Speeches by Gibson.

“I think there is a lot to be said for that, so thank you very much.”

“That is interesting. I was going to ask what sort of improvements in measurement would most benefit research, so that we can have policy development. From what you are saying, if we are only monitoring the places and not the people, we will not know. We have already heard from previous witnesses that there are people w…”

“Dr Fuller, sticking with what Dr Holman has been talking about—the concern about focusing on limit values and different measuring tools—how should the UK’s monitoring networks evolve to fully capture the totality of England’s air pollution and include emerging pollutants such as ultrafine particles? You talked about th…”

“That is an interesting point. We have been quite happy to have smoke alarms in our houses, and most businesses have carbon monoxide monitors, but in my office we had a carbon dioxide monitor. That was really interesting, because by the afternoon we were well over the limit, which explained why we were all exhausted and…”

“I was not suggesting that building control should disappear from local authorities in any way whatsoever; I was merely thinking of the huge volume of new builds—a registered profession might sort that.”

“Given the challenges around bringing building control back into local authority-exclusive control, which we have just highlighted, is there an argument for making sure that building control officers are part of a registered profession and therefore accountable to an organisation that they can be struck off from? In tha…”

“What improvements in measurement would most benefit the research?”

“On the subject of getting young people into farming, my local agricultural college tells me that when it tries to send students to help on farms, the farmers find it extremely difficult to find a use for them, because getting a licence to drive high-level agricultural equipment is so expensive that students from lower-…”

“Before we leave the House for several weeks, I feel it is absolutely necessary to raise an issue in my constituency, about which I have been trying to get an answer from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and from the Environment Agency. We have a landfill site in Calne that is producing a sulphurou…”

“Absolutely. I just wanted to ensure that my colleague agreed with me that we would like the Minister to consider farming.”

“Farmers across Wiltshire, especially in my constituency of Chippenham, say that Government support is not working. They are disappointed that Labour is compounding the damage left by the Conservatives, with an underspend of millions in the farming budget. Shockingly, the Government’s own statistics say that in 2023-24,…”

“I appreciate that. That is kind of what we wanted to hear, I think. Do you believe that the OEP’s current headcount is sufficient? Would you make the case for more resources?”

“Do you have past experience of delivering cuts while maintaining service levels? Have you had to do that before?”

“Thank you, Dame Helen. You touched on resourcing earlier and that was going to be one of our questions. The OEP is facing real-terms cuts in its budget, and the CEO told us that as a result there are programmes that won’t be taken forward. How do you decide which programmes you are going to cut?”

“Too often, rural communities such as mine in Wiltshire have been overlooked by successive Governments and treated as an afterthought rather than as places with distinct needs, challenges and enormous potential. Decisions are far too often made on urban assumptions, leaving rural areas struggling with weak transport and…”

“I have a specific issue with landfill sites, where regular smells of sulphides are not dangerous necessarily, but very prevalent. Of course that often comes with methane, which is not detectable and fits into your category of nobody knows it is happening. Is there an argument for localised pollution monitoring in areas…”

“There is methane coming out with it as well, which is obviously not detectable by the residents. It is the sulphurous compounds that they know about because they smell.”

“We do not measure the sulphides either, do we?”

“Thank you very much. That is a very clear ask of the Committee.”

“Thank you.”