Speeches by Gardiner.

“Professor, anything to add?”

“I wanted to first of all ask you, Professor, about the bioremediation work that you have been doing with Daphne. Part of the problem with that is that it is a slow process, is it not?”

“I had understood it was the application.”

“In order to refine these technologies, and given the complexity of the way in which this works, is there a role for AI in identifying how to do that, how to speed it up and how to make it more efficient?”

“Dr Schwarz, I wanted to ask you about recycling of the chemicals once the PFAS has been captured, because we have heard that a number of these processes gather it all together, but it still has to be dealt with. How does that fit into the sustainable management strategy for PFAS?”

“High energy cost, high real cost?”

“What are the technical and regulatory hurdles that you face in scaling that?”

“We have 10,000 sites to get rid of.”

“In that case, it will be very easy and very cheap for the Environment Agency to inspect them in a regulatory capacity and say, “What a fine job you are doing!”.”

“No, I am talking about the recommendations that this Committee should make. You want to get it right. That is what you are assuring us of. You want to get it right and you are taking steps now to do that. If you are confident in what you are doing, it should be perfectly natural that you say, “Let’s be transparent. Let…”

“Would you support this Committee making a recommendation that there should be regulatory monitoring of your outflows?”

“With respect, that is not regulatory monitoring.”

“Surely it would make sense for the Environment Agency, or its successor body, to be doing some regulatory monitoring to ensure that you are then meeting the standards that you have set and had accounted for in your plan going forward.”

“What you have identified is a problem, and it therefore is incumbent on you to hold your hands up and say, “We have a problem. We are now coming to Government for help in solving that problem”. As you said, that may well involve finance.”

“The results of that 12-year study you will be presenting to the Department for Transport and saying, “We have a problem here. This is what we are producing”—the sort of stuff that Ms Bradley told the Committee about earlier—“and we need to mitigate it, because otherwise we are polluting the environment”. Is that the pl…”

“Just picking up on exactly the same points, we heard from Ms Bradley about the absolute toxicity of one of the outflows that she monitored. We know that the Environment Agency says that it is not monitoring these outflows and does not perceive itself to have a regulatory role in monitoring them. It is not funded for it…”

“But it did not.”

“Indeed; that is why I am asking the question. Did the experts put into the brief that it would be best to try to do this planting in the autumn or the spring rather than in the heat of the summer?”

“Was the element that you found to be wanting in the original specification about the time of year of planting?”

“Thank you. That is clear. Who were the contractors?”