of her constituents. I have an understanding of the issues. Does she agree that any final approval for the Peak Cluster project must include cast-iron, legally binding guarantees to protect landowners’ rights, and that local environmental objections and community safety fears must be genuinely addressed rather than bypassed by central Government?
I agree, but none of that has been forthcoming to the public, no matter how hard they have tried, and the public do not want the project. Right across the region, there have been demonstrations and councils have voted against it. At a recent public meeting in Byley, close to one of the proposed pipeline routes, the failings were laid bare. The local communities of Cheshire, Wirral and Derbyshire know this, and that is why they are calling for the project to be stopped. The project is completely unnecessary. It is a madness of a project-a net zero vanity project. I stand here today on behalf of all those members of the public calling for the Peak Cluster project to be stopped. I call, too, for the Government to answer the most basic of questions about the project, and to stop treating the public like mushrooms, keeping them in the dark and feeding them absolute rubbish. The Government cannot dodge responsibility and accountability for this project, as they seek to by ducking parliamentary questions and freedom of information requests. Last week I raised a point of order on the Floor of the House about the woeful responses on this matter, only for the Minister to reply that the project is nothing to do with the Government. He said: “It is a private project.” -[ Official Report , 7 July 2026; Vol. 789, c. 175.] Really, Minister? If one delves a little bit deeper into the Peak Cluster project, it is revealed that it has deep, direct, structural and financial links to Government,...
The North Sea Transition Authority deals with many private sector companies around oil and gas drilling. I agree that it is a public quango, but surely the right hon. Member agrees that it does not have responsibility for what Shell or BP do in the North sea any more than it has responsibility for what Peak Cluster may or may not do through Cheshire and underneath the Liverpool bay?
I thank my neighbour for asking that question. If he listens to the rest of the debate, he will see that this is not a private project; it has deep structural and financial ties to, and sign-off by, the Government. It is not, as he wrongly refers to it, a Shell or a BP. That is not true. That is the myth that we have to dispel today. So far, £28 million of funding for the project-nearly half of the money to date-has come from the National Wealth Fund, which is wholly owned by the Government. When announcing the project, the National Wealth Fund said on its own website that it “has an important role to play in helping to amplify government policy”, and on the gov.uk website, the Energy Secretary classed it as a “landmark investment”. The issues I am raising are not highly technical or obscure; they are straightforward, basic questions about safety, cost and the use of taxpayers’ money. The cost is billions of pounds, which rests on the shoulders of the taxpayer. The amount already spent is in the region of £60 million, and that was just to secure planning permission. The full construction costs are estimated at £5 billion, although the full cost is likely to exceed that. HyNet, a similar project, has cost £2.5 billion for just 31 km of new pipeline, in comparison with the 200 km planned for the Peak Cluster. As the Government have so far committed £28 million through the National Wealth Fund, will the Minister say what process was followed before the fund invested in the...
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Roger, although the debate has probably not been conducted in the best way to discuss this topic. I draw the attention of the right hon. Member for Tatton (Esther McVey) to the recent Adjournment debate secured by her colleague the hon. Member for Chester South and Eddisbury (Aphra Brandreth), which I think she was unable to attend.
Order. I assume that the Minister is not suggesting that the debate has been in any way out of order.
That is not what I said at all, Sir Roger. The debate has been perfectly in order, but I do not think the public watching will have got much from it. That is my assessment and, I am sure, the assessment of many others watching. As I was saying, I encourage the right hon. Lady, if she did not see the recent debate on this topic, to look at the remarks by her hon. Friend the Member for Chester South and Eddisbury, who rightly raised concerns about local communities, but in a way that was, I think, based slightly more in fact than in rhetoric. I will come to the right hon. Lady’s questions.
Will the Minister give way?
No, I will not just now, because the right hon. Lady has just given a speech. I will respond to some of her points.
Then don’t be so dismissive!
Order.
