Speeches by Edwards.

“We have covered off skills and the jobs plans as part of your remit to advise the Government. The term “economic dynamism” has been suggested as something that you should have a look at. Perhaps that is about supporting the ability of markets to evolve, innovate and support high-growth businesses. I just wondered what …”

“I would like to ask another follow-up question around procurement, but starting with with economic dynamism, what do you take that to mean? How are you advising the Government to manifest that?”

“I wanted to pick up on the problem that the ceramics industry is currently having. As a Staffordshire MP, I know that the potteries have been very important there. The GMB general secretary has said that there has been a complete lack of support for these businesses, and Ceramics UK has called for an entire rethink of …”

“We have been talking a lot about the cost of energy and non-commodity costs making up 62% of a bill and the rest being commodity costs and a few other bits and pieces. One thing I have been campaigning on is this challenge around business energy and how you bring that down. I recently launched a charter, alongside lots…”

“Are there any pieces of advice that you are starting to consider around the role of the Government? One of the areas where we know there is quite a big lever is around procurement. That can be used to drive some of that growth and help support smaller companies by giving them those revenue streams and the contracts tha…”

“As chair of the all-party parliamentary group for small and medium-sized enterprise house builders, I regularly hear about the growing skills shortage, and the urgent need to change perceptions about careers in construction, which is a highly skilled, rewarding industry that offers strong career progression, good wages…”

“I want to pick up on an element of that, but before I do, James, at the beginning of the session, you started talking about supply chain weaponisation. You covered some of what I would have asked, but what is the likelihood of that being used? Could it—there are different schools of thought here—be sustained? Would the…”

“We heard a bit in the last panel about where these minerals are coming from. I wanted to probe a bit more about where these gaps and vulnerabilities are going to impact the supply chains of some of the new technologies that we are looking for, so batteries as one example. I wanted to get your views on that and what the…”

“What is a long time?”

“Just briefly, it is very interesting to hear that focus on recycling because we were having a discussion in our private session about really looking at the operational challenges and barriers to that. I was just going to come at this slightly sideways. We are often looking at the Government’s resources and what tentacl…”

“Do you look at the future demand in those calculations as well, not just at what we know today? We know that we want to grow those industries and that there will be a greater need, so future supply chain disruption could have a larger knock-on impact to the economy. Is that the way that those predictions are structured…”

“I want to come back to what you were saying earlier. You said we are not doing the processing and, as a result, we end up with a net loss. Could you give us some insight into why we are not doing it? What would it mean if we could do it? What are those barriers? Just briefly, it might be similar to what we have heard, …”

“We have some domestic production, although it is very small, and we have an issue around the refining. We have a very tiny amount of capability, so we need to build that out. Some of the information that we have received is that other countries are ahead of us. You gave one example there. We have things such as Cornish…”

“I wanted to follow up on the point that you made there about how the company was hoping to bring it back to the UK for refining. We know that one of the UK Government reports last year, in 2025, said that energy costs are too high for the production of UK critical minerals to be competitive. I wondered whether, especia…”

“We have here that “a severe, year-long disruption to the UK’s top supplier of battery components from 2030 could lose out on 583,000 units of EV production and put up to 90,000 jobs at risk.” That is just one example. Did you want to pick up on that, Martin?”

“Building on some of the conversation about the risks of having to go to so many different places for our minerals, we have a very handy table here that is illustrating the point you mentioned around the DRC and cobalt. It has 62% of global concentration there, while 24% of copper is in Chile and 63% of nickel is in Ind…”

“I wanted to ask about items, such as batteries, that are hugely dependent on China, which potentially has a big stronghold on their cost and on the variation or fluctuation of that. It is actively looking at vertical integration, so it has stakes in the critical minerals and the refining, then it has the lithium, the b…”

“Building on that point around supply chain resilience and whether enough is being done, I had a conversation with a company called Toray Textiles, which explained that it would like to supply the armed forces and the MOD with its quality product. It is struggling and competing because, at the moment, the British Govern…”

“Are we confident that we can manage the risk of where that investment might come from? Are we going to accept it at any cost?”

“The point I was trying to make was more that, comparatively, it is a tiny amount of money. It is not about excluding them. It is more about whether it is really worth it. What are we gaining when we are talking about these national security risks?”