Ministers scathing in letters over wasted offshore resources

Senior figures in Margaret Thatcher’s government gave a withering assessment of the way their predecessors had handled North Sea gas.

Secret letters from 1984 show former chancellor Nigel Lawson and the Iron Lady’s chief policy adviser John Redwood believed “ridiculous” decisions had cost offshore jobs and stifled investment.

The Cabinet was discussing a controversial and ill-fated plan to buy huge volumes of gas from Norway’s Sleipner field, as well as the privatisation of British Gas.

In a letter t o Mr s Thatcher in May 1984, Mr Redwood said: “Owing to past follies over gas prices, we are faced with the ridiculous position that a country full of energy resources may well have to rely on imported gas to meet its need in the early 1990s. The same folly that has left us short of native production of gas has also served to stimulate demand – when prices were too low, many more cus- tomers signed up, thereby exacerbating the potential shortage.”

In another stronglyworded letter to the prime minister, Mr Lawson – father of TV chef Nigella – outlined the damage caused by a 1974agreement to import Norwegian gas from the Frigg field. “There can be no doubt that the Frigg deal has had a very harmful impact on the development of the UK’s own gas resources,” he wrote.

“BGC’s (British Gas’s) need for gas from UKfields was dramatically reduced and, as a result, the corpo- ration offered potential developers of UK gas fields prices far below international levels.

“This stopped the development of our own fields and brought exploration for newgas discoveries to a standstill for several years.”