Business and Trade Sub-Committee on Economic Security, Arms and Export Controls

Welcome to the final hearing in our inquiry on critical minerals. Minister, thank you so much for joining us. Mike Hill, thank you for coming along as well. Minister, I know you are deep in preparation for the Second Reading tomorrow, so we will canter through this as quickly as possible. Let me start off with this basic question about whether we understand our needs. A lot of the evidence that we have taken basically tells us that we have a reasonable picture of what is needed today or in the recent past. What we are worried about is our grasp on the critical minerals requirements for the economy in the future, and particularly in those industrial strategy priorities. We were a bit surprised to understand that we have a geological survey that is more than 50 years out of date. Help us understand how, as a nation, we get a grasp, and how you get a grasp, on the critical mineral requirements of the economy over the next 10 to 15 years. I know it is not clear, but I want to understand how you think about it.

You were surprised that we have a geological survey that is 50 years out of date. When I called in the British Geological Survey to meet with me, I pulled my geological map off my bookshelf at home from 1962 and it was pretty much the same as the data that it has now. In the meantime, foreign Governments have been paying the British Geological Survey to do extensive work in their own countries. The reason that a lot of it is so out of date is that many parts of the UK have been very well mapped. If you take Cornwall, it was very well mapped for tin, for instance, but at that time not really paying particular attention to what we would now term critical minerals. These are quite often by-products of the main mining process, but of course they have additional value now. When I called BGS in, I asked it to go away and have a look at what it might need to do to enhance the data that we have.

It is not free, is it? Figures of about £50 million were talked about.

It is not free but, for a start, you can be focused. BGS has started to think about the places in the UK where there is the greatest opportunity to do that enhanced research. As I mentioned, in Cornwall it is not about lifting the lid on the whole thing. It is about looking at already well‑mapped areas and refining the data. There are parts of Scotland, for instance, or the north-west, in the Pennines, where there is a real scarcity of data but perhaps some opportunity. The first step is to set BGS off and ask it to go and have a look. It will need to go and talk to the research councils and UKRI about the priority of funding there. There is a base level of data there, but we do not need the data to tell us what industry is doing and what industry’s demands are. That is the thing. You have already had someone from BGS come in and talk a bit about how they do the planning for the critical minerals strategy through the Critical Minerals Intelligence Centre. You will be aware that they took a snapshot in 2024, just as they did in 2021—and they will do it again in three years’ time—and that gives us our critical minerals list. Quite rightly, they said it is not their job to forecast on that basis. They are scientists who are interpreting data. That is fine; we have got that. That is why this time there is the add-on of the growth minerals. For instance, I was very keen to see copper in that growth minerals list. That is something that I have been calling for for nearly 10 years now. As a result, we have quite an expansive list. It is a slightly different approach to the approach that the EU has taken. We have a graded list rather than having cut-off thresholds.

Let me just make sure that I have understood this. We have a bunch of industrial strategy priority sectors. I am assuming that the critical minerals strategy is basically in the foundational industries that underpin those.

Yes, exactly.

Are you aiming to get, or do you have, a sense of the critical minerals requirements for each of those industrial strategy sectors for the years to come? Is that where you are trying to get to?

It is an iterative process. The latest version is better than the previous one. The next one will be even better. I cannot remember exactly who it was now, but one of your previous witnesses was talking about the development of battery technology. A lot of critical minerals demand is driven by battery demand. I think it was Professor Freer from the Faraday Institution. There is a lot of work going on on this at Oxford University. He was pointing to the development of solid-state batteries and the increased demand for sulphur from sulphates, essentially. Over time, you would expect that forecast to change, but it will change as a result of the technology development. If we just took a very basic approach and said that the demand for critical minerals will primarily be driven by the demands of electrification, batteries, artificial intelligence, data centres and so on, that gives you a very core group of critical minerals. If you add your infrastructure on to that, which is where aluminium, steel, copper and titanium come in, you have captured the bulk of it there really. The ones that could potentially catch us out are where there is a new technology that leads to sharp growth and it comes around the side.

That is almost an answer to the question. The question that recurs through this Committee a lot is what we can learn from China’s very long-term vertically integrated development of industrial capabilities. Is there something to learn from that? Can a small open island economy such as ours get close to that? What is the approach that we should take to approximate it? If we take demand curves that we know are going to change radically, such as defence, we know that we are going to rearm. We are even now anticipating a defence equipment plan—let’s see. None the less, you have some sectors where there are some quite punchy growth forecasts in the future. How do you think about de-risking critical minerals supplies for rearmament, for example?

