Speeches by Bryant.

“Yes. As a nation, we are not as industrially focused as some others are in Europe. Nine per cent. of our GDP is industry.”

“Because of all the points that I have laid out earlier about the difficulties of getting decisions.”

“Certainly the pillars of that, yes.”

“There is just one other thing I should mention, which is the supply chain centre that we have started up recently. It has published 36 categories of critical inputs as a signal to businesses to help them understand exactly the direction of travel.”

“If I give an example, this goes back to when I was Telecoms Minister. There was the merger of Three and Vodafone, and obviously there were concerns in relation to part of the ownership of Three, because Vodafone had contracts with the MOD and other organisations and parts of Government. First, we wanted to make sure th…”

“It is slightly early days, but I am always an optimist. It is in Kate’s hands, so it is bound to come off.”

“Similarly, I was in Türkiye two weeks ago. We are trying to make that FTA, which we want to get over the line before Christmas, very much focused on services, because that is a strength for us, but that is quite a big ask from the Turkish Government, so we are working through what will work. You will recall that, with …”

“One of the things we are doing that happens tomorrow is the new steel trade measures that we are introducing, because we recognise that, if we are going to make sure that we have more of a level playing field for British steel production, then we have to have quotas and tariffs in place to do precisely that. On the who…”

“Yes. Let me just finish the point I was making, if that is okay. Nine per cent. of our GDP is industry; Europe’s is 14%. If we want to engage in a degree of reindustrialisation in the UK, then we are going to have to be able to answer some of these questions. That is why the steel trade measure has been quite difficult…”

“Can I just do the second bit first because it fits with it?”

“I would do one other thing, which is that the Minister responsible, who may not necessarily be the Cabinet Minister, should always be at any meeting that has a workstream element in it where they are the person who is going to be taking it forward. The minutes from all these meetings are very impenetrable, and you need…”

“Peter Kyle in the Department and I and others have had quite long conversations, and that happens across Government, completely outside the decision-making process. That is quite important. I worry sometimes that Ministers’ diaries are so full of going to things that do not really have an outcome, and they would be bet…”

“For instance, in trade this is writ large, because we are often seeking a mandate to negotiate with another country or bloc. In order to do that, we have to get agreement from maybe seven or eight different Departments, each of which may be going, “We want you to try to achieve this” or “You must achieve this in your n…”

“I do not think the danger is not allowing enough time; the danger has been that we have just taken far too long to make some decisions. I have an analysis of lots of reasons why, over the last 15 years, the decision-making process in Government has got much sludgier. We need to make it a bit swifter.”

“First of all, we probably have too many structures of committees. Committees should be able to make decisions. We need to delegate better throughout the whole process of government. We should be less obsessed with Cabinet and more able to use the whole of the Government structure. I would introduce a rule that no Minis…”

“It might be useful, but it might be unachievable. That is my anxiety, because, first, things change pretty regularly, and so people might be relying on what the view was six months ago, which might have changed. Secondly, some of the areas where we would perceive greater risk and we would want to exercise greater discr…”

“I will come to that. There are two different elements here. First of all is the question that may be the most effective means of bringing about a change, which is to introduce due diligence requirements on company directors, who could potentially be civilly liable, so that they would have to make sure that, within thei…”

“I was not sure whether I was allowed to say it; I do sometimes check. It is the National Security Committee, which is chaired by the Prime Minister. If there is a major, significant issue that needs to be addressed, then that is where that would go. For instance, there was an adjudication last week by the Chancellor of…”

“The national security investment screening process under the Act has a very precise process, and that is all laid out in statute and is available for anybody to understand. Where there are cross-cutting issues, those are addressed by Cabinet sub-committees, and Ministers consider them.”

“A submission would probably come up to Ministers in my Department. Kate and I would probably have discussed it beforehand. We would have a little bit of a discussion with Lewis as well about how all of that would go down. We would have to bear in mind how that relates to other parts of our industrial strategy and wheth…”