Speeches by Maynard.

“In terms of structural versus behavioural remedies, could you say a little about where you are headed or whether there is any change in direction?”

“Running with Sarah’s point about principles, under the last Government, Labour pushed very hard that any trade agreement should have a human rights chapter in it. India’s does not; the GCC’s, as currently being discussed, does not. It feels a little bit like, “When we’re out of power, we want this, but when we’re in po…”

“So it is strictly best efforts. The message to anybody else is, “We would like to have human rights in there, but we’ll go forward without it.””

“Running with that, one part of economic security is a register of foreign-owned assets in the UK, which the last Government talked about a lot. I was hoping that—maybe not on the spot now, but perhaps in writing—you could say when this Government will commit to putting in the public domain a full register of properties…”

“Many thanks for that, Douglas, but if I may, it is not just about our weapons; it is about other weapons. If the UAE is transferring weapons into Sudan, which is a bloodbath, we should be thinking very hard, because we would be breaching our own export regulations because of what their actions are doing with other peop…”

“On the process involved in that, over the last 10 months we have experienced things like point No. 17 in our weekly pack being, “Company B is blocked from buying company C”, or whatever it might be. That may be interesting, but our job here is to scrutinise DBT. We have absolutely no way of doing that with the informat…”

“I take your logic that there has to be a system, and the security makes it harder to do that. Certainly from my point of view, it does not necessarily have to be this Committee that is doing it, but I am advocating a check and a balance on the Ministry making the decision. Whether it is Matt and his colleagues at the J…”

“Do you at least accept the point that there should be a check and a balance on the decision made by Government, and that we should work towards putting an effective check and balance in place?”

“Sorry to be late. I was in another Select Committee meeting and it overran, so apologies and thank you for having me. Going back to Beth’s point about more efficient trade with Europe in electricity, my understanding is that post Brexit one of the things was being outside the single day-ahead coupling system. What are …”

“Sorry to be late. I was in another Select Committee meeting and it overran, so apologies and thank you for having me. Going back to Beth’s point about more efficient trade with Europe in electricity, my understanding is that post Brexit one of the things was being outside the single day-ahead coupling system. What are …”

“In terms of the Cyber Resilience Act and what the EU is up to there, what do you think the UK should do in response? Should we do something similar here, and where is that transfer of liability best located?”

“In other very international lines of work, you would have conferences where you would all get together and talk shop. Do things like that exist? If it is taking years to get stuff, in some ways, that could be because you do not know each other that well.”

“Following up on that, if those barriers to entry keep dropping, which seems very probable, can you sketch out how this will look in five years, in terms of how you try to stay ahead? It sounds almost as if it is traditional policing: you are trying to identify who these people are and going after them, or is there much…”

“Any other points of view on that?”

“Following up on Jamie’s comment about it being dependent on what the private sector tells the NCSE, or whoever it may be, people were talking earlier about mandatory reporting. I want your take on whether you think that should be regulated so that private companies have to report if there have been breaches.”

“What is your take on the Australian example and the pros and cons of that?”

“I am one of those people to whom the NCSC is new, so that is helpful. I am getting warm and fuzzy feelings, but in terms of risks and concerns, you have mentioned quite a few and they have been very interesting and useful. What have you not mentioned about where we are going in the future and what we need to be thinkin…”

“You talked about English language and Russian language as two big blocks. Sticking with the Russian language side, that is obviously across several countries, not just Russia. Is it impossible to access, or can you access a lot of that to take things down in other states? Are there effective means of doing that, so tha…”

“You touched earlier on the top of the tech stack. There is a lot of conversation about the small businesses, but can you talk about the largest big tech businesses in terms of how your relationship with those companies has evolved, how engaged they are in UK security and how interested they are in co-operating with you…”

“Does anyone else want to add anything?”