There are quite a lot of questions in there.

How are you forecasting demand for critical minerals in the industrial strategy sectors? That is ultimately what it comes down to.

Those demand forecasts, you can see them now and they are quite extreme. In fact, in the FT today there was an article about the acceleration of lithium demand, which is well over 1,000%. Copper demand is going to double over the next few years. It is not, “Is it 3% or 5%?” It is, “Is it twice as big or five times as big?” It is way beyond what we are currently producing. From our perspective, what we need to do as a country is to determine what our strengths are and where our competitive advantages are, so that we can go out into the world and decide where we are going to trade. Clearly, a great point of our strategy is to reduce our dependence on China. The group of nations with which we want to trade is the G20 and the G7, and we want to have bilateral relationships with countries such as Canada and Australia, which have some wealth in critical minerals, so we can de-risk through that means. I am really keen—this goes back to your initial point about China—that we do not lose sight of the potential that we have to be competitive in some of these areas by ensuring that we make the right investments. China has a stranglehold on critical minerals, not necessarily because it has access to huge numbers of mines, but because it has a grip on processing. There are essentially two potential strategies that we could deploy. One is to say that we will go into the market, sign deals and trade, which I do not favour as a strategy because it leaves us very weak and exposed. The other is to get a grip on the opportunity that we have for midstream processing, from both mining and recycling, to give us something sensible to go out into the market and trade with. Those relationships will be better when they are of mutual benefit, when we have something to trade with. In relation to what you were saying, in tungsten, which is the major defence metal, we have the biggest reserve outside of China. That is a big opportunity for us.

Could you document for this Committee your assumptions about demands for critical minerals in industrial strategy sectors over the next 10 years?

You could pick those numbers up in the press.

Yes, it is in the published strategy. The annexe has a view on what the critical minerals demand is over the next 10 years. In line with the eight high-growth sectors in the industrial strategy, we say, “This is what we think the critical minerals demand will be, based on the available evidence today, for the next 10 years.” That is split out by sector. In defence, some of that is a bit more sensitive. I am not sure all of it is published in the annexe, but some of that data exists in the annexe to the critical minerals strategy.

You are happy that we have a good grip on the future critical minerals requirements for the industrial strategy sectors.

Yes, I am. As I said, it is an iterative process. I would expect it will improve every time as a result of getting better data and the shift in technology, which is a really important thing. Let us say I am sat here in three years’ time—who knows? I do not know whether I will be lucky enough to be able to do that. There may be a new mineral that we have not considered that comes in then. That is really possible, because it could be due to a shift in battery technology. I just want to make the Committee aware of that.

The strategy does not mention the primary threats to UK supply. Christopher Vandome from Chatham House talked about how the strategy shies away from the inherently geopolitical challenge presented by critical minerals. In your view, what are the UK’s most pressing dependencies here?

Clearly, it is the dependency on China, particularly on processing. As I mentioned, China has a grip on 70% to 90% of the processing capacity in a number of critical minerals. The UK has two sources of material inbound, the primary resource that we can dig out the ground and the secondary resource that is circulating in our economy. If I can explain how bad it is, the vast majority of our aluminium is shipped over to Germany or elsewhere in Europe for remelting and coming back. We do not have copper-melting facilities. That is primarily due to the uncompetitive business environment that we have and the high energy prices that we have had in the UK. That has driven a lot of that stuff overseas. The success of this critical minerals strategy cannot be just about securing critical minerals supply. It also has to be about securing economic activity. In some areas, that economic activity will be mining, but it will be mining combined with processing or processing of recycled product. That has the additional benefit of breaking that link in the supply chain. The reason that it has been really difficult to do that in the past is that, if one country owns 70% of the processing capacity for lithium and a private company tries to start up a lithium refinery, there is price control, essentially. They cannot hit the floor on that. It is no coincidence that the only aluminium-melting facility that we have left in Scotland has its own hydroelectric power plant, which means it is essentially immune from the energy shock. Clearly, we need to sort out the energy situation, which we are doing through BICS, the British industry supercharger and so on, but it is also about making sure you have the right trade arrangements to make that work. There is a recognition, clearly not just in the UK but among the G7 and the G20, that we have to do that to break the stranglehold from a single supplier. To my mind, it does not matter whether it is China or any country: for these really important elements, we do not want to be 70% to 90% dependent on any country in the world.

