Reform’s deputy chief vows a Nigel Farage-led authorities will get ‘each final drop’ out of the North Sea and permit fracking for shale fuel to offer Brits ‘low cost power as soon as once more’

Reform UK’s deputy leader today vowed a Nigel Farage-led government would get ‘every last drop’ of oil and gas out of the North Sea to bring down energy costs.

Richard Tice used a press conference in Aberdeen to unveil the party’s four-point plan to cut household bills and ensure the UK ‘can have cheap energy once again’.

Following the huge spike in oil and gas prices caused by the Iran war, Mr Tice said there had ‘never been a more important time’ to focus on boosting UK energy production.

He promised that if Reform won the next general election, the party would give the go-ahead to the Rosebank and Jackdaw projects in the North Sea.

Mr Tice also vowed to scrap the windfall tax on North Sea oil and gas firms, as well as push forward with fracking to extract onshore shale gas across Britain.

Reform’s proposals would additionally see the party scrap Net Zero targets and axe the emissions trading scheme, while reforming industry regulations, Mr Tice added.

‘If you add a cost to business… they have to pass it on to all of us as consumers,’ he said of the red tape and high tax bills faced by oil and gas companies.

Mr Tice, who is also Reform’s business and energy spokesman, said the UK should extract ‘every last barrel, every last drop’ from the North Sea.

He added: ‘It’s our energy treasure, it creates jobs here, it creates wealth here and prosperity, and gives us low competitive energy prices, so we have to do this.

‘If not, the tragedy is… you see seriously fantastic businesses, energy-intensive businesses, shutting, closing, because they’re uncompetitive.

‘We say no; we can do much better, let’s change course.’

Since winning power, Labour has banned the granting of new licences for North Sea oil and gas drilling as Energy Secretary Ed Miliband pursues his Net Zero agenda.

Mr Miliband is also still yet to decide on either the Rosebank or Jackdaw projects, which are not covered by the ban as their applications had already been made before  Labour took office.

It was recently reported that Mr Miliband could be minded to approve the project at Jackdaw, a major gas field off the coast of Aberdeen. 

But his department dismissed the speculation as ‘incorrect’ and insisted no decisions had yet been made.

Mr Tice hit out at Mr Miliband’s staunch resistance to boosting North Sea production, with the Energy Secretary having frequently argued ramping up the extraction of domestic fossil fuels would make ‘no difference’ to global energy prices.

‘If you have an increased supply of anything, in this case energy, guess what happens to the price? It goes down,’ Mr Tice said.

‘That’s the point and that’s why we have to make these changes. That’s why I’ve been banging on about it for years.’

Under Reform’s plans, the party wants to see industry regulator, the North Sea Transition Authority, change its name back to the Oil and Gas Authority – with Mr Tice adding that the body should be tasked with working towards ‘maximum economic recovery’ of fossil fuels.

Mr Tice also demanded the Government abolish the Energy Profits Levy on oil and gas – known as the windfall tax – which was introduced by the Tories following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine but has continued under Labour.

Abolishing the levy would help ‘incentivise’ the oil and gas sector, Mr Tice said, adding that 49 new wells had been drilled in Norwegian waters last year, compared to none in the UK – a situation he insisted was ‘frankly a humiliation’.

He added that shale gas was ‘literally what transformed the US economy some 20 years ago from being an energy importer, to using their own domestic energy, their own domestic gas and then becoming an energy exporter’ – with Mr Tice saying the UK ‘could have the same’.

‘I’m a Lincolnshire MP, and in Lincolnshire there is shale gas to the tune of potentially a decade’s worth, give or take, of UK gas demand, and there are a variety of techniques for extracting it,’ he added.

‘We should be extracting everything we possibly can, safely of course.’

Mr Tice said his four-point plan ‘is how we can get the North Sea back on track, it’s how we can get growth back into Aberdeen, growth back into Scotland, growth back into the UK’.

‘And it’s how we can bring the cost of living down and it’s how we can bring our bills down,’ he added.

As well as mounting pressure from political opponents, the continuing Middle East crisis has also seen growing calls from within Labour circles for Mr Miliband to soften his stance over the UK’s untapped fossil fuel reserves.

Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar supports drilling at both the Jackdaw site and the proposed project at the Rosebank oil field north-west of Shetland.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves has said she would be ‘very happy’ to support drilling at Jackdaw and Rosebank because of the positive impact on ‘jobs and tax revenue’.

A number of Labour MPs are also demanding Mr Miliband allows new drilling, while some of the party’s trade union backers have repeatedly called for him to change course.

Meanwhile, Ms Reeves has been accused of blocking £17.5billion of investment in North Sea oil and gas after shelving proposals to scrap the controversial windfall tax.

Following the outbreak of the Iran war, the Chancellor backtracked on plans to announce an early end to the Energy Profits Levy, which is due to expire in 2030.

A spike in energy prices as a result of the Middle East crisis led Ms Reeves to put those plans on ice, which has infuriated the industry.

Oil and gas firms are reported to have identified North Sea projects which could deliver the equivalent of more than a billion barrels of oil and gas by the end of the decade.

They are said to have told the Chancellor early last month that they were prepared to push ahead with those projects, but only if the Government scrapped the windfall tax early. 

One industry figure said a decision to delay the switch from the current Energy Profits Levy to an Oil and Gas Price Mechanism was ‘economic illiteracy on steroids’.

Robert Palmer, deputy director of Uplift, which campaigns for a ‘rapid and fair transition’ away from oil and gas, said: ‘Reform’s pledge to ‘drill the North Sea’, while promising to block renewables, is a nightmare double whammy that would see higher energy bills for longer.’

Mr Palmer said ‘new drilling will do nothing to improve the UK’s energy security’, adding that ‘the UK has burned most of its gas, and most of what is left in the North Sea is oil, the vast majority of which is exported’.

He continued: ‘The promise of lots more jobs from oil and gas drilling is selling a pipe dream to energy workers. Under the last UK government, jobs in the industry halved.

‘Given the ‘Trumpflation’ caused by the Iran conflict, we need to get off our dependency on fossil fuels by doubling down on renewables, like wind, and upgrading homes with solar power and heat pumps, so we can free ourselves from oil and gas.’