Burnham defends Jackdaw decision as Badenoch urges PM to overturn ban on new oil and gas licences

The UK government has approved production from the Jackdaw gas field in the North Sea amid intense debate about the project's environmental and economic impact.

Ministers said the first gas could be produced by the end of this month, helping heat millions of homes, and also announced the creation of a new energy wealth fund.

But environmental campaigners said the decision would hamper efforts to tackle climate change and make "no meaningful difference" to UK energy security.

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch accused the prime minister of "dithering" on Jackdaw and said a ban on new oil and gas licences should be repealed - but Andy Burnham said her party had "messed up" the original decision.

Jackdaw is situated 150 miles (241km) east of Aberdeen and is operated by Adura, a joint venture between Shell and Norwegian state energy firm Equinor.

A decision is yet to be taken on whether production can begin at Rosebank, the UK's largest known untapped oil field, which is located off the coast of Shetland in the North Atlantic.

Adura says Jackdaw will provide about 6% of UK gas production, enough to power 1.4 million homes. After imports are included, that amounts to about 2% of total UK demand.

The gas will be pumped to the existing Shearwater platform for processing – known as a tie-back in industry terms – before being piped to the St Fergus gas terminal in Aberdeenshire.

The UK government said that over its expected 11-year lifespan, Jackdaw would support the UK's gas supply, protect hundreds of jobs and add £2.9bn to the economy.

Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh said the gas from Jackdaw would be in homes and businesses this month - although she told BBC Radio Scotland Breakfast that it would not lower energy bills this winter.

She said the decision would "help minimise the UK's use of imported higher emission fuels as we continue our transition to renewables and nuclear".

"The decision is compatible with our legally binding climate commitments, and we remain resolute in ending new licences for oil and gas and achieving net zero by 2050," she said.

The UK government also announced the establishment of an energy wealth fund using tax revenue from oil and gas extraction, with an initial £2bn of funding, to invest in renewable and low carbon energy projects.

At Prime Minister's Questions, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch thanked Burnham for "finally" approving Jackdaw but accused the government of "dithering" over the decision.

She also urged Labour to repeal its ban on all new oil and gas licences.

"We have the resources, the expertise and the people. What we have lost is the confidence to make tough decisions," she said.

The prime minister said he had made a decision that the previous Tory government had "messed up".

He said they had got decisions wrong because they did not give any regard to climate obligations, and that "these things have to be considered in the round".

Burnham also said he had asked the chancellor and energy secretary to look into whether standing charges could be removed from gas bills.

Scotland's First Minister John Swinney said he hoped the announcement would provide some certainty for the north east of Scotland.

"It is vital that the economic benefits of our energy are felt here in Scotland and used to bring energy bills down, rather than flowing to the Treasury to plug more short-term spending gaps," said the SNP leader.

He also welcomed the creation of an energy wealth fund, which he said should be "prioritised for offshore renewable opportunities and be ringfenced to be focused on the north east of Scotland".

Scottish Conservative leader Russell Findlay said the decision was a victory for Scotland's oil and gas workers, but added: "They should never have had to wait this long for common sense to prevail."

Business leaders in Aberdeen said it was "exactly the sort of pragmatic call the North Sea has been crying out for", and unions also welcomed the decision.

But the co-leader of the Scottish Greens, Ross Greer, described the approval as "climate vandalism".

He said: "It is a devastating betrayal of our children's future and it won't even lower energy bills in the here and now."

Environmental campaigners argue that this summer's heatwaves demonstrate the need to tackle climate change by rejecting both Jackdaw and Rosebank.

Areeba Hamid, the co-executive director of Greenpeace, said approving Jackdaw was "the wrong decision" in terms of lowering energy bills, providing energy security, and addressing climate change.

Oxfam said the government had "drilled straight through the UK's climate commitments" and accused the prime minister of sending "the wrong signal as the impacts of climate change intensify".

The charity says the government must commit to not approving any new oil and gas licences, including the proposals for Rosebank.

Jackdaw sits close to the boundary between the British and Norwegian sectors of the North Sea, in an area where Westminster originally granted licences to explore for oil and gas in 1970 and 1989.

The field was discovered in 2005 but it was expensive and technically difficult to exploit.

Shell did not commit to its development until 2022, shortly after the Conservative government had granted consent for production.

But in January 2025, after a challenge by environmentalists, the Court of Session in Edinburgh ruled that consent for Jackdaw and Rosebank had been granted unlawfully.

The judge, Lord Ericht, said the developers should have provided a more detailed account of the fields' impact on climate change as part of the permitting process.

The judge allowed the companies to continue with preparatory work short of producing oil and gas while they crafted new environmental impact assessments taking into account the eventual effect of actually burning the fossil fuels, not just the emissions which would be created in extracting them.

When BBC News visited the platform this summer, Adura CEO Neil McCulloch said its approval was vital to avoid domestic supply shortages this winter.

However, the UK government has previously suggested that Jackdaw will have little impact on energy security and none on reducing domestic gas and electricity bills.

In August, in an interim response to a consultation on the future of the country's gas supplies, Energy Minister Michael Shanks said the UK would inevitably become more reliant on imports as domestic production declined.

"With diminishing output from the North Sea over the past decades, any gas produced from the UK Continental Shelf represents a tiny fraction of global demand and so will not lower prices nor materially boost supply," wrote Shanks.

Labour has previously said it is opposed to the issuing of new exploration licences but it will consider new production projects if they are tied back to existing facilities.

McCulloch described the Jackdaw decision as "an important and positive step forward" - but said attention now turned to Rosebank.

He has urged the UK government to approve production from the field, in which Adura owns an 80% stake. The other 20% is held by London-based Ithaca Energy.

Rosebank contains an estimated 300 million to 500 million barrels of oil.

But while most of Jackdaw's gas is likely to be consumed in the UK, Rosebank's oil will be taken off by tanker and sold on international markets.