I appreciate that. You have touched on this slightly, but is there a cross-Government strategy for de-risking supply chains? I know you are having conversations with specific Departments, such as the MOD when it comes to UK defence capabilities and specifically Chinese export controls.

On MOD specifically, yes. I was talking to one of the MOD Ministers yesterday about this. The MOD is developing its own plans, which will then feed into demand. That will feed into some of the bilateral arrangements you will be aware we are discussing. There is the opportunity to access stockpiles with friendly nations. MOD demand will certainly fill into that. A lot of the other requirements come through my own area, such as advanced manufacturing or semiconductor supply. It is particularly the case for advanced manufacturing. I get that intelligence that comes back through the Automotive Council, which I chair. The key link for me is with MOD.

The one area where I would push slightly is around having a specific plan for de-risking those supply chains. Does the Department have that? Is there a co-ordinated plan on that? Is it something that is happening incidentally? It would be useful to know explicitly, if that is the case.

No, it is not happening incidentally. It is very much the focus of what we are doing through the strategy. As I said, there are really two ways to do that: UK processing and bilaterals. There was a point where we could have pretty much decided, “We will use the bilateral or multilateral arrangements as the primary supply chain de-risking tool,” but we have moved beyond that now to recognise the importance of keeping that processing here. Another way that we are doing that is—

You mean here in the UK.

Yes, here in the UK, in so far as possible. Another example of that is on the technology development side. Take a business such as HyProMag, which is a spin-out from Birmingham University. I opened its pilot plant in Birmingham, which was great. It is building a plant in Germany. We have the processing here and it is building the plant in Germany. That is great, but we could have gone down the technology licensing and sale route. I would not regard it as being a success, if the technology is bought and commercialised overseas, and all the product of the mines in Cornwall is bought and processed overseas. That is not economically beneficial to the UK, but it is also not the best answer to de-risking our supply chains. To be clear about it, if we sign an agreement with someone to take all the product of a South Crofty tin mine overseas and process it, in extremis we need to be sure we are going to get that back here, if we need it. The best way to do that is to ensure that we have a processing plant here as well. It is part of the role of the National Wealth Fund and others to provide the support to do that, as they are.

Just to add, in DBT we have the global supply chain centre, which is set up to track some of these supply chains beyond critical minerals, look at some of the challenges and work closely with businesses to help them understand their particular challenges and how they can tackle that in a bit more of a co-ordinated fashion beyond just critical minerals.

Our challenge here, Minister, is that we cannot yet see the connection between the projected demand for critical minerals or growth minerals and the spending plans for securing those minerals, processing them and rendering them safe to UK plc. Let us just take a couple of examples: graphite, rare earth elements and phosphate. Those are three sets of critical minerals that we know are super-important for the UK economy and a massive chokepoint in China. Where and when will we see the kind of investment that is going to be needed to build out the ambition you have just articulated, which is to maximise onshore processing?

For two out of three of those, there will not be any onshore processing. It is on a case-by-case basis with the particular element. For instance, we are not going to be processing graphite here particularly, but this week I have had a conversation with an official from the high commission of Canada, where they not only have graphite, but they are developing a graphite stockpile. They are offering G7 and G20 members the opportunity to buy into that stockpile. It is a similar situation with gallium in Australia. On rare earth elements, neodymium in permanent magnets is exactly the HyProMag example that I was describing. We have to be clear about the fact that we cannot do everything. That is a bit of an obvious statement, I realise. Where we can do something, we should try to do it. That is essentially my point. On tin, tungsten and lithium, we have recycled and primary. There are maybe half a dozen where we have real scale. There is copper on the recycling side and aluminium as well. Those are the areas where we will invest more and we will be able to grow those capabilities. In many cases, we will have more than we need for the UK economy. The idea is that, once you have developed that capability, with trusted international partners, whether it is the EU, the G7 or the G20, you can trade for the other elements that you need as well. There are not many countries in the world that are blessed in the same way that Canada is in terms of supplies.

Before we conclude our report, maybe we could write to you and try to get a kind of “state of the nation” for where we are.

Yes, that would be really good. I would be pleased to do that.

It would be good to have it documented. We want to do everything we can to help you in your negotiations with the Treasury. That is an important part of what we do on this Committee.

