Category: UK News

Ruia, and Essar’s Energy Transition arm (EET), is the vital private sector enabler in the northwest of the government’s GB Energy plan to deliver clean power by 2030…reports Asian Lite News

Indian billionaire Prashant Ruia is building a new refinery on the banks of the Mersey that will run on hydrogen, making it the UK’s first emissions-free plant

From the roof of a building in the industrial heart of the North West, a landscape of fields and smoke-chugging chemical plants is spread out before us. The Welsh hills make up one horizon, the River Mersey and Cammell Laird shipyard another, as per a Sunday Times Business profile.

It’s a glorious Cheshire day, and the mood of Indian billionaire Prashant Ruia is as sunny as the autumn weather. Clapping his arm around my shoulder, he points across the vast tangle of steaming pipes, fire-belching flare chimneys and giant cooling towers that make up Britain’s second-biggest oil refinery, Stanlow.

“It is all changing,” he beams, stretching out his arm theatrically. “We are going to decarbonise the industry around the whole of the North West.”

Ruia, 55, is the scion of the family industrials empire Essar Group, and its chief executive. Established by his father Shashi and uncle Ravi, better known as the fabulously wealthy “Ruia Brothers”, its rollercoaster fortunes are the stuff of business legend.

They bought the Stanlow refinery from Shell in 2011, when it was in a pretty grim state of repair. Ruia says they have invested $1 billion in it since, but it’s still clear that the 100-year-old plant, which makes 16 per cent of the UK’s fuel, has had better days. The pipes leak in many places, while its distillation columns — turning crude oil into jet fuel, diesel and petrol — are often heavily rusted and discoloured. Big parts of it are decommissioned and rusting into the weeds.

Look closer, though, and you can see the future — and Ruia’s enthusiasm about it. In the distance, a brand new refinery is emerging from a web of scaffolding, its dazzling silver towers juxtaposed with the dark red rust of a disused 1960s hulk behind.

It is being built to run on hydrogen, making it the first refinery to move away from CO2-emitting gas in the UK. “And that’s just the start,” Ruia says. If all goes to plan, and the government gives its support, the family will move on to installing carbon-capture technology in other parts of the refinery, pumping the carbon into disused gas fields deep under the Liverpool Bay seabed.

First, though, Essar needs to build a plant to make the hydrogen. This will have “350 megawatts” of generating capacity, says Ruia, who has a number ready for every topic. All things being well, a second hydrogen plant will follow. The gas not being used by the refinery will be piped to neighbouring factories, such as the Encirc bottle-making plant, to decarbonise their processes, too.

In short, Ruia, and Essar’s Energy Transition arm (EET), is the vital private sector enabler in the northwest of the government’s GB Energy plan to deliver clean power by 2030. In fact, only a few weeks ago, the Downing Street circus rolled into town for Sir Keir Starmer to announce a cool £21.7 billion of state funding for these projects, and a similar “cluster” in Humberside.

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The chancellor is expected to announce an increase to employers’ national insurance contributions on Wednesday in a move that could raise between £8.5bn and £20bn….reports Asian Lite News

Labour’s tax rises will not hit workers’ payslips, the education secretary has promised, as the government prepares to announce one of the most significant budgets in recent history next week.

Bridget Phillipson said on Sunday morning that the tax rises being planned by Rachel Reeves would not affect employees’ take-home pay, as ministers struggle to explain what was meant by their manifesto pledge not to increase taxes on “working people”.

The chancellor is expected to announce an increase to employers’ national insurance contributions on Wednesday in a move that could raise between £8.5bn and £20bn.

However, ministers say this would not break the party’s manifesto promise not to increase national insurance because raising employers’ contributions does not count as a tax on working people.

Phillipson told BBC One’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg: “What we set out in our manifesto was that we would not increase VAT, national insurance or income tax on working people. And coming out of this budget, working people will not see higher taxes in the payslips that they receive. That is really important, because we know the pressures that people are under.”

Reeves will on Wednesday present the first Labour budget in 15 years, which is likely to include about £40bn worth of tax rises and spending cuts, coupled with changes to the government’s debt rules to allow her to spend billions more on infrastructure in the long term.

The chancellor told the Observer this weekend her budget would be as momentous as any in the party’s history, saying: “In 1945, we rebuilt after the war; in 1964, we rebuilt with the ‘white heat of technology’; and in 1997, we rebuilt our public services.

The most significant tax increase is likely to be a 1p or 2p rise in national insurance contributions, along with a reduction in the threshold at which companies begin paying those contributions.

The chancellor is also planning to raise VAT on school fees, to increase inheritance tax on land and to raise capital gains tax on money made from selling shares.

The series of planned tax rises have led to a row over whether Labour is about to break the promises it set out before the election. In its manifesto, the party promised: “Labour will not increase taxes on working people, which is why we will not increase national insurance, the basic, higher, or additional rates of income tax, or VAT.”

Much of the debate has centred on what Labour meant by “working people”. The prime minister, Keir Starmer, attempted to clarify that last week by saying he used the term for people who earn money through work rather than from assets such as shares or property, though Downing Street later said that people who owned small numbers of shares could count as working people.

The row is causing worry among some in Labour. Peter Mandelson, the Labour peer and former cabinet minister, said he wanted to see universities reimbursed for the tax rise in the same ways that other public sector organisations will be.

Mandelson, who is running to be the next chancellor of the University of Oxford, said: “If the chancellor, as predicted, reimburses other parts of the public sector, including schools and hospitals but not universities from the impact of this tax hit, universities will be forced to reduce their contribution to lecturers’ and teachers’ pensions with calamitous consequences for future benefits.”

Andrew Griffith, the shadow technology secretary, told the BBC on Sunday: “You’re about to see a government come to office on the promise of no increase in taxation, no increase in borrowing – they’re about to break all of those promises.”

Meanwhile, Britain’s fiscal watchdog is to publish a detailed breakdown of the £22bn “black hole” that Labour says it inherited after Rachel Reeves presents the budget on Wednesday.

The Office for Budget Responsibility will release the conclusion of its review of how the forecast for departmental spending for its last economic and fiscal outlook, published for the March budget, was prepared.

The review has examined whether the information and assurances provided to the OBR by the Treasury regarding departmental expenditure limits ahead of the Conservatives’ final budget before the general election were adequate.

The review could help to clear up whether Labour was left, as Reeves claims, with a £22bn shortfall in funding to pay for public services this year.

Jeremy Hunt, the former Conservative chancellor, has protested about the OBR’s plan to publish the review on Wednesday, calling it “a surprise and a significant concern”.

Hunt, who claimed in July that the £22bn “black hole” was nonsense, said he had not been contacted by the watchdog or the Treasury about the review, even though he was running the finance ministry until the election in early July.

“As this covers my time as chancellor, as a matter of procedural fairness I would have expected to have been fully engaged with throughout the review and given the chance to address any criticisms made,” Hunt told the OBR chief, Richard Hughes, in a letter on Friday.

Hunt argues that the OBR is breaching the principle of political impartiality by releasing its work on budget day. “I had serious concerns about the way the report was announced on 29th July, done with no prior notice at the same time as a highly political statement from the chancellor of the exchequer in the House of Commons. The comments alongside that announcement gave the impression the OBR had prejudged the outcome,” Hunt said in his letter, published by the OBR on Sunday.

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