Speeches by Jopp.

“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Lewell. I thank the 170,000 people who signed the petition, particularly those from my Spelthorne constituency. I served four tours in Northern Ireland and dedicated three and a half years of my life to trying to bring peace to that place. My first tour was in Belfa…”

“The hon. Member is giving a powerful speech. Will he put on record whether he thinks that any of the 500 veterans who he has met are naive?”

“I declare an interest as a Surrey Member of Parliament, and my constituency of Spelthorne is the northernmost borough of Surrey. Can I just confirm whether the changes that we are making today still require Spelthorne borough council to give permission for compulsory purchase, when we have handed those powers to Surrey…”

“Mr Roome is not in his place, but he told a horror story about an SME in his constituency that was on a down select to a prime from eight to seven, and it was being charged 100 grand to do the testing for that down select. Leaving aside the fact that a down select from eight to seven is not a down select, surely the Na…”

“Okay. I do not know whether I can take from that that you know the answer to the question I asked or not. I will turn to Mr Wyatt to ask a slightly different question in the context of defence reform, a more muscular policy shop, a military execution arm and an armaments director. Bear in mind that the Minister said, “…”

“Begging your indulgence, Chair, I want to stay on this issue for one more question. Air Vice-Marshal, have you ever done a NATO job?”

“It is just that I identified a bit of a schism between what you said and what the Minister was saying. Minister, I thought you were going to suggest something like you could not attain starred rank unless you had done a NATO post, and yet the Air Vice-Marshal said that the career managers have taken away the SDR, they …”

“Thank you very much indeed. Moving on to the prioritisation of resourcing between NATO and the Joint Expeditionary Force, who makes those balance of investment and resource prioritisation decisions in the Ministry of Defence?”

“It is worth giving you the feedback—I have to be very careful to launder my sources here—that on one of our visits we got the impression from a NATO perspective that, to a certain extent, JEF activities represented buccaneering privateers and were not altogether helpful in the NATO construct. That is what was suggested…”

“I want to be clear: Minister, you described it as coming in for “ministerial sign-off”, and Mr Wyatt describe it as requiring “political direction”. I just note that distinction.”

“Minister, fairly recently there was a major incident where three electricity substations caught fire and Heathrow airport went dark. Could that happen to any of our UK airbases?”

“We had an evidence session with Professor Peter Roberts from Exeter University, who said that, at the entry level, you are talking about £20 billion. Obviously, that is iterative because move creates countermove, which creates counter-countermove—it is a dialectic. It is important that we are getting into this business…”

“Some of your best friends have been to NATO. Air Vice-Marshal Flewin And have done very well in their careers. To the point that people do not have a fulfilling career out there, I think there is evidence to counter that. I think people go out, enjoy the role, enjoy the centrality of the role and the career, and then w…”

“Wonderful, thank you.”

“One of the recommendations in the strategic defence review was for further investment into an integrated air and missile defence system for the United Kingdom. Obviously, the defence investment strategy is going to cover the detail of that, but could you just give us, in policy terms, a sense of any capability choices …”

“The first line of defence in national resilience is us, the citizenry. The Health Secretary and the Education Secretary wrote recently lamenting the absence of much-needed grit among many of our young people. Now that that risk has been identified at the highest level of Government, does it appear on the risk register?”

“We had a long discussion in Committee about assessing how much this regulator was going to cost and how big it was going to be, but all the amendments we put forward were voted down. When will the Minister know that this thing has grown too big and costs too much?”

“I regret that the Pensions Minister, the hon. Member for Swansea West (Torsten Bell), is no longer in his place; I wanted to pay him something of a compliment for getting the Bill here today with typical ambition and enthusiasm. I should, however, remind him of my grandmother’s favourite saying: an ounce of experience …”

“I was just googling “dirigiste” and my right hon. Friend’s everyman quote. Will he comment on the fact that OMERS, which he would probably agree is one of these megafunds that he thinks are slow and unwieldy and invest in infrastructure and illiquids, returned a 7.1% net return over the last 10 years and the London Pen…”

“The way in which the Minister is talking about insurance buy-out suggests that, in the Government’s mind, insurance buy-out is still in some way a gold standard. Can he reassure the House that he is seeking to flatten the playing field, such that the increased choice available to defined-benefit pension schemes will me…”