That would be good. I will tell you what we could do on that, just to create a bit of work for Mike. On some of those, we could highlight what the opportunity is. Do we have a mining opportunity? Do we have a processing opportunity? It is not easy to land that. It is a cross-Government effort. If the Committee would be interested in that, I would very much welcome it.

You will have clocked that we are just a little bit anxious about whether the National Wealth Fund is in the right place on some of this.

Yes, I have.

We heard from some of the lithium miners that they certainly feel that the targets you have in the strategy are achievable, but there is a bit of a block in terms of getting to deliver on that. What are you able to do to help them achieve those targets?

Thanks, Justin, for all the work that you did on this when you were in the Department as well. I appreciate it. I do feel slightly guilty about coming in and just picking it up, but there we are—I did say that when we launched it in the House. If you look at lithium particularly, there is a combination of the miners and the recyclers there. I also want to declare an interest now. A couple of the companies that you will be aware of are interested in setting up facilities in my constituency, including Tees Valley Lithium or Green Lithium. We can give you a list of the four or five businesses that might be interested in doing that. You could register that in the report perhaps. Let us look at the two types of business separately. For the recycling businesses, to make their business model work they are trying to secure an appropriately priced site and energy supply, and a commercial contract on the other end. They have to get hold of the material as well, but that is a slightly lesser point. They are then progressing through financing. What can we do to help? We can ease them through the planning process. That is where the direction that we have given to the Environment Agency might come in handy. We can give them access to R&D funding, which some of them have access to through R&D partners. We can also help them a bit with some of the requirements that they have on financing through public finance institutions. Some of them have been successful. For instance, Altilium was successful in accessing some finance. On the mining side, that is a bit of a different model. We have two clusters, the north-east and Cornwall, and on mining it is Weardale and Cornwall. On the mining side, right now they are focused on extraction. They are slightly less focused on the processing. They are also operating some different processes. I was in Cornwall before Christmas and I saw both the Imerys and Cornish Lithium plants, which are operating slightly different processes. Inevitably, there will be a bit of competition about which of those processes ultimately becomes the most efficient, regardless of where the mining comes from. It depends to some extent on where they are in terms of their technology readiness level and how close they are to market, but the challenges are the same regardless. They have to get access to a site, access to energy, access to R&D funding and then, fundamentally, some capital to help them access the market as well. We have little things in place that help along the way.

In terms of cross-Government public agencies, you are the man to tie it all together and drive it through.

I am a bit averse to cross-Government ministerial working groups because I feel as though they can get tied up in bureaucracy. It is clear that the Department for Business and Trade is leading on this. I feel as though I have good relationships with both MOD and MHCLG. More importantly, Mike and the team have their ears to the ground with the businesses and speak to them very regularly.

In terms of the funding that has been allocated in the strategy, are you able to give us an indication of whether any of that has been spent, what you are planning to use it for or what the priorities will be?

Yes, I can. I am going to ask Mike to come in on the £50 million in a moment, but I just wanted to point out that the total amount of funding allocated for critical minerals is around £270 million. It is £268 million at the moment, if you take into account the National Wealth Fund, DRIVE35 and so on. We are pretty much at the point of being ready with the £50 million, aren’t we?

I do not want to steal any future announcements from the Secretary of State, but are we helping businesses scale up feasibility studies and pilots where we have identified gaps in funding as companies progress to public or private finance. Some of that early-stage activity is difficult to attract funding for.

This is for the sort of things the Minister has just been alluding to.

Yes, it is across mining, recycling and processing.

An announcement on that is imminent, is it?

Yes. We are not particularly far away from being able to explain how that money is going to get out into the market.

Minister, you are committed to building a resilient UK and global supply network, which is great. You have also committed that the Government will take a more active role in helping facilitate offtake contracts. I just wonder whether you could put some flesh on the bones of that. What is going to be different about the bilateral agreements that we have when it comes to critical minerals? We have lots of very strong links with lots of countries around the world. What is different in this relationship?

