Speeches by Hoare.

“Ms Elgar, what are your thoughts on that?”

“Over what time span was this professional negligence—one can only describe it as such—taking place?”

“Could I ask you, Mr Banton, and indeed you, Ms De Longhi, for a word or two on your assessment of how dangerous opencast mines that have not been restored fully are?”

“Let me direct my final question to Ms Lewis, if I may. It is my whip hand question. I do not know if you heard the first panel. If you did not, let me just regurgitate it slightly. Very often, where industrial processes have taken place, accidental habitats have been created as magnets and harbours for biodiversity and…”

“Whose collar gets felt for not monitoring an agreed programme of contemporaneous remediation as one moves from phase 1 to phase 2?”

“Let me just pause there on the bond point, which I take. It is almost held in an escrow account, if one will. My understanding was that it might be that the sum held is fortuitously equal to or less than the cost of remediation, in which case everybody is very happy. Was it ever necessarily seen, de facto, that the amo…”

“I appreciate that. I was thinking of recommendations that this Committee might want to make in its report, casting forward. Thank you for your answers on that. This next question may be to Mr Banton to start with. What have you identified as the barriers for preventing opencast mines, such as the one at Merthyr, from b…”

“Should it be out there for all interested parties to be able to see rather than requiring people to go rootling around to find it?”

“Ms De Longhi, do you have a view on sunlight and transparency?”

“Mr Cox, do you have anything to add?”

“You would have a presumption of public accessibility.”

“We heard from the first panel this afternoon—this rang an alarm bell in my head—about the attitude towards the safety surveys that are undertaken. If the community is interested in them, they jolly well have to go and make an FOI request, dig around and find out. I just wondered what your observations were on that. Whe…”

“I have two quick-fire questions, if I may, for the four of you. There are targets in England and not in Wales, as we heard earlier. Why? We might start with Ms Lewis, who is boasting the finest collection of Ordnance Survey Landranger maps that I have ever seen. That must be the national collection.”

“I just wanted to ask where the balance falls. Mr Therkelsen, you mentioned the creation and establishment of what I would describe as accidental habitats a moment ago. When parcels of land are used and then left undisturbed, mother nature fills the vacuum. When we are talking about remediation, which can often be very …”

“It will be no more expensive than anything else that is proposed to come forward in the round. Let us be absolutely frank. And what price justice?”

“It has increased to a week now, has it?”

“Can I try to inject a little bit of realistic realpolitik into this? The system that went before, with inquests, some liked and some loathed. Quite a lot of that liking or loathing was determined by whether they found the outcomes palatable or not, and the timeliness with which they were accessed. The trigger—no pun in…”

“I am always endorsed by the fact that Mr Robinson thinks I have talked nonsense. There must be a kernel of truth in what I have said.”

“But pursuance of the inquest system is not a drawing of the line; it is just resorting to what we have had in the past. That is not drawing a line. That is not pulling the curtains and saying, “Let’s just forget about it.” It is just using the inquest system and not trying to create anything new. That is not drawing a …”

“Yes. Apologies if that was not clear.”