Speeches by Gilmour.

“It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Sir Christopher. I thank the hon. Member for Waveney Valley (Adrian Ramsay) for introducing this important debate. The reports this week have been horrifying. That thousands may have died in this heat shows how ill-equipped we are as a country to deal with this kind of weather.…”

“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Alec. There is a version of coastal communities that we like to tell ourselves, of chocolate-box fishing villages and tight-knit communities where people look out for one another, and there is certainly truth in that. In Tiverton and Minehead, I represent one and I…”

“I hear what the Minister says; as a lifelong Liberal, I personally found those years extremely difficult. That said, rurality is not taken into account when the Government give out money for local areas. Accounting for rurality and remoteness in local government funding outcomes would make a massive difference to my co…”

“This is a pretty straightforward question, and I am expecting a very straightforward answer. Minister, under what circumstances would you terminate your contract with Capita?”

“I presume, from what you are saying, that you must have looked into an alternative. You would not just be keeping on going, keeping on going and keeping on going without having at some point thought of what an alternative would look like. That would just be insane.”

“Does contract that you currently have with Capita define a level of service at which it can be terminated? From what you are saying, it seems that you are prepared to be on this treadmill of failure ad nauseam.”

“To what extent have any of the issues so far constituted a critical performance failure? Have we got there yet?”

“I cannot emphasise enough how appalling this situation is for our constituents across the country. I am afraid to say that when Capita were before us in March, we had absolutely no indication from them that they were prepared to be accountable and that they actually understood the enormity of the impact that their fail…”

“On risk, what is the likelihood that the mechanism that triggers additional repayments will be triggered in the next five years? That is a risk.”

“I have to say that I am very saddened to hear about the state of the British Council. I came across it as a teenager, and I know just how important the soft power element is. I have a degree of sympathy, but that is not to say that there are no problems. Nick, what assurances did you take from the external reviews of t…”

“I would like to hear from Helena, because I think she has been very impressive so far. Going back to the financial side of things, given its financial position, how useful was it to charge the British Council more than half a million pounds for external consultancy reviews?”

“How realistic are the plans to repay the loan capital in full within 15 years? I do not want to go back to where we have been in other PAC meetings, where people come here and overblow what they are going to achieve, which inevitably means that they return in a year and we get rather irritated. I would like an honest a…”

“That is a significant percentage of what we are talking about, every year.”

“You are talking about a much more measured, pragmatic and therefore realistic approach. That has a positive impact for staff, morale and things like that, because you are not over-promising and under-delivering.”

“Which is unlikely.”

“You might have just stolen Tris’s thunder on trapped cash.”

“It is about the likelihood that the mechanism that would trigger additional payments will be triggered in the next five years. Sorry about the double “trigger”, which is not good.”

“We are a proud seafaring nation—as John Evelyn put it, the “sea is England’s element”—and the coastguard stands as the nation’s eyes and ears along our shore. The west Somerset coast runs along the north of my constituency and, in the Bristol channel, we have the second highest tidal range in the world. I ask the Minis…”

“Do they not want to establish what it means because they don’t want to offer potential help?”

“What does it mean?”