I do not know that it necessarily has to be different. It is more about ensuring that we know what our objectives are when we go into these discussions. In the area of critical minerals—again, I have read through the evidence that people have given when they have come to the Committee—there are lots of people who see this as a tool to do lots of different things. It is a tool for economic development, a tool for diplomacy and all these various things. We need to be very clear about this. The opportunity that we have in critical minerals is a security opportunity for the UK, a prosperity opportunity for the UK and a development opportunity primarily for the UK. It is important to develop the Democratic Republic of the Congo; it is also important to develop Cornwall. I am not primarily using this as a means of overseas development, because we want to see investment here too. That is the approach that, as Industry Minister, I am taking on this. There is an opportunity to improve our industrial capacity and capability, and we will tick all those boxes as well. That also is really helpful for me when I am meeting my counterparts from Canada, Australia or wherever else. I have something solid I can go in and trade with them, rather than just opening a cheque book and writing a cheque to buy some of their minerals. They would see that as a very positive relationship, I am sure. In the past, we might also have seen it that way. We might have thought, “Well, that works well for us. We are a rich country; we can buy this stuff.” I am taking quite a different approach with this, which is to say that this is a big lever for us to create some industrial development. It is important that we grasp this opportunity because this is a huge shift in how the economy is going to work for generations, certainly in our lifetime. I spoke about this when I gave the statement to the House around the launch of the critical minerals strategy. This is a new era in human development, where we are relying on these materials. The history of man has always been associated with metals, but this is a new class of metals that is opening up and on which we will be dependent. In the past, our wealth and our security as a country was built around the control of metals, whether it was iron or tin. Taking a trading approach to this will fundamentally leave Britain weaker for generations to come. Yes, maybe that is the difference. For me, this is not just about trade. It is a much bigger issue about the future of the country and our national security. It is also a really important opportunity for us to generate some development and some well-paid jobs in parts of the country that really desperately need it.

You talked there about evidence that you have seen. Stakeholders have told us that they are very keen on this new focus on securing supply, but they were a little concerned about some of the vagueness around it. They wonder whether—you touched on it there—you are going to specific countries and talking about specifics. You mentioned Canada. Are you going there and saying, “We want to talk to you about uranium, nickel and copper?” Are you being that specific? Are we looking at almost individual sectoral deals with different countries?

The short answer is yes, essentially. I do not want to downplay the multilateral aspect, because that is really important. If there is the opportunity for multilateral trading frameworks in the EU, the G7 and so on, we are very keen to be supportive of that. It is also true that there are individual countries that are seeking bilateral arrangements. I have been involved in those discussions. The Secretary of State recently met his German counterpart. We are absolutely interested in those. I signed the MOU with Quebec. In fact, every territory in Canada has an abundance of critical minerals. We are very happy to engage in those individual bilaterals.

With these growth partnerships that you are talking about, you are quite agnostic about the shape of them. You are happy if it is multi-country or bilateral. You are quite relaxed about that.

Yes, we are. It would be different if we were in a situation where there was a view that those things were mutually exclusive, but that does not really seem to be where we are. There is not a central grip on this at the moment, where these things are mutually exclusive—far from it. Certainly among the G7 nations, there is a real desire to progress at pace with these things because everybody is in the same position of being incredibly dependent on China and no one wants to be in that position.

Is that a difficulty? Everyone is scrambling for this now, aren’t they? That is a problem. Are we having to get our elbows out and get ahead in this race?

That is a really good question. It does concern me a bit. How do we make sure that we get the minerals we need and that we are strong in the areas where we have capability? I do not feel as though we are behind where we need to be. There is huge scope still. I do not want to rush in too quickly either and sign a bad deal, as it were. We need to get to that position where we feel that we are strong enough and understand our requirements well enough, and then we can engage in those agreements. If you think about what they would look like, some of these things are commercial agreements. We have the Vale nickel refinery in south Wales. They have nickel mines in Canada. We need to make sure that that supply chain works, essentially. It is a very mutually beneficial relationship between the UK and Canada. Equally, if you look at the lithium or tungsten mines in Cornwall, if we put the processing on the back of that, we would be offering capacity within those processing plants to G7 partners as well. For those smaller amounts of things such as gallium, germanium or scandium, which are essentially by-products of other processes, it would probably be more about tying up with the stockpile of another G7 country and taking a sliver or a quarter out of that. That may be a slightly more delicate negotiation, potentially.

The trick here is the processing, isn’t it? This is the point. That is what China has cornered. It is not that China has these things in the ground. It has the processing and the ability to manufacture these things. Canada is a good example of that. It has lots of these critical minerals, elements, metals or whatever, but they are in the ground. The money needs to go into mining first to recover them and then to processing.

