Labour MP defends plans to block North Sea drilling against union criticism

The North Sea oil and gas industry is in decline, a shadow business minister has said as she defended plans to block new drilling licences from 2050, a move criticised by trade unions.

Seema Malhotra said the proposal was an important part of the transition to net zero, by phasing out new fields from which to extract fossil fuels and boosting Britain’s “sovereign capability” for clean and green energy.

“It is important now you don’t have a policy that rides a coach and horses through any of your climate pledges,” she told Sky News on Thursday.

“And if other countries did the same [with policies that broke climate pledges] – if that happened around the world – we would actually see global warming increase by 3%. So you have to make some of those choices now.”

Unions, including Unite and GMB, have said the plan would cause large job losses, but Malhotra stressed that Labour wanted jobs to be transferred to green energy industries, not lost.

Related: Does the UK really need to drill for more North Sea oil and gas?

A rift has been growing within Labour since news of the pledge to end new oil and gas extraction emerged.

Gary Smith, the general secretary of GMB, said on Sunday that Labour had “got it wrong” and risked creating “a cliff-edge with oil and gas extraction from the North Sea”.

Sharon Graham, the leader of Unite, said last week that Keir Starmer’s announcement had “left out everything that was important – the detail”, and that he should have been clear workers would not be hammered by the transition.

The number of workers directly employed on oil and gas fields in the North Sea are estimated at 20,000, with a further 200,000 jobs onshore.

Labour has said it expects its plan to shift the focus to renewables to create up to half a million jobs in the industry, including at least 50,000 in Scotland.

It has been criticised by the Conservatives, but welcomed by the UK’s most senior climate adviser, John Gummer, who was also a Conservative environment secretary in the 1990s.

Malhotra said the move was necessary because “a just transition means having a plan now for how you’re going to see some of those jobs and those skills transfer to where the future is”.

Starmer, the Labour leader, was to visit British Steel on Thursday to outline plans for investing in it as a “foundation industry”, she added.

“We’re not going to be able to build those new turbines, wind turbines or solar energy or look at hydrogen as a future, or look at carbon capture and storage without having some of that sovereign capability here.

“And other countries, frankly, are ahead of us in this race. We’ve got to look now and make decisions for how we have a global competitiveness in our green industry, and make sure that we see jobs transition over a period of time in a planned way, working with unions, so that everyone who has got those skills now in other energy sectors will be able to transition to be part of that future.”