Industrial waste
Sir: I endorse your concerns about the closure of Grangemouth and Port Talbot and the statement that ‘if high-quality jobs are to return to the North and the Midlands then re-industrialisation is presumably the answer’ (‘Time for a change’, 12 October). However, your leading article fails to observe that Ed Miliband has already committed £22 billion to the re-industrialisation of Liverpool and Teesside in the form of Carbon Capture, Usage and Storage (CCUS) projects.
One might wonder where Miliband acquired the daft notion that it is a good idea to spend £22 billion on a technology that has only been proven to work in a coal-fired power station (a sort we don’t have any more). Even when it works, it substantially increases the cost of the power generated, while sequestering a small quantity of carbon dioxide – which will probably leak from whichever cavern it is subsequently stored in. Perhaps Miliband had been reading the government’s ‘Industrial Decarbonisation Strategy’, published in 2021 while Boris Johnson was PM. This states that ‘our commitment to support deployment of CCUS could help to create 50,000 jobs alone in the UK by 2030’ – in a chapter entitled ‘Levelling Up’.
Richard North
Hayling Island, Hampshire
Too many bishops
Sir: Marcus Walker’s critique of the selection process of bishops is timely (‘Mitre reading’, 12 October). However, he could have gone further. If questionable managerialism is producing corporate clones, then the same managerial criteria should be used to measure success.
In business, those leaders who fail to grow their market share are soon dispatched. The Church of England in 2024 has 108 bishops, roughly the same as in 1924 – but the numbers of clergy, parishes and membership have declined dramatically.
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