Yes, you are absolutely right. There is not really a shortage of mines. You are right. China’s key strategy has been to corner the market on processing. Over a long time, western countries have been quite relaxed about that—until we woke up to this realisation that we have lost so much of it. Once you have a very powerful player in any market, they can just control the price in the market. That is why there is not really a market-based solution to correct this. This is why Governments are becoming involved now. If you have a monopolistic provider in any market, it can control the market to squeeze people out. I should just be quite clear about this. There is an important role for Government here, but it is correcting a market failure or a previous policy failure that has resulted in a market failure. It is not because we have a desire to be intervening in critical minerals markets all over the place; it is a product of where we are.

You say market failure, but the market has been, frankly, manipulated by China deliberately.

It is a huge market distortion.

It has deliberately driven prices down to avoid other countries investing in certain areas. That is going to be a vulnerability for us as well.

It is typical monopolistic behaviour. As I said before, for me, this is not a China thing. We should never have allowed ourselves to get in a position where any one country was able to have that grip, because then another country’s industrial policy becomes our foreign policy. You do not want to be in that position.

There is now a wealth of multilateral initiatives, which we are trying to understand better. Do you want to just talk us through what is real from these different multilateral partnerships? If we look at the G7 plan, FORGE and some of the EU initiatives, which of them are actually delivering de-risking and what do we want out of them? We seem to be playing in all of them. Maybe that is the right strategy at this stage of the game, but I am interested in where you think we ought to be investing time, energy and money.

It probably is the right strategy at the moment. I would not expect that all of them are going to result in something completely tangible.

Which is the most important? Is there a hierarchy in your mind at the moment?

Yes, there is. The bilateral relationships with the G7 partners, our closest partners, clearly are incredibly important. The relationships with the US, Canada and Australia are really important. That is partly about the availability of minerals and finance, but it is also about the nature of the trusted relationship. Of course, that extends more generally to the EU, where we would expect a strong material flow, and where there is a strong material flow, particularly when we are looking at recycling and the development of recycling technologies and recycling plants around the EU. Because of the strength of our university sector, we are in the very fortunate position of having developed a number of technologies here that could be rolled out in that way. Some of these technologies will need a larger market than the UK to scale effectively in terms of the business investment side of it. Quite clearly, those are our priority. For some materials, we need to look further afield to ensure that we have access. That is why you can see this eclectic list. I have not mentioned Japan. When we talk about the materials in Cornwall, there is a huge interest from Japanese industry as well, because it feels this vulnerability very closely too. Have I have mentioned just about everybody when you asked me to prioritise? I possibly have, but you can get a sense of it then.

You have mentioned the Five Eyes partners, our closest neighbours in Europe and our new Asia-Pacific partners. At this stage, your judgment is that it is right to be in all these partnerships. You have given us a reasonably clear hierarchy.

Yes, and it is right. We are talking about critical minerals, but there are dozens of these materials here. There is no one-stop shop for all of it. If we are going to get all the materials that we need, there is going to be a complex trading landscape.

Let us just turn to how we are going to use development finance to help.

Minister, you mentioned earlier that you do not see critical minerals as primarily a means of overseas development, in the way perhaps some do. Therefore, what is the role of those partnerships with developing countries? What role should development finance play within that?

Any partnership must be a partnership of mutual benefit. It does not matter who it is with. That is the basic way that I used to do business, and that is the basis for any strong relationship, whether it is a commercial relationship or a Government treaty. I am always looking for an opportunity for mutual benefit. I always want to make sure the balance of it is such that we can exploit our competitive advantage or make a decision about where we want to develop a new competitive advantage. If I were to pick a specific example, you could look at the tungsten situation in your own neck of the woods, Noah. We could enter into a relationship where we mined and sold tungsten, or we could enter into a relationship where we mined, processed and sold tungsten. For me, the latter, if it is possible to achieve it, if we can get the financing and all these sorts of things in place—there are a lot of “ifs” around that—would be a better outcome for the UK. That is the outcome that I am trying to work towards. Equally, as you can imagine, if we are in a negotiation with another country that has access to a mine—if there is another version of Cornwall somewhere else—it is in their interest to capture the mining and the processing in their own country. From our perspective, it may be that for that particular mineral—it would not be the case for all of them—I would prefer to have the processing here because we might have some sort of technology competitive advantage that we are trying to exploit and develop in order to feed into one of our high-value manufacturing supply chains. We would have to look very carefully at the balance on that, but there is not a single rule across the board. It would be dependent on each individual mineral. Once you can see what the shape of that looks like, you then have the financing bit. That is ultimately where there could be a development benefit in another nation and where we could play a really important role. One of the strengths we have identified is our ability to finance these projects. We have strengths in mining, processing and R&D, but financing is another strength that we have. That is the reason why I recently took a number of the critical minerals businesses that we have in the UK to the City and we did a domestic trade mission to connect those businesses. We are pretty good at financing overseas projects, but we have been less good at financing UK projects in the same way. If we look at what I have just described, we can see what our competitive advantage is or we can see a space where we might want to have a competitive advantage, which could be about processing. We then find a nation to partner with on that in a way that achieves a benefit for that nation as well. You then have a package of mutual benefit. Financing flows, and the materials flow in the other way. It is a neat little deal. That works as a development project, but the primary objective was not development. It was to find a deal of mutual benefit.

