Speeches by Cooper.

“Again, this may only be speculation, but there are a lot of suggestions that this is tied to achieving a security and defence partnership with the EU. Can you give us any sense of where we are with that? Are there challenges to that? Are we well down the line to achieving that partnership? This also has big implication…”

“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Vickers. I congratulate the hon. Member for St Ives (Andrew George) on securing this important debate. I declare a sort of interest: in a previous life, I was a special adviser with the Scotland Office, and I spent the larger part of 2021 working on exports from Sco…”

“Q9. When he was Director of Public Prosecutions, I do not think the right hon. and learned Gentleman would have sat comfortably in the Cabinet of Prime Minister Cameron, but incredibly in Scotland, we have a situation in which the head of prosecutions—the Lord Advocate—does sit in Cabinet. This situation has been throw…”

“How feasible is it to keep the blast furnaces going in the interim period? I know that is not easy. If you shut them down, it is very difficult to restart. Are they likely to keep going?”

“Again, you do not have a deadline on that. You are not putting a guillotine on it. It is open-ended, is it?”

“Those talks are ongoing?”

“Going back to the education sector, there seems to be a particular problem in Scotland. The Scottish Government’s decision to scrap tuition fees has effectively capped the number of Scottish students. Am I right in saying that Scottish universities are exposed to Asia? It was quite remarkable: I think you said that 68%…”

“T6. The Hawk aircraft, most famous in the scarlet livery of the Red Arrows, is at the end of its service life. Can Ministers explain what steps they are taking to ensure that we replace it with a British-built sovereign capability?”

“My hon. Friend has begun what I am sure will be an exquisite speech, and she hits the nail on the head when she talks about transport connectivity. One of the great problems that unites all our coastal communities is that it is difficult to get anywhere. For a community like mine in Dumfries and Galloway, it is 80 mile…”

“That leads me to the mix of people that you have. Can you break down by proportion the numbers of professionally qualified accountants, lawyers and financial crime practitioners?”

“Large spending announcements for defence would make people think that Britain is marching to war, but the Ministry of Defence is bimbling along with procurement systems that are better designed for peacetime. Will the Prime Minister use his good offices to bring British industry into this fight, and quickly?”

“In February 2024, Companies House told this Committee’s predecessor that you had recruited 216 out of 241 new staff as a result of reforms to enforcement. Earlier you touched on the resources and capacity you have. At that time, the target figure was to recruit 320 people. Where are you now? How many have you brought i…”

“Looking at that capacity resource, do you feel that you have enough staff to materially reduce fraud and false filing? Are you comfortable with those figures?”

“Chris, can I come to you, a smaller company? Is exporting on your radar? Is that something that you want to do? Is it too daunting?”

“That is quite remarkable. The Americans approached you and helped you supply them?”

“You experience is good but just not here.”

“John, you have one eye on the export market with the global combat ship that you are putting together in Babcock at Rosyth. What can the UK Government do to help get that sailing the seven seas?”

“If I can take you back, you have been able to talk about your three pillars and how you assess where you will do business. You speak to governments, presumably, all over the world. What are the relative strengths and weaknesses of the UK’s business environment? Perhaps taking you back to your three pillars, you talked …”

“You are heavily invested in the UK and there is something about Britain you like. You hinted at the appetite for innovation, though. You thought that we might have fallen down somewhat on that. What is the difficulty there?”

“What are other governments doing that is right, apart from throwing the kitchen sink at this? The growth you are talking about there presumably means a lot of money is getting put in. Yesterday, we were a stone’s throw away from the medicines manufacturing and innovation centre just outside Glasgow airport. Is that a d…”