Speeches by Morello.

“If you do not secure the adequate funding, if it is £250 million, what has to be cut, or is there silverware that can be sold?”

“How confident are you under a Trump presidency that the USA would fulfil its article 5 obligations if it was called upon?”

“It is a very short one then. Under a Trump presidency, how confident would you be that the USA would fulfil its Article 5 obligations?”

“You mentioned in passing there that you do not think that the British Council is doing as much as it should or wants to.”

“Also, it is being forced to pay back its covid loan at commercial interest rates. Do you think that that is consistent with trying to get it to do more?”

“The ECHO 2 programme is crucial to delivering the new global communications network for the FCDO. The Minister mentioned that it is due for completion in January 2025, but will it remain within budget? What are the plans to ensure that it delivers its full technical and financial benefits? Does the Minister think that …”

“8. What recent steps his Department has taken to deliver the ECHO 2 programme.”

“Obviously, a lot of this comes back round to money, and you have referenced where we sit in global league tables—below the Qataris, on par with France, and pretty much half of what the Americans are spending. But then we look at Russia Today, at £1.5 billion, and China somewhere in excess of £5 billion, in terms of wha…”

“There is the CSR, but there is also the charter review coming up, which is theoretically another opportunity to look at a long-term model. What is the ask for the charter review?”

“We have obviously focused on soft power. In the Grade report for the FCDO on the World Service from 2020, Grade says that the World Service does not just support soft power; it also supports trade and national security. Do you agree that it supports trade and national security, and if that is evidencable in the way tha…”

“Obviously, a lot of this comes back round to money, and you have referenced where we sit in global league tables—below the Qataris, on par with France, and pretty much half of what the Americans are spending. But then we look at Russia Today, at £1.5 billion, and China somewhere in excess of £5 billion, in terms of wha…”

“There is the CSR, but there is also the charter review coming up, which is theoretically another opportunity to look at a long-term model. What is the ask for the charter review?”

“We have obviously focused on soft power. In the Grade report for the FCDO on the World Service from 2020, Grade says that the World Service does not just support soft power; it also supports trade and national security. Do you agree that it supports trade and national security, and if that is evidencable in the way tha…”

“If we accept that the BII is achieving outcomes along the lines of the strategy in terms of development, is the other side of that that we accept that it is loss making?”

“If you are talking about consular services being self-funded through passport levies, those are low intervention cases. If 8,000 out of the 22,000 people who were helped were vulnerable people, they would be complex interventions that do require more money. If we are talking about a more volatile world, we are talking …”

“Sir Philip, you started off in your opening statement talking about the fact that the world has become more volatile and less predictable, and the need to be more agile in the FCDO response and think ahead to future risks. With that in mind, there was a 7% increase in the number of individuals who received the help of …”

“Can I just ask whether there is any indication that if you are accurately forecasting that over a sustained period, the Treasury would reduce your headroom?”

“I guess where I am trying to go with this is that, if we accept the National Audit Office number or several hundred million—whatever you want it to be—and we run out of receipts from drawdown and there is nothing left to sell and the Treasury is not making up the shortfall, you hit a cliff edge, at which point you have…”

“But you know what your needs are, because the National Audit Office reckons that your annual maintenance budget is £250 million a year and presumably it is only going up with ageing assets. If you have got a run cost of £250 million increasing every year and you are nearly out of the drawdown that you can make from sal…”

“Over what period?”