Potential Labour mayoral candidate Liam Byrne has defended his plans for a West Midlands energy company, saying it’s ‘high time’ the Conservative Party ‘woke up and saw the climate emergency around us’.

Earlier this year the prospective candidate for next year’s mayoral race unveiled plans to establish a regional energy company, saying he wants a publicly-owned firm to help provide solar panels and expand plants which turn waste into energy.

However the proposals were met with criticism from the Birmingham Conservative group, which called for them to be scrapped after it was revealed that Nottingham’s own energy company faced having its licence revoked.

Responding to these calls Mr Byrne, the current MP for Birmingham Hodge Hill, said that it was not good enough that 300,000 homes in the region were ‘languishing’ in fuel poverty.

And he called on the Conservatives to ‘wake up’ and see the scale of the problem at hand.

“It’s high time the carbon-pardoning Conservatives woke up and saw the climate emergency around us,” he said.

“Even on the hottest day of the year, under a third of my constituency’s electricity comes from renewables. Every year the region spends nearly £7 billion on energy – yet 99 per cent of that money flows outside our region while 300,000 homes languish in fuel poverty.

“Enough is enough. It’s time we helped schools and communities turn their rooftops into power generators with the mass roll out of solar power to keep our spending local.

“We invented gas and water socialism in this city, now its time we reinvented it to help lead the green revolution, create thousands of jobs for young people in the green energy business and lift hundreds of thousands out of fuel poverty.”