Chamber and committees

We are all here sitting on the committee, having done an inquiry a few months ago, and it has come out during a committee meeting that 400 people are about to lose their jobs at the site—that is quite a significant number of jobs—at a pace that I think the committee did not expect. We recognise that there is a shift away from refining and from use of oil and gas, but not at the speed that this happening by 2025 would suggest.

We will pick up with the Cabinet Secretary for Wellbeing Economy, Fair Work and Energy questions about what a just transition means. From the outside, I have to say that, at this point in time, it does not look like there will be a just transition for Grangemouth.

That brings us to the end of the evidence session. I thank Colin Pritchard and Iain Hardie for attending. I will briefly suspend the meeting for a changeover of witnesses.

I welcome our second panel to discuss Grangemouth. Neil Gray, who is the Cabinet Secretary for Wellbeing Economy, Fair Work and Energy, is joined by Scottish Government officials. Kenneth MacDermid is head of critical energy infrastructure and commercial projects in the energy industries division, and Sue Townend is interim deputy director of the energy industries division.

I invite the cabinet secretary to make a brief opening statement.

To be honest, we did not have any pushback from Ineos this morning that it is not 400 jobs that we are talking about.

How often does the future industry board meet, and how often does the Government meet it?

Thank you. I was going to see whether Colin Smyth had any questions about the workforce, but I will go back to the issue of the board. When we conducted our inquiry in the summer, we expressed some frustration around the Grangemouth future industry board, which was not able to give us evidence because it did not constitute itself as a board. It is really a discussion forum. Recently, Richard Dixon has written an article expressing frustration about the lack of activity by the board. I understand that the last minutes that were made public were from December 2022. Although the board may have met, I do not know how transparent it is.

I do not know whether you have an idea of when the board’s priorities will be available. They are not available for 2023-24, yet we are almost at the end of 2023 and we are faced with news that we were not expecting from Grangemouth. The committee would want to look for some assurances that the board is working effectively and is filling the gap with planning the transition. The other issue is that we are still waiting for the Government’s plan.

Is there a recognition that the recent announcement on Grangemouth impacts on the just transition plan significantly, because we have moved at a pace that was not anticipated when the plan was originally drafted?

On the green freeport, from the outside it looks as though there is a connection between the fact that the refinery business is now moving to an import-export business and, at the same time, a green freeport is being set up that will give tax breaks and incentives to imports and exports. However, we have been told that there is no connection between the two.

On importing, I asked the previous panel about offsetting. The carbon activity is just being moved somewhere else—we are offshoring it—but it still has to happen. We will be importing refined products. Do you plan to carry out an assessment of where the refined products come from and how they are being refined? Other countries do not have the same health and safety conditions for workers as we do and they will not be refining to the same standards. How will we know that the imports are of the same quality as those that we produce in Scotland?

A number of members have asked about energy security. No doubt, we will pick that up with the UK Government minister when they are here in January but, at a time of increased global instability, it does not seem like good long-term planning for us to be increasingly reliant on imports.