Speeches by Murray.

“You might be very pleased with our director appointment that is just about to be announced, in terms of her location.”

“The key thing that businesses told us at the election is they want stability, they want credibility, and they want investment in the economy. That is what we have delivered. That takes money to do. I have yet to hear a proposal that suggests that we take that £25 billion out of the economy and suggests what we replace …”

“No, the GREAT campaign is the UK’s principal brand. That has now been running for the best part of two decades. Therefore, it runs parallel with the GREAT campaign, but we cross-contaminate each other. What we are trying to do with Brand Scotland is make sure that whenever the GREAT campaign is doing something, Brand S…”

“We have the full business case, approved by the Treasury, which sets out what we are trying to achieve with the money. Broadly, there are three pots. The first pot is trade missions, the second is being able to help and encourage exporters to export more, and the third is trying to encourage inward investment. There ar…”

“That was a decision that was made by the previous Government. It came down to the fact that the heavy industries in the cluster around the track 1 projects were a much readier source of carbon than the Acorn project itself. Despite the fact that Acorn had the infrastructure, it did not necessarily have the level and vo…”

“I am not responsible for Scotland’s ongoing fiscal challenges. It is the decision of the Scottish Government to determine their own budgets. What I can do is make sure that Scotland gets its fair share and gets the investment that we all want to see, and you can see that through the spending review. Since we came into …”

“I do not want to spend any time at this Committee talking about global instability because everyone knows that is the case. Maybe I could just use that as the first sentence to segue into the fact that from a Scotland Office perspective, all that is incredibly important. We have seen the increase in defence spending an…”

“There are a few things that fall from that. First, if any business in your constituency thinks there is a market it can try to exploit, tell it to get in touch and then we can perhaps put it in touch with a mission in-country. There is some grant funding available, between £3,000 and £20,000, which it could access to h…”

“Apart from that, everything is fine? The biggest challenge we have is in the supply chain—not just in terms of creating capacity in supply chains across Scotland and the whole of the UK, but also in providing a pipeline of projects so the supply chain can be robust and have that certainty in its order book. Sumitomo El…”

“I know Members will be very keen on other examples to give some colour to what we are trying to say. The strategic defence and security review was launched in Glasgow on Monday 2 June. A high-level security briefing on the defence review was offered to the First Minister before it was launched by the Prime Minister. Th…”

“At the election we inherited an economy that was in complete and utter chaos. Public finances were in chaos, with an industrial crisis across Scotland and the rest of the UK. We had to make some pretty tough decisions to stabilise that, by filling the £22 billion black hole, by stabilising the—”

“Yes. A spending review process is not perfect because it is very much about the departmental budgets being set. Of course, the envelope was set in the Budget in October last year. Our role really in a very technocratic way would be that each individual Department looks after its own budget because it has its own progra…”

“I do not recognise that because this is comparing estimates rather than actuals. If we look at the actuals, there is £4.9 billion—£1.5 billion in the previous financial part year and £3.4 billion extra in this financial year. There is £9.1 billion extra across the spending review period, which is the next three years. …”

“Scotland has punched above its weight in terms of the hydrogen sector. In the call for projects to come forward for the funding, there are 11 UK projects, eight of which have been shortlisted in Scotland. There is a £2 billion package on the table. The shortlist for the second hydrogen allocation round has been announc…”

“I am the Member of Parliament for Edinburgh South and Secretary of State for Scotland.”

“It is nice to see the Committee again, and a warm welcome to Mr Doogan. This might be his first Committee appearance while we have been here, so welcome to him. The spending review was a great success for Scotland, and a great success for the whole of the United Kingdom. The Scotland Office worked very hard, and not ju…”

“I don’t think so. The challenge for us as a Scotland Office is to make sure that other Departments have in their spending reviews what we want in Scotland. For example—just for the benefit of the Committee—the £750 million for the supercomputer at the University of Edinburgh, which Minister McNeill launched on the day …”

“There are great opportunities in terms of the rural communities in Scotland. Clean energy by 2030 is a massive opportunity. In fact, the opportunity will be so large that the infrastructure might not cope in terms of housing, connectivity, roads and so on. Those are the kinds of things we are working in partnership wit…”

“To highlight, the Glasgow chamber of commerce has recently been to Shanghai. The interim director of the Scotland Office accompanied them to try to get some big projects over the line. We are all looking for measurables, but some things need a nudge from Government to get them over the line. Hopefully, we will get some…”

“They are complementary, not in conflict. They are supposed to complement each other and not compete. This is Scotland Office’s drive, through UK trade and Foreign Office networks, to try to improve exporting, sell more Scottish products to the world, and get more inward investment, so they are complementary to each oth…”