Speeches by Martin.

“12. If she will take steps to provide Ukrainian refugees with a route to permanent settlement.”

“I know that the Minister will listen carefully to this question because he used to live in Tunbridge Wells. Elena is a Ukrainian woman who works in our local hospital. She has not been able to advance her career because her visa restrictions mean that she cannot study. I know that the Government do not want to give the…”

“Finally, do you have any brief thoughts on clause 9, on the extension of MAPPAs, or multi-agency public protection arrangements? Is it enough? Does it need to do more, or is it in the right place?”

“My hon. Friend is making a powerful case for his constituents. Does he agree that this is a problem not just for the Isles of Scilly, but for the Isle of Wight and the Western Isles? We are an archipelago. Those who live on the outer islands suffer from this inequity; they are as British as us, but they do not enjoy th…”

“You are saying that there will be a reduction in headcount of one-star officers and above?”

“One final question: can you state categorically that no tanks will be withdrawn from Estonia?”

“Any idea on timescales?”

“That is really helpful.”

“I am sure you are doing a great job. I mean in the abstract, of course.”

“One of the reasons that you reduce headcount is to cut costs. The other reason is the chefs in the kitchen idea: that things are much more efficient, and decisions are made quicker, when you have fewer people sticking their oar in. We have all heard the stories of the Zoom calls with 30 people where each of them has a …”

“Thanks very much for coming today. To dive into the details, clauses 5 and 6 give new powers to the service police and courts to protect individuals from sexual harm and domestic abuse. Could you speak a little about that? Does the Bill go far enough? Does it give adequate protections? Is there more that we could do th…”

“Permanent secretary, will you answer the same question?”

“To give you an example, I may be slightly out of date, but at one point last year, my understanding was that the brigade pencilled against Estonia was 4 Brigade. You will remember that pre the accession of Finland and Sweden, we offered security guarantees to those two countries. In the interim between them saying they…”

“Provided that those promises are not all called in at the same time.”

“Air Marshal, as you would expect we have a number of commitments all over the world. Some of those will be physical commitments, such as in Estonia where we have troops, and some of them will be promises for further troops. To use Estonia as an example, we promised a follow-up of the rest of 4 Brigade to reinforce that…”

“The accountability would go from you to the director of Defence Digital to the project lead—one, two, three—and then the portfolio approach, which might bring together a whole bunch of stuff, sits at your level, which is the interface.”

“So that portfolio approach is held at your level?”

“I have a final point on organisational design. Incentives are important. Organisational design basically aligns personnel and teams’ incentives towards outputs. With the portfolio approach you are talking about, we could have a digital bucket and so on—perhaps in your answer you could give us some examples. Are you the…”

“Many of these programmes were started a long time ago. To what degree are we locked into stuff that means that we cannot open up the architecture, for instance, and get these different elements to work together better, inhibiting that systemic thinking you are extolling?”

“That is very MoD, because you only get four cups of coffee in those carriers, rather than five.”