Speeches by Cooper.

“Professor Haskel, it seems we have an enormous problem: £2 trillion is an incredible, mind-blowing number, and we are talking about decades to try to address this. Have you any thoughts on that? We are not going to solve this overnight—that is obvious—but where might we begin to head in the right direction?”

“You touched on the capital gap. Professor Allas, you mentioned the capital gap as well, which is broadly the gap between the supply of capital relative to demand, as I understand it. Is that broadly right? You might be able to put me right on that.”

“We talked about churn and Chancellors. There might be quite a lot of churn in politicians if we suggested increasing council tax by four or five times; I think that would be quite a tough sell. Professor Chadha, you seemed to indicate that perhaps the Government were looking at this issue through the wrong end of the t…”

“I am from the south-west of Scotland, which is as far from the north-east as one can get in Scotland. None the less, this is a huge issue for the whole country. My hon. Friend is making a point about the North sea basin being mature. We always hear that—it is mature, it is declining—but the Norwegian investment is expl…”

“rose—”

“Will the Minister give way on that point?”

“I thank the Minister for giving way on that point: this is about balance. We need to find a balance in the transition of people coming out of oil and gas and moving into renewables. The difficulty is that we cannot say to these highly-skilled people that there is a great job for them in renewables but it is going to be…”

“This goes back to my colleague’s point about minimum unit pricing. We are close to that border. There is no minimum unit pricing south of the border. There is north of the border. Are we getting to the point where it would pay you to do a bootleg run across the border, load up and come back over?”

“It is quite remarkable that the Scottish Government got money through the Barnett formula to pass on rates relief and that money just disappeared into Edinburgh. We never saw it. That seems quite remarkable, does it not?”

“Stephen, finally, on the Scottish position, the Government here have a plan and, while it might be flawed, I am not convinced that the Scottish Government have any kind of plan other than to tax you into the ground. Would you agree with that?”

“Lydia, do you agree with that? You are on the ground. Is this policy much help to you at all?”

“The Government have the small business plan, which was mentioned briefly there. If you look at the hospitality offer within that, it has some quite interesting things about hospitality zones, fast tracking licences and things like that. Listening to what you are saying here today, it strikes me as though the Government…”

“You spoke about how vigorous your board is. Is there room on that board for someone from the SME sector?”

“Is that an ongoing process? Are you going to make that part of your ongoing process?”

“You said there that you spoke to SMEs as you were ramping up.”

“Sarah, Skills England is obviously fairly new. You said that you have only been fully established since June. The big sea change, with the arrival of the growth and skills levy as opposed to the old apprenticeship levy, has broadly been welcomed. Would you agree with that? There is possibly a little warning sign ahead.…”

“I grasp the mechanics of it, and I know that three are suspended. My question is: what assessment have you, or the Government, made, in the round, of the effect of the suspension of those licences? Have you done any work on what effect that is having on the conflict?”

“Simply that you have suspended three licences; what assessment have you made of the effect of that on the conflict in Gaza? Has it made any material difference at all?”

“You talked about the suspended licences, of which there are only three—a relatively low number. What assessment have you made regarding the suspension of items that might be used in Gaza? Has that made any real difference to the conflict? What I am driving at is that there is a very low number of suspensions; have you …”

“Critical to this issue is the F-35 programme. Can you give an indication of how many of the 55 extant licences are for exports to the global F-35 Lightning II programme?”