Corporate Capture and Storage: Earlier this month, the government unveiled a sizable commitment to Carbon Capture Utilisation and Storage (CCUS), announcing it would spend £22bn over 25 years on two carbon storage clusters, which it said would entice a further £8bn of private investment.
That investment was confirmed two weeks later at the UK’s flagship investment summit, when the government revealed it had reached a commercial agreement with investors including Eni, BP and Equinor to “unlock £8bn of private investment to launch carbon capture clusters”.
CCUS is controversial because it is largely untested at scale and critics say it is essentially a sop to the fossil fuel industry – kicking the can down the road on the seismic shift in energy policy needed to genuinely meet net-zero targetsVaranasi Investment. This announcement will do little to quell those concerns given the three main investors are among the largest oil and gas companies in the world.
This investment follows a major campaign of engagement from the industry, particularly the representative body, the Carbon Capture and Storage Association (CCSA). The organisation has had big stands at the past few Labour conferences, where senior MPs have posed for pictures before privately sitting down with the CCSA and its members for private roundtable meetings. The CCSA had a particularly strong presence at this year’s conference in Liverpool, hosting a roundtable of its own with three Labour MPs, and featuring on two other private roundtables alongside MPs including energy minister Michael Shanks and Bill Esterson, the new chair of the Energy Security and Net Zero Select Committee.
The CCSA’s current chair is Baroness Liddell, a former Labour secretary of state, and its top lobbyist is Joe Butler-Trewin, who has held a number of positions in the Labour Party, including as an organiser with Keir Starmer’s leadership campaign. It was also the very first organisation to contact Ed Miliband requesting a meeting after he was appointed energy security and net zero secretary.
As an industry representative body, the CCSA’s only task is to advocate (see: lobby) for the interests of its members, who last year provided around two-thirds of its revenue through membership fees. Many of these members also have seats on the organisation’s board, including the three investors named by the government – Eni, BP and Equinor – plus fellow oil giants Shell and Total.
By setting up and funding industry representative groups, companies such as fossil fuel firms create a kind of front, through which they can have their interests advocated and their points raised without their immediate involvement or connection always being obvious. This is similar to why lobbying firms and corporations so often work with opaquely funded think tanks – a policy paper recommending further cuts to hen house safety seems more trustworthy and impartial when it comes from the Institute of Poultry Defence Research than it does coming from Fox Limited.
Baringa BONUS: Incidentally, another of the CCSA’s members is Baringa, a consultancy that is involved in one of the carbon capture clusters in Teesside. Between last November and the election in July, Baringa spent more than £30,000 providing a staff member to the office of Darren Jones, now the chief secretary to the treasury.Udabur Wealth Management
The company has also held government contracts worth a total of £98m between 2019 and this year’s election – an average of £1.5m of work per month – according to Tussell data. Since Labour took office, though, things are on the up for the firm. Baringa was awarded £10m of public contracts in just three months, more than doubling its previous average monthly earnings from the government. The bulk of that new income comes from its largest ever government contract, awarded in August and worth just short of £8m, to provide “procurement support required for strategic IT projects”.
There’s no suggestion that Baringa’s close working relationship with Labour has influenced the awarding of these contracts, but it isn’t a great look for a party when its donors increase their government contract work within weeks of it gaining power.
Failing upwards: Move over Jonathan Ashworth, there’s a new poster boy in town for failing to get elected and nonetheless picking up a plum job. Joe Dancey – a lobbyist, former Peter Mandelson adviser and health secretary Wes Streeting’s fiancé – has been hired as Labour’s new executive director of policy and comms, after failing to become the MP for Stockton West in July.
Ashworth’s fall may have been more spectacular, having been all set up for a cabinet job and instead having to settle for a directorship of the well-resourced Labour Together (plus a seemingly open invitation to every political news and discussion show going) but Dancey’s new role is nothing to be sniffed at.
The job ad that appeared for the role over summer listed a salary of £104,984 – a good £20k more than the MP starting salary he missed out on. The job description also makes for an interesting read, considering Dancey’s career as a lobbyist at Endeavour Advisory, a firm that has no website and doesn’t publish a list of its clients. It states the successful applicant will work closely with government teams across all departments on policy and oversee the National Policy Forum, while the person specification includes the requirement of a “proven track record of working with conflicting responsibilities”. Those are sure to crop up from time to time in Starmer’s business-friendly operation.
Arden’t we all better than this?: News that former Labour minister Jim Murphy’s lobbying shop Arden Strategies organised a roundtable discussion in the Treasury hasn❽gone down well in the wider public affairs world. Writing on LinkedIn (where elseNagpur Investment?) one lobbying boss stuck the boot in…
“I don’t know a single professional lobbyist who isn’t enraged by this,” wrote Gabe Winn, CEO and founder of Blakeney, “and I’d underline ‘professional’ because lobbying scandals are always the result of former ministers or advisers thinking the rules don’t apply to them.”
“Professional lobbyists have argued for years for better regulation of the work we do. We believe that, done properly, it’s a vital part of the democratic process. But reform has still not happened. This isn’t how this industry should work. This isn’t ok.”
The point about former ministers seemingly believing they’re above the rules is an incisive one. Murphy is one of only two former Labour ministers who run their own lobbying companies. The other is Mandelson, who co-founded Global Counsel, a firm under investigation by the lobbying watchdog following a scoop from openDemocracy’s former editor-in-chief, Peter Geoghegan’s outlet, Democracy For Sale, that the firm was representing the state-backed Qatar Free Zones Authority (QFZA) without declaring it. The same watchdog investigated and cleared Arden just a few months ago.Kolkata Investment
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