Let me respond to the right hon. Lady’s points. She has now accused me twice in this House of being “elusive” and of “obfuscation”. I have answered every single one of her written parliamentary questions. I am not responsible for the fact that she may or may not like the answers I give, but I have answered every single one of her questions, and I responded to her point of order in the main Chamber. I resent the implication that I have not done that, because I take my responsibilities to Parliament very seriously. First, I will come back a little from the Peak Cluster itself to make some points about why carbon capture is important. I say that partly because carbon capture technology has been around a long time. The previous Government, in which the right hon. Lady served in various ministerial roles, drove forward investment in carbon capture, which we have continued. This is not something that just appeared in July last year; it is a technology that Governments have recognised will play an important part in decarbonising our energy system. This technology is also important for particular parts of our industry, which are now competing against imports from other parts of Europe that utilise carbon capture, usage and storage. Cement is one example that the Peak Cluster project is looking at, but we are taking forward other important clusters, such as the Viking and Acorn clusters, that the previous Conservative Government supported. Decarbonising cement might not seem like a...
Will the Minister give way?
I will give way in just a second. The right hon. Lady’s point about the NSIP regime was quite wrong. Decisions are made based on applications that are submitted, but no application has been submitted. They are based on all the facts, including the community engagement that takes place-I will come back to that after I have given way. Applications must demonstrate genuine community engagement and learning from the views of communities; it is not just a listening exercise but a shaping exercise, and that has not yet concluded.
Can the Minister confirm that the final sign-off on this project, via a development consent order, will be done by the Secretary of State for Energy-by, in other words, the Government? Is that true or false?
I think I just said that the nationally significant infrastructure project regime exists so that decisions can be made at a national level by different Secretaries of State. In this case, it is an energy project, so yes, the decision will be made by the Secretary of State for Energy. The right hon. Lady seems to be implying that there is somehow a predetermined outcome, but the application has not even been submitted for consideration, so I do not think that is a sensible position to take. The right hon. Lady also cast aspersions on the North Sea Transition Authority, which is an independent regulator. It was the Oil and Gas Authority for many years; it is now the North Sea Transition Authority. It has operated under Governments of all political persuasions to make decisions about how we steward the North sea licensing regime not only for oil and gas but, increasingly, for carbon capture. It makes those decisions independently of Government; Ministers do not interfere in the decision making of the NSTA. Again, she seems to be drawing conclusions about an independent regulator that are neither fair on the regulator nor accurate in fact.
Will the Minister give way on another inaccurate piece of information?
Will the Minister give way?
I will give way to my hon. Friend.
The Minister has referred to the fact that, as yet, there has been no application and therefore no ministerial decision, but he has also said that community engagement is an important part of the decision-making process. My concern on behalf of my constituents is that they do not feel engaged with; they do not feel that they have a voice in this process and they do not feel that they are getting information at all. I appreciate that it is not the Minister’s job to provide that information, but can he be extremely clear about the level of engagement that is required?
My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and that was the point I was going to come on to. Community engagement is absolutely critical. It is an absolutely firm expectation from Ministers that any of these large-scale infrastructure projects should have meaningful engagement with communities. However, it is also absolutely critical for any project that wants to succeed in the NSIP process to demonstrate not only that it has carried out consultation but that that consultation has had a meaningful impact on the shaping of the project. That is one of the key factors in decision making in NSIP applications. I want to echo a point that was made in the Adjournment debate on this subject and that many Members have raised with me outside of debates in Parliament, which is about the need for extensive consultation on this particular project. Criticisms have been levelled at the Peak Cluster project that its consultation with communities has not yet been good enough. I understand that it is planning to do more, but it is not for me to direct it to do that. It must engage meaningfully with communities because, once a proposal has been submitted, if community engagement has not been meaningful, that will count against the project. There is a wider argument here about principle. The Government have said from day one of coming into office that it is important that we build things as a country again and that we do not become a country that just spends decades talking about important...
The important thing for my residents is this: does this project work and is it safe? Those are the two key points. I note that my hon. Friend the Member for Wirral West (Matthew Patrick) is in his place today. He has been challenging these plans on behalf of his community, as have I and my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Sarah Russell). This is not a done deal, and Peak Cluster needs to listen to the community’s concerns and act on them. Does the Minister agree with all those points?
