Speeches by Maynard.

“Just following up on that, Aline, as a practitioner, what do you see as working badly with the NSIA? You move across various jurisdictions. Seeing other jurisdictions and what this or that country does well, how would you rank us and what recommendations would you make for improvement?”

“It is the same country.”

“And a mobile phone network.”

“Flashing back to the 1980s, would the right hon. Member like to remind us when the Conservatives last balanced a budget?”

“Thank you all for being here. I want to ask you about sovereignty and the relevance of focusing just on the UK or focusing on the UK and its allies. I am aware of various things. There is the G7 critical minerals action plan, the Minerals Security Partnership, RESourceEU, Pax Silica and all these things floating about.…”

“I thank the Minister for his statement. We have learned today that this contract was awarded two and a half years ago. Capita had two and a half years to prepare for taking on the administration of the civil service scheme. As has been mentioned, the Public Accounts Committee warned in October that Capita was not ready…”

“Just on that point about interdependency and limited capacity, it seems to be largely a failure of diplomacy and organisation at an international state level. You have a unitary state, China, and a whole load of other states who are getting whacked—“By the way, don’t whack me because that’s scary.” We are not co-ordina…”

“Yes, I know.”

“Martin, switching slightly to your interest in batteries, I was looking at something last night about CATL and BYD, and the $2 billion or something that they had just announced that they are putting into battery technology, and about the amazing 1,500 km that they had just announced—where is the UK, in terms of tech, w…”

“Would anybody else like to give views on that?”

“Pranesh, I think you are an economist by background. Following on from Caspar’s point, we are not going to be able to do this alone. There are lots of efforts: the G7 critical minerals action plan, the Minerals Security Partnership, RESourceEU and Pax Silica; there are various things going on internationally. Ultimatel…”

“How much visibility do you have on the EU? The US is doing that thing, and the only other party that perhaps has sufficient scale might be the EU. It has RESourceEU. How much is it doing in terms of working out, “We have a risk in this mineral, this mineral and this mineral. We want to have refining and smelting somewh…”

“In the UK Government, in terms of trying to wrangle the cats into some sort of bag, is DBT very active on this, or anybody? It is beyond the scale of the UK, so I am wondering how much the UK is trying to pool.”

“Is the Minerals Security Partnership the one that is most active in trying to track down those supply chains and work out how they works? Is there anybody else out there who you particularly recommend?”

“That will not work, will it?”

“Is there any recent track record of that working?”

“I would like to refer the Members to my entry in the register, particularly my stake in BDA Partners, which I founded in 1996. Rain, talking about trade balance, the trade deficit in goods with China has doubled from 2019 to 2025 from about £20 billion to just over £50 billion today. There is no sign of that changing. …”

“What would you like to be different? What could the UK change so that innovation happened more effectively in the UK?”

“I take all those points, but we previously had the WTO rules, which were a way of policing these sorts of things. We have now lost them, effectively. In some ways the argument might be that the UK is a mid-sized economy and China is a behemoth, so we should get out of the way of the things that it is producing; we cann…”

“This is industrial subsidies—grants, income tax concessions and below market borrowings. It is China, ex-China Asia-Pacific, Europe and North America. China is massively larger. The chart is from the OECD, so it is good data.”