Speeches by Williams.

“From a Perm Sec perspective, the programme is already demonstrating value for money, on a day when we have launched the defence industrial strategy, with a focus on defence as an engine for growth. Some £22 billion-worth of contracts into the UK supply chain for an investment of around half that is good for jobs and th…”

“I understand that. I am happy to think about that in the context of the defence investment plan, but, more broadly, some of the areas mentioned here, particularly around streamlining of approvals. The threshold at which reapproval is needed is part and parcel of our defence reform work and the way in which we are looki…”

“One member of the Treasury Officer of Accounts team was read in, although not the Treasury Officer of Accounts himself. Part of the way in which we handled this internally was that the policy response for much of this period was led by my deputy, the second Permanent Secretary, with me maintaining a separation for acco…”

“I absolutely agree with the principle. On the particular point around 2010, in the 2010 SDR, we were assuming that we were buying F-35C variants. We changed to the Bs. It is just that there is a degree of complexity around 2010 that I do not have at my fingertips.”

“On individual projects we may from time to time. There is possibly something for us to examine about whether we can do that more systematically. Some of the changes in requirements to publish or make public a version of business cases for GMPP projects that the Treasury introduced earlier in 2025 would be a good vehicl…”

“The principal point of the super-injunction was to protect the lives of those whose details appeared in the data that had been breached, as it were. That risk to life weighed heavily with the courts, with Ministers and, indeed, with officials. That was the balancing between transparency and managing that risk. There is…”

“The risk that we were managing in a world where we were actively looking to bring Afghan nationals back to the UK was access to information of individuals who would understand the nature of their relationship with the UK armed forces versus the sharing of that data.”

“Yes, internally, certainly.”

“It has been a problem, because, in the end, we have to live within an annual budget. The trick is to ensure that we are forecasting the cost of the programme in a way that has appropriate risk contingency built in, are thinking about the balance of risk across portfolios of like-minded or similar capabilities and do no…”

“With the benefit of hindsight, if we had expected the injunction to be in place for two years, there would have been an opportunity to take a different decision.”

“Yes, but we have had to deal with a range of cost pressures, including extraordinary levels of inflation, for example, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine and some of the energy cost crises of earlier this decade. There are constantly things that add costs to the programme and some things that do not progress as we e…”

“That is the risk, if you have a programme that, in the end, you are unable to afford in the way that you hoped that you would. That, in this particular case, is not a weakness of the programme management of this project. It is part of the consequences of trying to afford the defence programme overall.”

“We had conversations with Ministers about reading in Chairs of a small number of Select Committees, but, in the end, the ministerial decision was not to.”

“To go back to your point, the breach is less a classification issue. It is a breach of GDPR and of personal identifiable information, where the classification comes in because of the nature of the service and the links between those individuals and the British armed forces during our operations in Afghanistan.”

“It is a conventional consequence of making decisions. As we live within an annual budget, we are constantly making decisions about the sequencing and volume of spend on different programmes. Those kinds of decisions will be made for this spending review in the defence investment plan. That work is underway now and then…”

“Indeed, the figures are there. The point is that the cost is not in the years in which we have saved the £82 million and we have to live within an annual budget set by the Treasury and voted for by Parliament.”

“This goes to the particular challenge and the unique circumstances of this incident being subject to a super-injunction. Our ability to tell people that there was an injunction covering a set of issues and to ask whether they wanted to be read in was not available here, because our only choice was to read you in, and w…”

“In that particular case, there was a decision deliberately to slow investment in that facility, partly for short-term affordability reasons, which has led to an increased cost overall, but was necessary in order for the Department to live within the budget that it had at the time.”

“Yes, but you can compare F-35s against some other types of aircraft, unless there is a material difference in the fuel consumption, given that it is variable depending on how much we then fly the aircraft. I understand the basis of the NAO’s costing. I think the NAO understands the basis of our costing. We have chosen …”

“I cannot comment on that particular challenge. If, in our engagement with the audit director, she had suggested that we needed to read the Comptroller and Auditor General in, I would have looked at that. To be fair, the information that we shared with her was, as Mr Davies has set out, only part of—”