Speeches by Kane.

“I am very conscious of time, and I want to crack on and ask a couple of other questions, if that is okay. I suspect America is now firing more missiles than it was planning on buying to replace them. How is the industry thinking about the difference between its approach to steadily building a stockpile of munitions in …”

“It is more about the joined-up approach of the Government. I absolutely get the safety aspect, and I think we promote that well, but if you take nuclear—we have Rosyth, Barrow and Devonport—do you feel that we have joined-up UK approach to doing skills, or do you feel that devolution can sometimes get in the way of an …”

“As a Scottish MP, Bob, can I take you back to what you were saying about decommissioning submarines? Having been to Rosyth and seen how keen everyone is to get going with that, do you feel that delays to the DIP are compounded by the—I am not sure whether I want to use “dismissive” or “naive”—approach to defence shown …”

“I think, as we are approaching Easter, this is the one time of year when baskets are probably useful—for Easter-egg hunts and things like that.”

“Sir Geoffrey has talked about the graduate or youth entries into this; can we talk about the defence skills passport—this sort of smoother transfer for mid-career professionals—in moving between industries? How are you finding the Government’s approach to ensuring that the skills shortages can be filled throughout a ca…”

“You have talked about the ability to surge production, and to go to 24-hour shifts if necessary. How long could you sustain that before it became the norm, or before it broke? Temporarily surging is not the same as moving to a new normal. This question is in relation to how you are coping with the thoughts of being at …”

“Is the cost to replace a weapon that you have fired the same as the cost to plan to do it?”

“My constituency has Queen Victoria school, which is one of the few boarding schools for service personnel. Will you ensure that when we are looking at where families are living, you realise that you have some very articulate teenagers living in this school, and that their accommodation could also do with some TLC? Can …”

“Air Marshal, I am the Scottish MP in the room and am always interested to ask a devolved question. When you talk about liaising with doctors to break logjams of paperwork, can you tell me what you are doing to ensure that those engagements happen in the devolved health services? Will you also talk about general recruit…”

“Thank you. The assurance I am looking for is that you have a mechanism by which it will land on your desk if there is divergence or more of a problem around accessing medical records in Scottish GPs versus English GPs, or if there is a consistent level of recruitment from Scotland versus England in the total, or if the…”

“In constituencies such as mine, social and community enterprises are thriving. They are practical working solutions, driven by local people who care deeply about where they live. We see that in employee ownership, such as in United Auctions, where employees now have a direct stake in the business. We see it in communit…”

“Many households in the rural part of my constituency—including in Carron valley, whose community council I met on Friday—rely on heating oil and live in older housing stock that can be difficult to make energy-efficient. Many of those communities also have an older population. Does the Minister recognise the particular…”

“Good morning, everyone. Sir Peter, let me quote from the NAO Report, paragraph 14: “The average time taken by DWP to process applications more than doubled, from 28 working days in 2021-22 to 66 working days in 2024-25, and has continued to increase. In November 2025, the average time taken was 109 days compared with D…”

“When you say that you are confident you can get to the 25-day target but you cannot tell us when and you are not prepared to put a figure on it, I understand why but it does not give us the confidence we need to know that you are moving towards the target being met. If this 25 days should be 40, to give us a realistic …”

“I get the fact that you have a justification for missing the target. I accept that that justification exists, given the numbers. What I am saying is that as the numbers in the programme can ebb and flow, a target of 25 days is an internal target to help you manage internal processes and expectation, but it is also an e…”

“You are talking about a demand-led programme, with numbers that can ebb and flow, but a target that is fixed at 25 days. Can you talk about how you look at that target? I am not asking you to tell me what you may have internally, but if the numbers treble and the target stays the same, and it is known at the start of t…”

“Bringing that future-gazing to the target, when can we expect the average time taken to process applications to fall to your target of 25 days?”

“Paragraph 18 of the Report says: “DWP told us it is currently seeking to manage the backlog of applications within the budget for the scheme, but this means it does not expect the backlog to fall significantly in the short term. It noted that it needs to balance the demand for Access to Work with its other priorities a…”

“This is the last one from me. You have talked about openness and the “no surprises” culture. I cannot resist asking whether there is anything that surprised you about the success of the “no surprises” culture. Is there anything that you do not want us to lose in our deliberations about the importance that the openness …”

“I want to drill down a couple of things. It often comes up in this Committee that business and technical specialists do not work well together. What do we need to take away from your project that specifically made that work, and that can be learned elsewhere? The business and technical specialists seemed to work well t…”