Speeches by McDonald.

“Yes, I am. As I said, it is an iterative process. I would expect it will improve every time as a result of getting better data and the shift in technology, which is a really important thing. Let us say I am sat here in three years’ time—who knows? I do not know whether I will be lucky enough to be able to do that. Ther…”

“Yes, exactly.”

“It is an iterative process. The latest version is better than the previous one. The next one will be even better. I cannot remember exactly who it was now, but one of your previous witnesses was talking about the development of battery technology. A lot of critical minerals demand is driven by battery demand. I think i…”

“Clearly, it is the dependency on China, particularly on processing. As I mentioned, China has a grip on 70% to 90% of the processing capacity in a number of critical minerals. The UK has two sources of material inbound, the primary resource that we can dig out the ground and the secondary resource that is circulating i…”

“On MOD specifically, yes. I was talking to one of the MOD Ministers yesterday about this. The MOD is developing its own plans, which will then feed into demand. That will feed into some of the bilateral arrangements you will be aware we are discussing. There is the opportunity to access stockpiles with friendly nations…”

“No, it is not happening incidentally. It is very much the focus of what we are doing through the strategy. As I said, there are really two ways to do that: UK processing and bilaterals. There was a point where we could have pretty much decided, “We will use the bilateral or multilateral arrangements as the primary supp…”

“Yes, that would be really good. I would be pleased to do that.”

“That would be good. I will tell you what we could do on that, just to create a bit of work for Mike. On some of those, we could highlight what the opportunity is. Do we have a mining opportunity? Do we have a processing opportunity? It is not easy to land that. It is a cross-Government effort. If the Committee would be…”

“Yes, I have.”

“Thanks, Justin, for all the work that you did on this when you were in the Department as well. I appreciate it. I do feel slightly guilty about coming in and just picking it up, but there we are—I did say that when we launched it in the House. If you look at lithium particularly, there is a combination of the miners an…”

“I do not know that it necessarily has to be different. It is more about ensuring that we know what our objectives are when we go into these discussions. In the area of critical minerals—again, I have read through the evidence that people have given when they have come to the Committee—there are lots of people who see t…”

“The short answer is yes, essentially. I do not want to downplay the multilateral aspect, because that is really important. If there is the opportunity for multilateral trading frameworks in the EU, the G7 and so on, we are very keen to be supportive of that. It is also true that there are individual countries that are …”

“It is not that we have not figured it out, but there is not such a project yet. That does not mean there could not be.”

“The question that we would need to ask first, though, is what midstream processing we would want to develop in a country in Africa and why we would want to do it. This goes back to the point that I raised with Noah. We would have to decide first where we would see that sitting and whether it would be here or there.”

“You were surprised that we have a geological survey that is 50 years out of date. When I called in the British Geological Survey to meet with me, I pulled my geological map off my bookshelf at home from 1962 and it was pretty much the same as the data that it has now. In the meantime, foreign Governments have been payi…”

“Yes. We are not particularly far away from being able to explain how that money is going to get out into the market.”

“Yes, here in the UK, in so far as possible. Another example of that is on the technology development side. Take a business such as HyProMag, which is a spin-out from Birmingham University. I opened its pilot plant in Birmingham, which was great. It is building a plant in Germany. We have the processing here and it is b…”

“For two out of three of those, there will not be any onshore processing. It is on a case-by-case basis with the particular element. For instance, we are not going to be processing graphite here particularly, but this week I have had a conversation with an official from the high commission of Canada, where they not only…”

“Yes, we are. It would be different if we were in a situation where there was a view that those things were mutually exclusive, but that does not really seem to be where we are. There is not a central grip on this at the moment, where these things are mutually exclusive—far from it. Certainly among the G7 nations, there…”

“That is a really good question. It does concern me a bit. How do we make sure that we get the minerals we need and that we are strong in the areas where we have capability? I do not feel as though we are behind where we need to be. There is huge scope still. I do not want to rush in too quickly either and sign a bad de…”