Liz Truss facing questions over closure of gas plant as energy storage ‘decimated’

Liz Truss faces calls to explain whether she signed off on the closure of a North Sea natural gas storage facility – a decision opponents say “decimated” the UK’s stocks ahead of the current crisis.

The Rough facility off the coast of East Yorkshire is poised to reopen within weeks in a desperate effort to replenish gas reserves as energy prices soar.

Labour today called on the Tory leadership favourite to explain whether she played a role in closing it back in 2017.

Energy firm Centrica announced the facility’s closure on June 20, 2017, just over a week after Ms Truss started as Chief Secretary to the Treasury. Her allies say she would not have been involved.

At the time the company told the government that safety issues at the plant made it unfeasible to continue operating, and later that year MPs were told it was “not a decision for ministers”.

Ms Truss started in the role on June 11, 2017, and the closure was announced by Centrica nine days later.

It is understood to have held enough gas to meet the UK’s winter energy demand for 10 days – compare to reserves of 230 days in Austria, 103 in the Netherlands and 75 in Italy.

Today shadow climate change secretary Ed Miliband said: “We are facing an energy crisis because of 12 years of Conservative failure on energy security – on renewables, on storage, on insulation and on regulating the market.

“ Liz Truss needs to urgently explain what her involvement was in shutting down the Rough gas storage facility and plummeting the UK into close to zero storage stocks.

“The decision shows a blatant disregard from this government to protect our energy supply and keep bills down.”

In a statement Labour said: “All other European countries have been filling their storage over the summer to prepare for the critical winter to come, but Tory decisions over the last 12 years have left us insecure and families exposed to higher bills.”

In a meeting of the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee in October 2017, Dan Monzani, then director for energy security at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, told MPs that the decision to shut the plant had been made by Centrica.

He said that this was on the basis of safety concerns and that discussions had gone on for years – long before Ms Truss took her role in the treasury.

He stated: “We did assess the impacts, as we do on a regular basis. Of course, the decision to close Rough was not a decision for Ministers; it was a decision for Centrica, and you heard that this morning.

“We note that Centrica, at the time of its decision, had been testing the facility and had found a number of significant failures there.”

Mr Monzani added: “Centrica concluded that it could not safely return the assets and the facility to injection storage operations, so the facility, as you have heard, was beyond its design life; it was failing consistently; its reliability had fallen.

“The decision was actually for the Oil and Gas Authority about whether to change the licence to allow production rather than storage and injection, which, based on the evidence about its reliability, is what it did.”

A spokeswoman from Ms Truss’ campaign said: “As Prime Minister, Liz would drive forward efforts to secure the UK’s long term domestic energy supply and keep families’ bills low.

“She would reduce the UK’s dependency on foreign energy supplies and leverage private sector investment to embrace transition energy methods like gas and nuclear.”