Speeches by Bryant.

“The system is global. It exercises regardless of the country. We deal with—I think—some 10,000 licences every year across the whole world, and they are not for every single item that could possibly be exported to another country. If we were to introduce such a measure, that would severely limit British trade with other…”

“The F-35 is a matter for the MOD, I am afraid.”

“Just one thing, which is that three of the 167 military ones were suspended military licences.”

“Yes.”

“I am not quite sure what the tenor of your argument is in that question.”

“Well, it means that they are not able to use them. And we have suspended more licences. It is just that three of the licences that are extant and that would have been continued, because the licences are normally for two years, have been suspended. There are others that were suspended on 2 September last year.”

“That is not the job of the DBT; that is a matter for the FCDO.”

“Again, that is not for me, I’m afraid.”

“For instance, in relation to the trainer aircraft that I was talking about, we have made a very clear assessment—we rigorously looked at it, and we have looked at it again this year—of whether any of the equipment in those trainer aircraft could possibly be used in fighter combat, and they cannot be. We can see no way …”

“That is a perfectly legitimate question that I have asked myself. But the assessment is that the training of an aircraft pilot on such equipment would take so long that they would not be among the people who would now be engaged in fighter combat in Gaza.”

“Yes.”

“I think there is confusion here. As you know, in the UK’s export control arrangements there are two categories of things that have to be subject to an export control licence: the first is military and the second is dual use. Military covers a very wide range of things could be used but may not be used at all in a letha…”

“In the broadest possible sense, yes it is. I want to be as open as I possibly can be in the information that we give to the Committee. There do have to be some parameters around that in terms of the commercial sensitivity and security of the individual companies, but within those parameters I am happy to be as open as …”

“It might be best if we go to Rosemary, who is most directly engaged in that.”

“I should make a correction to what I said to Mr Western earlier. The numbers that he referred to are the maximum value that will be allowed under the licence. It is not necessarily the amount that actually ends up going out under the licence, which may be considerably smaller.”

“If I might, Chair—”

“If I may, I will respond to the previous point. First, I want to apologise to you, Chair, and to the Committee, on behalf of all three Departments, for the delay in responding to your letter of 13 August. We would have wished this to have happened much more swiftly than it has done, and I hope we will be able to make s…”

“Every single licence application is assessed when it comes into the joint unit, which is a joint unit between the three Departments. We keep all the extant licences under review all the time. There has been a review of some of them again this summer. Some licences have expired, including some of the ones that were susp…”

“I should also say that while of course today is about export licences, all three of us are fully cognisant of the horrific situation that is ongoing in Gaza. There are still people who have not been reunited—the hostages with their family and loved ones—and the misery continues. We want to make sure that everything tha…”

“Because, first of all, the original assessment, which I was trying to explain, is that we control certain items. Those controlled items have to go through a rigorous export licensing process. People in the Department assess every single one, and we assess the situation in Gaza as to what might or might not be used. For…”