Speeches by Aquarone.

“Just to be an extra thorn in that side—I appreciate your commitment to do that—we do not have lamp posts in most of these places, so access to cheap charging is limited, as you know, and the undertaking that goes from having a parking free-for-all, which is already far from ideal, to necessarily allocated parking will …”

“One level up from the leaseholder is the housing association. In my North Norfolk constituency, they took vast swathes of estate from councils and they are pretty much designed and laid out in the same way as they were when they were council house estates. It is even more complex than the typical town street, where at …”

“I get that the price in comparison is coming down. If it was just a case of existing EV drivers accepting the long-term truth that you have announced, it would be fine, but I am not sure that you have priced the convenience factor into this rejection of that modelling. I would not suggest you are being bullied by the T…”

“But this is specifically about eVED and the impact on uptake. Surely, you would not be doing this were it not for the revenue requirement. You could do this two years later. You could admirably advertise that it is coming two years in advance, but still do it two years later. It could still be the right tax at the wron…”

“So the road budget is more important than the transition numbers?”

“I am grateful for the steps that the Government have taken today in recognising the importance of rural and coastal communities. The hon. Member for East Thanet (Ms Billington) made reference to my constituency earlier in this regard, and I thank her for doing so. The Government clearly realise how important it is to r…”

“I mean strategic decisions where you think, “I can’t do that yet, we need the permanent appointment in place to do that.””

“Nick, you have recently taken the leadership role on an interim basis. What are your immediate priorities?”

“Nick, back to you. You have these priorities of safety, timing, and getting the foundations right for RIS3. There must be some important decisions that will happen under your tenure as interim chief executive. Are there any that you already know need to happen after the permanent appointment?”

“Before I come into a bit more detail on that, I know, Laurence, that you had a supplementary.”

“I brought up the ORR’s critique of the need for a company-wide standard of benefits management approach earlier. It is easy to think that that applies to new big schemes and having standardised those, but renewals are a little tricky because the benefit arguably could be the road does not fail. Are we on track for havi…”

“I am sure we will come back on that. Does anybody else want to add to this discussion before we move on? No? Thank you.”

“Then it is the productivity of the undertaking, not the asset or the pound invested; the productivity of the works, the programme, even the contractor, or what are you measuring the productivity on?”

“I am sorry to push you, but do more on which part? If this is about the big picture, that is a lot of money. We want to make sure that £27 billion is spent in a way that absolutely maximises the benefit to the taxpayer. Has the ORR not understood the detail of how that works, or is it about bringing a number of differe…”

“Okay, that is interesting. It helps because that is part of the changing shape of the portfolio.”

“That makes sense, but you could still be doing something in a very efficient way that does not stack up in terms of benefits. Are you confident that this layers up to having a way of looking across the whole organisation and saying, “Yes, we are maximising the benefit potential across all the work that we do”?”

“I am sure my colleagues will have questions on measurement in particular. If I could ask you to focus on the overall company-wide benefits management process, that would be really helpful at this stage.”

“There is lots of nodding; you seem confident.”

“You talk about robust measurements and analysis processes being in place, but the ORR said that during the interim period it advised you to improve your process for identifying and measuring realised benefits across its portfolio. Which is right?”

“Let us move on to the ORR; you are probably expecting questions on this. It has been reasonably critical, particularly on the issue of defining benefits and having a clear understanding of benefits, whether those are about schemes or strategies or overall approaches. How are you planning to address its concerns?”