Speeches by McDonald.

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

“It is not free but, for a start, you can be focused. BGS has started to think about the places in the UK where there is the greatest opportunity to do that enhanced research. As I mentioned, in Cornwall it is not about lifting the lid on the whole thing. It is about looking at already well‑mapped areas and refining the…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“I am a bit averse to cross-Government ministerial working groups because I feel as though they can get tied up in bureaucracy. It is clear that the Department for Business and Trade is leading on this. I feel as though I have good relationships with both MOD and MHCLG. More importantly, Mike and the team have their ear…”

“Yes, I can. I am going to ask Mike to come in on the £50 million in a moment, but I just wanted to point out that the total amount of funding allocated for critical minerals is around £270 million. It is £268 million at the moment, if you take into account the National Wealth Fund, DRIVE35 and so on. We are pretty much…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“Yes, you are absolutely right. There is not really a shortage of mines. You are right. China’s key strategy has been to corner the market on processing. Over a long time, western countries have been quite relaxed about that—until we woke up to this realisation that we have lost so much of it. Once you have a very power…”

“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…”

“It is a huge market distortion.”

“It is typical monopolistic behaviour. As I said before, for me, this is not a China thing. We should never have allowed ourselves to get in a position where any one country was able to have that grip, because then another country’s industrial policy becomes our foreign policy. You do not want to be in that position.”

“It probably is the right strategy at the moment. I would not expect that all of them are going to result in something completely tangible.”