Speeches by Jopp.

“The hon. Member for Rushcliffe made the very powerful observation that, in identifying a target operating model, form should follow function. The function has been pretty well defined in the Bill, which rather prompts the question why the Government do not have some idea of the form that the regulator should follow. Wi…”

“I—”

“We do not know yet what the target operating model will be. I think the Government can do that work, as they have a pretty clear picture of the functions of the regulator that are envisaged in the Bill. The shadow Minister asked the Minister to give some indication of the limits on money and structure, because we have …”

“Quoting those figures is very helpful. Can the Minister tell us what personnel assumptions those figures were based on?”

“On that principle, does the Minister agree with the Secretary of State for Defence, who said yesterday that the number of people in the Army would be 73,000?”

“I thank the Secretary of State for his statement. When I worked on defence reviews at the Ministry of Defence, they all had up and down arrows. From what I have read of this defence review in the brief time we have had with it, there seem to be a lot of up arrows; I could really find only one down arrow, which was abou…”

“The Minister has been slightly equivocal in answering this question, which I have asked on two previous occasions; third time lucky! Prior to announcing this policy change yesterday, did the Government meet and consult the Domestic Abuse Commissioner about it—yes or no?”

“The 7.58 am train from Sunbury to Shepperton is used by a lot of schoolchildren in my constituency to get to school, but it was cancelled for four days during a recent six-day period, which meant that children were late for school. That appears on their attendance register, which follows them throughout life. The Secre…”

“The Leader of the House knows a great deal about my constituency because I never tire of telling her about it during business questions, so she knows that it is in the administrative county of Surrey, but she may not know that it is in the historic county of Middlesex. Tomorrow is Middlesex Day. I wrote to the Governme…”

“My constituency has 2,000 acres of raised reservoirs and there are 402 Members in the House from England alone who have raised reservoirs in their constituencies, but the debate has not covered the potential for floating solar. Does the shadow Minister agree that if the forthcoming Government solar road map does not co…”

“Some 5,500 defined-benefit schemes have £1.6 trillion-worth of assets. The trouble is that the regulatory environment is skewed toward buying an insurance policy at the end of that journey. In order to change the way in which trustees and fund managers invest, the Minister has to change the end state. What discussions …”

“What was it about the local election results that first attracted the Home Secretary to the idea of rushing out an immigration White Paper?”

“I very much enjoy discussing the British film industry, because Members across the House stand up and say that they have the Hollywood of Hertfordshire or Bedfordshire and everywhere else. I am blessed in Spelthorne to have Europe’s biggest film studios and the second biggest in the world in Shepperton—interestingly, i…”

“Yes, moving on, I think it was in 2021 that we saw the Russian testing of a direct-ascent anti-satellite capability, to international opprobrium at the time. How has the threat environment developed since then? What have we seen? Can you bring us up to date on what is happening up there?”

“The Chagos islands, or somewhere like that.”

“Thank you. If it is any consolation, when I worked in the Ministry of Defence, we had two teams working on the single version of the truth, so don’t worry about incoherence in UK space policy.”

“That brings us into the realm of sovereign nations having huge reliance on commercial capability for the prosecution of self-defence. You might say that ’twas ever thus, but it is obviously not a national capability of Ukraine; they are reliant on the commercial sector. Can you give us a sense of the concentration risk…”

“Are those commercial companies all US-based, or are other options around in the marketplace up there?”

“This is a nuclear weapon constantly loitering—deployed in space for deployment downwards. Is that correct?”

“Have any other market entrants replicated SpaceX Starlink’s capability since that monopoly of one became apparent?”