Speeches by Olney.

“Given the width, still, of this funding envelope, there is £49 billion to £66 billion in 2019 prices. Again, if I was one of the commercial partners, I would be looking at that and thinking that that creates an opportunity. I think that remains a risk to this project and a risk to your very best efforts, which I do not…”

“I am going to express a bit of scepticism, if I may. If I was one of your commercial partners and I was listening to you today saying how you need to reset, how HS2, as an organisation, took on too many of the project risks at the beginning, and how you need to bear down on costs, I would be thinking, “Why should I? Wh…”

“Mr Wild, I just want to come back to your previous statements about renegotiating with the main contractors. I have also been reflecting on some of your introductory remarks about the necessity—within HS2 and within the DfT—for a reset on this programme. However, is it not the case that the third parties that you will …”

“Once you have agreed among yourselves what the new costs look like, you will have to go back to the Treasury, Dame Bernadette. What is your estimate of the timescale for getting a new agreement with the Treasury?”

“Dame Bernadette, you said to me that an agreement is being reached between HS2 and the Department for Transport on what the new costs look like, and you are working very closely with the Treasury. Your answer seemed to imply that you think that once you have landed on that figure, which we know will be somewhere betwee…”

“To be clear, I mean that because you are saying that the Treasury is involved every step of the way, once you have reached agreement you expect it to be quite soon after that that Treasury will sign off on the budget.”

“I was coming to that, because the Report makes it clear that the need to keep annual spending under a certain limit has actually increased overall cost. Will your case to the Treasury be that you need an overall spend limit rather than these annual limits?”

“Not just for HS2, but for any project?”

“Something else that the Committee finds unsatisfactory is the fact that the £45 billion to £66 billion spread is still being expressed in 2019 prices.”

“Can I pin you down on that? Do you think that when the spending review happens is when you will finally start to use 2025 numbers, as they will be then?”

“So, given that the £45 billion to £66 billion spread is in 2019 prices, we can expect to see that shift upwards, can we?”

“I completely understand the point that you are making, but it is an increase.”

“In July of this year, it was revealed that 173,000 YouTube videos, including material created by globally recognised British musicians, news channels and artists, had been scraped into a dataset used to train AI models. Content from over 40,000 creatives has been found in this dataset, yet I do not believe that consent…”

“I and my Liberal Democrat colleagues are supportive of the extension of this legislation and its ambition to make our second Chamber a more equal and representative place. I am glad to see the legislation move so swiftly through Parliament and I plan to play my part in that. We are glad of the intention of the Bill to …”

“ Do you think the online marketplaces have access to enough HMRC data to be able to do most effectively the job they need to do?”

“ Currently, is it true to say that although we know that fraudulent company registration is a risk for tax evasion, it is impossible to estimate?”

“ Sir Jim, eBay UK is headquartered in my constituency of Richmond Park. I had a meeting with it last week about some of its concerns around the application of the new rules for tax reporting for online marketplaces. Its specific issue is that all new sellers&#…”

“ Ms Smyth, how much has fraudulent company registration reduced since the introduction of the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act?”

“ I imagine that if you are finding it hard to estimate how much fraudulent registration has been avoided or detected, then it is going to be quite difficult to say how much tax evasion has also been prevented as a result. Is that right?”

“ There are three things that I heard you say that might have contributed to that underestimate. There is a change in policy; you have cracked down on non-compliance; and there is an increase in volume. Have you broken down, between those three things and, indeed, any po…”