Speeches by Cooper.

“We are always told that the two certainties are death and taxes, but we can add to that the fact that every Government, of whatever stripe, will come in and promise to ignite a bonfire of the quangos and, yes, slash red tape. Government is a red-tape creation machine, is it not? If we could monetise that, we would all …”

“Thank you. Pat, you mentioned the need to balance economic and security policy, and said that they are sometimes competing areas. How do you manage situations where there may be competition? I am thinking of, for instance, PV panels for solar. We now have a policy that we will drive towards that, but the cheapest sourc…”

“It is worth putting on the record that the jury is still out on whether the Athenian Megarian decree, which imposed sanctions, was effective.”

“I was at the opening. It is probably fair to say that economic security sits in lots of ministerial portfolios but is nobody’s specific priority. Douglas, you seem to be coming down on the side of Sir Simon Fraser of Flint, who argued for a one-stop shop for business to come to, so that they can come to Government, hav…”

“We Conservatives were vilified when we pointed out that the vindictive changes to farming reliefs were going to damage jobs in rural Scotland. The Scotland Office conducted its own roundtable with agriculture figures. Will the Minister share the results of that with the House, the Scottish Government and, crucially, wh…”

“14. What discussions he has had with the Scottish Government on supporting Scottish agriculture.”

“Yes. Professor, you talked about insurance and made quite a powerful argument for convening Government, private industry and insurers, and drawing them together as we face this threat. Jamie, in 2023 the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy used evidence from RUSI to warn that there was a difficulty in the…”

“Can I just pick up on the social engineering point that you mentioned. Is that your understanding of how these people got in? In my limited knowledge, social engineering is where there is effectively an impersonation: someone phones you or the IT people and says, “Can I change my password”, but that person is not who t…”

“How well do you think your systems coped? You think it went well on a board level. Was the system itself, because it was designed to effectively firewall things, quite helpful, too? At the end of the day, you had red teamed this, but it still happened, so is the level of threat higher than you had anticipated?”

“You have given us a good overview there, and talked about how your systems coped. Like most companies, you presumably war gamed this sort of eventuality. What is your assessment of how well you had prepared? Hindsight is 20:20, of course, but do you think you could have done more and what more could you have done? You …”

“I wonder, Mr Babbage, if you are related to Charles Babbage, the inventor of the computer? That would be interesting. On funding, what impact, if any, is the recent spending review likely to have on your ability to deal with cyber-threats? The single intelligence account, which funds British intelligence services, got …”

“I should declare a non-financial interest in that my son actually works for the Co-op, so to some extent he was on the frontline of all this. Could you just give us a picture of what happened, and a sense of how you realised that you had a problem and what the difficulties then were? Our understanding, from the previou…”

“That brings me to a follow-up point. Although that national spending review did lift spending in some areas, longer term you are looking at potential reductions of 15% in departmental administration spending. That will obviously be a concern—you say it is too soon to say, but you must be concerned about that.”

“Do you think the market itself is in a reasonable shape, and that there is no need for the Government to intervene to put money in? I am thinking of things like when the Government stepped in and provided cover for private buildings when the IRA had a bombing campaign here in the UK. Even if you do not think that we ar…”

“As a member of the Business and Trade Committee, I was aghast to find that the Capture system predates Horizon and goes as far back as 1992; so we are 33 years on. The Minister has touched on the difficulties of getting evidence from that time. Has he made any assessment of how many victims might be involved in this Ca…”

“There cannot be a person in Northern Ireland who has not either been along the A75 or the A77 or had something delivered to them that has been driven through the ferry port at Cairnryan. We in Dumfries and Galloway and people across Scotland know that these are the highways from hell. This morning, even as we speak, th…”

“1. What assessment he has made of the potential impact of the adequacy of the A75 and A77 roads leading to Cairnryan ferry port on the Northern Ireland economy.”

“Toby, if I could come to you first, you mentioned VAT and we are hearing about some of the imbalances within the Budget. Everyone knows about the £90,000 VAT registration limit. It is a real cliff edge and lots of industries complain about that. There is a particular quirk here, is there not? You are an employment-heav…”

“Andrew, are apprenticeships a big issue in retail?”

“You are painting a picture in which people are effectively being driven away from VAT. They are actively seeking to avoid it. They are doing, as you say, the wrong thing. Is that quite a common story?”