The next few years look set to be important ones in respect of the development of gas fields in the North Sea off the Norfolk coast.  Centrica has announced its plans to spend many millions of pounds developing these new sites.

A welcome spin-off from this investment will be that some of the money will go to local suppliers and service industries.

In an exclusive interview granted to the Eastern Daily Press, Centrica’s deputy managing director, Jim Craig was very positive in tone.  He said: “Where we can use a local company then we will. It doesn’t make sense to bring people in from Aberdeen to the East of England, but it depends on what capabilities are needed.  If you look at a lot of the companies that work with us like Petrofac, those people are typically based or have a base in Norfolk and as long as their business is in the SNS (southern North Sea) those companies will be there and certainly we would encourage that. We have spent a lot of money in the SNS at the moment. We continue to see it as an area where we see value and like many other companies we will buy and we may even sell things from time to time as we try to focus on our most attractive opportunities to develop. We do see the SNS as an attractive place to work and we expect to see that input in the Norfolk and Suffolk economy for many years to come and we hope to play a role in doing that.”