Speeches by Kirkham.

“This deal will support 20,000 jobs and make sure we have the skills we need for future combat air programmes. Defence supports 37,000 jobs across the south-west. What steps are the Government taking to support skills across the whole defence sector and to support the space, satellite and drone sectors that are so stron…”

“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Roger. Truro and Penwith College in my constituency is a very successful tertiary college. It is fully ready to take up the mantle of two thirds of students and learners being in further education, higher education or apprenticeships by the age of 25. It works closely…”

“I suppose it was not just water; there were also some goals for clean air, maximising resources and minimising waste.”

“Are you going to introduce standards for inspections?”

“Do you think it would help if there were more inspections and more obvious standards for those inspections going forward? Because there have not been those ad hoc inspections.”

“I have a specific question but it goes to the issues that you are talking about in relation to permitting. We have a bit of a crisis in Cornwall at the moment with septic tank waste. I have a company—lots of them actually—that have been moving it hundreds of miles to take it to South West Water treatment works. It has …”

“Last year, you told the EAC that you were not doing a good enough job of protecting the environment. Since then, the Office for Environmental Protection has shown that many environmental indicators are on the decline and environmental laws are not actually being adhered to. Do you think we are heading into a culture of…”

“How much does that cost? Is that an extra on top of what it used to be?”

“Just a last question. There has been some criticism of the EA for being reluctant to publish inspections data and maybe opaquer and slower to respond to FOIs. What is the reason for this and is it being tackled? There have been some reports that employees have been frightened about publishing this data. How are you tac…”

“Do you have any concerns about the risk-based approach to monitoring or do you think it is good enough? Do you think that that will impact how much the pollution risk is being addressed that way?”

“Do you think there is enough intelligence and it is not impacted by your resourcing, for example? Is that limiting the amount of inspections that you can do and is that why you are focusing on that risk?”

“It collects waste from across holiday parks and has built one itself already on quite a decent-sized scale. It has been asked to conduct tests, but of course it cannot do the tests until the treatment works is up and running. It has become a bit of a circular situation.”

“How is the balance?”

“I just wanted to ask a little about the Shoreline Management Plan because I come from Falmouth, which has four beaches, two of which are treated very differently from the other two in the Shoreline Management Plan, and it is just that recognition that the economic impact of that could be vast to some places. The counci…”

“I welcome this fund. The Cornish fishing fleet, which has suffered, has put together a joined-up proposal for our part of the fund, so I would be grateful if the Minister could look at that. The proposal talks about front-loading the investment, multi-year project funding, science and research, and data collection abou…”

“Q3. The number of households in Cornwall in temporary accommodation has increased by 265% in five years, so I am delighted that this Labour Government are investing £39 billion in social and affordable housing. In Cornwall we are developing a strategy to provide housing at sites such as Pydar in my constituency, which …”

“I wanted to ask about your changing relationship with the EU. Since we left the EU, you have taken on a number of other responsibilities and roles and have been assisting with some of the risk assessments for free trade agreements as well. How successfully do you feel you have been able to take on these new roles. Do y…”

“How many people, roughly, do you think you have had to take on to deal with that?”

“Yes, so you have obviously expended resource on doing that as well.”

“You do not know, I suppose, whether anything in the future will relate to us, so you could miss out.”