Biomass company Drax is not ‘fit and proper’ and should not be receiving £7billion in green subsidies, MPs said yesterday.
Speaking during a debate on a proposed Climate and Nature Bill, Labour MP Barry Gardiner criticised the wood-burning firm.
He accused it of ‘deliberately misreporting’ the sustainability of the wood pellets that it uses to fire its plant near Selby, North Yorkshire.
It follows a BBC Panorama investigation which claimed that the power company burned wood from some of the world’s most precious forests in Canada – which Drax denies.
Yet the company is still in receipt of billions in environmental subsidies from UK households because the electricity it produces is classified as renewable.
The company imports the equivalent of 27million trees a year which it ships to the UK to burn. Biomass makes up around 8 per cent of the UK’s ‘green’ power generation – most of it from Drax.
Yesterday, MPs used a debate on the private member’s bill to raise concerns about the company and its environmental impact.
Mr Gardiner told the Commons: ‘We cannot allow the damage to old growth and to virgin forests that we know is happening in Canada.’
The company is still in receipt of billions in environmental subsidies from UK households because the electricity it produces is classified as renewable. Pictured: The Drax Power Station near Selby, North Yorkshire
Drax imports the equivalent of 27million trees a year which it ships to the UK to burn
He added that accounts from whistleblowers which were raised in the Lords had given added weight to an investigation by the regulator into the company.
Ofgem found that ‘the sustainability of the feedstock had been not only misreported but deliberately misreported,’ he said.
‘That means that the people concerned in Drax are not fit and proper to run the company, and we should not be paying them,’ he added.
Tory grandee Sir Roger Gale also told MPs: ‘Like the last Government, this Government are subsidising Drax, to the tune of billions of pounds.
‘For why? To transport millions of trees, felled and shipped across the Atlantic at God knows what carbon cost, to burn in the interest of some sort of future carbon-free fuel-which, of course, it is not.
‘Why are we allowing this, and why are we paying for it?’
It came after the former BBC director-general Lord Birt told fellow peers last year that he had seen ‘deeply troubling’ claims by whistleblowers.
Tory grandee Sir Roger Gale also told MPs: ‘Like the last Government, this Government are subsidising Drax, to the tune of billions of pounds’
‘It is troubling reading. They allege outright dishonesty, cover-up, offers of under-the-table bribes and naked threats by some senior Drax executives,’ he said.
A spokesman for Energy Secretary Ed Miliband did not respond to requests for comment on whether he shared the concerns of MPs, and whether he was comfortable with billpayers subsidising wood burning.
Drax was contacted for comment.
