North East tour for Secretary of State

Our Managing Partner Fergus Mutch spoke to the Financial Times Weekend for this article on the politics of energy and windfall taxes. Chancellor Jeremy Hunt used his Budget last week to extend the Energy Profits Levy by a year, in spite of opposition from his Scottish colleagues. Does this now open the door for the SNP to regain the ground it has lost with industry over its presumption against new oil and gas? “There’s a genuinely ripe constituency for the picking,” Fergus said, “if a party is willing to say: ‘max out domestic production while we still need oil and gas, sustain the jobs that depend on it, and target the revenues generated on the transition’.”..

Industry, policy and academic experts from the leading global energy cities of the UK, Norway, Canada and Australia will gather in Aberdeen in May to discuss the energy transition.    Organised by the University of Aberdeen Business School the free to attend half day event at King’s College Conference Centre on May 21 will focus on the regulation, funding and finance of the move towards sustainable energy sources.    The conference will be chaired by Dr Eilidh Whiteford, senior advisor at True North, with a great lineup of keynote speakers and panellists including Stuart Payne CBE and Maggie McGinlay...

True North has today unveiled the first tranche of results from our first major Scotland-wide issues poll of 2024. The highlights as follows: By a factor of 5 to 1 people across Scotland think that energy companies operating in the North Sea have a positive impact on the UK economy. Despite calls from some political quarters to accelerate the winding down the UK’s oil and gas production, three quarters of Scots think that the UK should meet its ongoing demand for hydrocarbons from domestic sources — with less than 10% of people who think we should rely on imports...