Speeches by Eagle.

“I am very hopeful.”

“It is in the offing, but it is not finished yet.”

“As I said, I am hopeful.”

“Machinery of government changes are for the Prime Minister. There is no perfect machinery of government arrangement. There is lots of cross-departmental working in many areas. We work pretty closely together. There is a UK defence and security exports team in DBT. If I go on export campaigns abroad, they come with me. …”

“Most of the ones that I come across are defence equipment. The nations with which we are trying to do deals want an arrangement with defence. I suppose that is natural. We pull in particularly from DBT on export finance.”

“We work with defence attachés all the time in our export campaigns. We do what we can to cohere across Government. At Minister of State level, we work with what we have. The Prime Minister decides on the machinery of government.”

“As long as the machinery of government is as it is, we would be working as we are now. I do a lot of export drives for Combat Air. It is not GCAP yet; it is Combat Air Typhoon.”

“We already encourage our suppliers to use UK steel if it is available. Not all the types of steel they need are available. That is what we do at present. A lot of the contracts that we have at the moment are legacy contracts, which were signed many years ago. They were based on pretty hands-off worldwide competition an…”

“One of the issues there is that the type of steel they use to build warships is not generally produced in the UK. It is a particularly thin type of steel that is not produced in the UK. As I have said, we encourage but we do not have contractual requirements. We encourage our primes to source in the UK if they can.”

“We have welcomed contributions from anybody who would like to contribute. The expertise that the Committee has will benefit our thinking as we go forward to create the industrial strategy. We have very much focused on defence. If you have insights that go beyond defence that you think might be helpful to us, we would c…”

“As the hon. Gentleman will probably know, Type 31s are being built at Rosyth and Type 26s are being built at Govan. We have got a programme for eight at Govan, and five so far at Rosyth—that is the current number.”

“I assure the hon. Gentleman that we are tearing up the way in which procurement works before the national armaments director moves into his place. It is one of the biggest jobs in government, which needs the right salary to attract the right person. I am clear that we will do things differently. The national armaments …”

“A fair shot—I commend my hon. Friend on her puns. Accuracy International has made a great contribution to UK defence and exports. I have been talking to defence firms, many of which are SMEs, during the defence industrial strategy consultation. I hope that the changes that we will make to speed up procurement and provi…”

“SMEs can help us make defence an engine for growth in all our nations and regions. I want far more involvement from SMEs in our procurement, providing agility, innovation and resilience as we seek to ramp up our industrial production. That is why the Prime Minister recently launched a new defence SME support hub, and c…”

“I thank my hon. Friend for his question. As I hope hon. Members from around the House are starting to realise, if I am asked for a meeting my general answer is yes. I am very happy to meet him.”

“I have met a number of my equivalents bilaterally, but it is important to say that we welcome the ReArm initiative and that it is in all our interests for SAFE to allow member states to partner with the UK. We will continue to emphasise the need for EU defence financing and wider defence industrial initiatives to inclu…”

“The Defence Secretary raised this issue at the meeting of all NATO Defence Ministers in February and has held a number of discussions with NATO allies since, including with the US Secretary of Defence and in meetings with joint expeditionary force and E5 allies. European allies are stepping up within NATO, and the UK i…”

“I cannot give the hon. Gentleman an answer right now, but I am certainly happy to look into it and meet him, if he wants a meeting, or write to him.”

“The hon. Gentleman is right to say that Hawk is due to be out of service in the early 2030s. We are taking steps to consider what the alternatives might be, and we of will course consider any UK options that exist. I cannot tell him what the answer to that is yet, but it is under active consideration.”

“I very much agree with my hon. Friend. Of course, there are skills shortages across much of manufacturing, not only in defence, so there is certainly going to be an issue. I can tell him that the apprentices I have met in the defence industry tend to smile the whole time. They are getting extremely good training for li…”