I understood that pecking order, with domestic processing being right at the top of that. Do you see development finance having that role in de-risking our supply chains domestically? Are we there yet?

What we are wondering is this: we are members of the World Bank, the EBRD and the IMF, but it does not appear that we are using our MDB partnerships with our allies to finance midstream processing, especially in Africa, in ways that are win-win for our relationships, win-win for our security and win-win for their economic development and domestic resource mobilisation.

The question that we would need to ask first, though, is what midstream processing we would want to develop in a country in Africa and why we would want to do it. This goes back to the point that I raised with Noah. We would have to decide first where we would see that sitting and whether it would be here or there.

I guess we are asking why we have not figured that out yet. If we have not figured it out, when are we going to figure it out?

It is not that we have not figured it out, but there is not such a project yet. That does not mean there could not be.

There are plenty of these projects.

There is not such a project that we are actively working on. Which is the particular critical mineral? There are some projects that I have looked at on iron ore, for instance, which is on the growth minerals list. In terms of the minerals we have talked about, we have cobalt processing here in the UK; we have nickel processing. I mentioned that I would like us to have tungsten and lithium as well. Gallium and germanium we will probably buy in directly. That processing could be overseas, but it could possibly come from a G7 stockpile. What is the specific mineral that is in a country that requires development where they have the raw material and they would like processing, and we do not need the processing here? That is the point at which we would then pick up with one of the international partners or BII to put the infrastructure in.

That is a useful point. Maybe in the follow-up correspondence we can run that gap analysis so that we understand your take on where that might be or might not be.

One example could be copper smelting, potentially. Were you going to come in there, Mike?

I was just going to talk about some of the tools. We have the new UK Export Finance critical minerals supply finance tool, which allows finance to be deployed overseas where some of that material will come back into the UK for UK businesses and then be exported onward. There are new initiatives through UK Export Finance to support that development. It was talked about earlier, but British International Investment is a way to support infrastructure in some of these countries as it relates to critical minerals. On UK Export Finance, a lot of it depends on downstream demand from industry in the UK. We are working on a demand aggregation tool, which was announced through our strategy, to give us a much richer picture of the niche needs of certain businesses, so that Government can work as a convener, with some export finance, to bring these projects to life. How do we kind of join all that together?

If I can just come in for a final word, a lot of this did not come up in our previous panels. It seems like we are at an early stage. How would you, Minister, define better that team UK offer?

One way to look at that is to pick up the critical minerals investment prospectus that we prepared following the strategy. There has been an incredible drumbeat of initiatives that have followed the strategy—I give real credit to Mike and his team for that—including the launch of the website and the skills plan yesterday. We know what our strengths are. We have raw materials strength in certain minerals in mining, and we can tell you what they are. We have strength in certain minerals in recycling, and we can tell you what they are. We have strength in certain recycling technologies and finance. We know what we have. We are identifying the supply chain gaps that we want to fill. I have mentioned some of them already, but there will be more in the future. With the investment prospectus, we have been able to say to the market, “Here are some UK projects we would like you to invest in.” With the new website that we have launched, which I would encourage everyone to look at, you can pinpoint individual projects and support through R&D, as well as local planning authorities that will support those projects to be developed. The skills document that we launched earlier this week helps educators; it helps young people who want to get into the sector to know what skills they need; and it helps companies to know where those skills can be found as well. There is this regular drumbeat of activity that is helping us to build up this whole new industry, essentially.

This has been a very productive session. Thank you very much. We will aim to get you our report before the summer recess so that you have the recess to reflect on it and respond.

I will take it on my summer holidays.

For now, that is it.