GRANGEMOUTH oil refinery’s immienet closure will stand as a “shining example of how not to do anything,” the Just Transition commissioner warned today.

Richard Hardy made the remarks as he appeared before MPs at Westminster’s Scottish affairs select committee, but not before a thinly veiled attack on Sir Jim Ratcliffe, anti-trade union owner of Ineos, whose joint venture with PetroChina, PetroIneos, owns the Grangemouth site.

He referred to a £600 million loan guarantee given to Ineos by the last Tory government to build a new facility in Antwerp, still in place despite plans to close Grangemouth with the loss of 400 jobs on site and more than 2,500 in the wider supply chain.

Mr Hardy told MPs: “There needs to be, in our view, conditionality around the provision of public funds to people, particularly very rich people living in tax havens who own football teams, who take public money and spend it on divesting jobs in communities that are very precarious.”

He told MPs that the handling of the situation at Grangemouth would now stand as a “a shining example of how not to do anything,” adding: “The key lesson from how we do change in the future is not to do it like it has been done at Grangemouth.

“I think it is fair to reflect that lots of promises have been made by various people in various different roles, none of which seem to have come about.” 

He argued that a better job had been done with the closure of Scotland’s last coal-fired power station at Longannet, Fife, in 2016, where Scottish Power had put a “five to eight-year closure programme” in place.

This meant “of the 350 people who worked at Longannet, everybody that wanted to remain economically active remained economically active,” he said.

Returning to Grangemouth, he said it had been “a litmus test for just transition — it didn’t do particularly well, I’m afraid.”

He warned: “I lived through the coal mining closures of the 1980s and ’90s in Yorkshire.

“That felt very much like it was done to us and leaves a legacy of hurt.”

A spokesperson for Petroineos said: “The impact of the transition to an import terminal on refinery staff is a key consideration for Petroineos and, following a full consultation, we have outlined a significant redundancy package worth over £30 million.”