Downing Street Says » Franco-British Summit

» Friday, June 9, 2006

Franco-British Summit

The PMS gave journalists a run-through of the Franco-British summit. She said that the British delegation included the Prime Minister, Margaret Beckett, Des Brown, David Miliband, Jim Knight and Malcolm Wicks. The summit would form part of the discussions in the run up to the European Council next week in Brussels which would be taking forward the Hampton Court agenda. Various issues would be discussed today, in particular European energy policy, focussing on security and diversity of supply. The European Commission had agreed in March that there was a need for an energy policy for Europe and this would also be discussed at next week’s Council meeting. In Paris today they would also talk about defence cooperation, the world trade round, Africa, and climate change following from the Gleneagles dialogue running up to the Mexico summit in October.

Asked if the energy policy was being discussed in the light of our increasing dependence on Russia gas and oil, the PMS said that the Prime Minister had set out the stark facts for the UK on energy in his recent CBI speech. He had said that be 2025 if current policy remained the same there would be a dramatic gap in our targets to reduce CO2 emissions and we would become heavily dependent on gas. Equally, with a switch to becoming 80-90% dependent on gas imports, whereas currently we are 80-90% self-reliant on gas supply.

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