Speeches by Scrogham.

“Moving on to that, which countries are excelling or doing better than the UK when it comes to research, testing and production?”

“Let us return to the original question: what are their limitations and what are they best suited for?”

“Thank you. Let me move on to autonomous vehicles, which we have talked about an awful lot. We have talked about submarines and the need for more of them. You won’t get any arguments from me on that, because I certainly think we need more of them, but when we are advancing so far into everybody adopting underwater unman…”

“When we visited Finland, we looked at their whole-of-society approach, which is utterly different.”

“I am from Barrow-in-Furness, so we understand the deterrent very well. Do you think that the rest of society understands the importance?”

“I would like to ask Sir Hew first on this one. Do you think that the UK’s posture on deterrence needs to change in the light of shifting ways of warfare?”

“If we are going to go down that line, I should put on record that my son is a volunteer in the cadet force. We are not advocating for them to be paid.”

“Do you think there was a whole-of-society response?”

“Last year’s SDR talked about a whole-of-society approach to bolster the UK’s resilience. How will moving in that way have an impact on the challenges we face for future warfare?”

“Does the public understand enough about what is happening in the grey zone, about deterrence and about what we need to spend on defence for us to justify that politically?”

“And on developing deterrence itself?”

“We have seen an escalation in attacks in the grey zone over recent years; we talk about cyber-attacks and, again, I would suggest that we do not talk about that enough publicly. People might see a delay to their shopping from Marks and Spencer but not understand the implications of those attacks on our supply chain. I …”

“What impact will the failure of support for the international non-proliferation agreements have on this, such as the expiration of the New START agreement?”

“If we can just go back to the Defence Investment Plan, obviously it is widely awaited with speculation on why we are waiting so long to see it, but that aside, my concern is businesses. We have a fairly large supply chain and many of those businesses rely on the orders coming through; they do not survive on hints and i…”

“You mentioned the Atlantic Bastion; there were due to be contracts and deployments this year. Has that been pushed back with the defence investment plan not being published?”

“They are on track with where they should be?”

“Secretary, you announced last year that there had been a 30% increase in Russian activity in UK waters. Can you tell us how much of that increase was subsea?”

“Obviously, it is fine if you do not want to go into details on what level was subsea, but what threats do you see that posing to the UK?”

“Are we seeing threats from other adversaries in those areas too? China, for example?”

“Coming back to what my colleagues were raising about public awareness and defence spending, this is something that I have raised on a fairly frequent basis. I do not believe the public are as aware as they should be of just how high the threats are and how many attacks are being made on the UK on a regular basis. When …”