First, on the point about this somehow being a Government project, it is absolutely not. That is why my answers to the right hon. Member for Tatton reflected the fact that, right now, private developers across the country in a whole range of sectors are developing private propositions for all sorts of things. Until those proposals come to Government, either with a request for funding or as part of the NSIP regime, the Government do not have a view on whether they are Government projects or not. They are not delivered by Government; they are private investments and therefore it is for those companies to put forward their proposition. The Government will then take a view on it, as we do with all nationally significant infrastructure projects. That is the first point about this being a Government project, which it is absolutely not. Peak Cluster is also not one of the clusters that the Government have initially taken forward. We are taking forward two clusters initially to drive carbon capture and storage; the Peak Cluster is not one of them. I make that point again on the record. My hon. Friend the Member for Mid Cheshire (Andrew Cooper) made a second point about safety. It is really important to say that carbon capture and storage is not a new technology; it has been tried and tested, across industry and across power generation at scale, for a long time. Geological carbon dioxide storage has been in operation for decades. Norway has stored CO 2 since 1996-it has stored over...
I see the hon. Member for Wirral West (Matthew Patrick) in the seat behind the Minister, although I appreciate that, as a Parliamentary Private Secretary, he is not able to speak. The Minister might not know this. but I confirm that Wirral council in its entirety, across all parties, objected to the Peak Cluster project. Do the Minister and the PPS sitting behind him know that?
I am aware of that. Councils can take a view on a whole range of things; I do not think there is anything controversial about a council making its views known on a particular project. It is very welcome to do that, and that is why we have democratically elected councillors in this country. On a final point by the right hon. Lady and others about Government funding for this project, she draws a connection between the investment of the National Wealth Fund and the fact that it is wholly owned by the Government. I understand the connection, but equally, it is not correct to say that that represents financial support from my Department or the Government for a project. The National Wealth Fund was set up to provide investment for important infrastructure projects, and it makes its decisions independently from Government. I have not seen or signed off any funding applications for the Peak Cluster pipeline and nor have any Ministers. The NWF makes those decisions on its own framework, as set out by the Treasury and Parliament. It should not be taken as any indication of my Department’s support or otherwise for a particular project.
What sort of people work at the National Wealth Fund and make these decisions? Who is evaluating this?
I can write to my hon. Friend with the specifics of the investment committee, but the National Wealth Fund is set up independently from Government to take stakes in projects on behalf of the British public, so that we would own a stake in some of these projects-instead of just handing out grants for things, we would actually own part of them. There is an investment committee that sets up these decisions, and the Treasury is the body responsible for the National Wealth Fund. I can write to her with specifics.
Did the Minister just say, “so that the Government can part-own some of this”? Were those the words he used?
The principle of the National Wealth Fund is that we can make financial investments in projects. In some of those cases, that means taking an equity stake. Sometimes it does not, but sometimes it does. The National Wealth Fund has been around for long enough now; I am sure Members are aware of it. I will close with something that, in part, reflects what Members said in the Adjournment debate secured by the hon. Member for Chester South and Eddisbury. Any large-scale infrastructure project comes with concerns from local communities, and it is right and proper that such communities voice those concerns in any way they can. That has to be a respectful exchange of views, which has not always been the case thus far, but I understand the strength of feeling on this-it is absolutely understandable. The exchange of views is important, and everyone, whether or not they are listening to this debate, should know that the Government take community engagement very seriously. We expect to see meaningful engagement with communities, but at the same time the Government have set out an ambitious plan to decarbonise our economy. That is important for a whole range of reasons, but it is also a hugely important economic opportunity for us as a country. Decarbonising hard-to-abate sectors such as cement and lime, which are critical to our economy, is difficult. CCUS is a route to doing that. It is essential not only for meeting our climate commitments, but for the economic opportunities that it...
Will the Minister give way in the final 30 seconds?
I am just rounding up. In the end, I hope that we will come to a view where communities feel they have been heard and where projects can move forward on their individual merits. That will be part of the process when we come to it. Question put and agreed to .
Sitting suspended.