Speeches by Crichton.

“I will give way. I would love to hear the hon. Gentleman’s excuses.”

“I understand the hon. Gentleman’s passionate defence of his own position, but the truth is that, despite higher spending per head in Scotland, that money is inefficiently used on a massive management structure—boards upon boards and quangos upon quangos—that does not put patients first, as evidenced in the Western Isle…”

“Time is short, my friend, so I must press on.”

“I am sorry, Ms Vaz. On ferries, we welcome the very late arrival of the Glen Sannox and soon the Glen Rosa. A minor earthquake welcomed the Glen Sannox through the Sound of Mull as she made her test run. We are glad they are there, but that is only one ferry crisis; there is also the inter-island ferry crisis. The two …”

“Would the hon. Gentleman describe £50 million for Argyll and the Isles and £20 million for the Western Isles as a “disaster”?”

“Will the hon. Member give way on that point?”

“Corhyn, David and Euan, thanks for coming in, for your evidence and for your expertise and for keeping us safe, I guess. I have technical questions about R&D and where we get value for money out of that, but I want to go back to a version of the question that the Chair asked you at the beginning about what keeps you aw…”

“This is a bonus question from DESNZ. DESNZ has just issued a strategic review of the National Nuclear Lab, which we have not had time to digest. I do not know if you have had time to do that, but did you feed into the review?”

“Do you have to buy in technology and patents from other sites around the world?”

“What do you get out of that? Do you get patents that you can then sell on?”

“Let’s move on to the technical stuff now. I am interested to hear how Tesco uses the NDA to deliver stuff to supermarkets, and how you make money like that. You spend something like £100 million on R&D each year and you are at the edge of innovation; with everything you do, it is the first time it has been done. Are th…”

“Our plants do not have missiles flying over them every night like Ukraine’s do, but we are in almost a cyber war with hostile actors. You mentioned that security and cyber are among the pillars of the NDA. Have you seen an uptick in cyber-attacks in the last couple of years?”

“You alluded to Sellafield possibly becoming an innovation centre for robotics in nuclear waste handling. Are you working on that?”

“I notice that the report calls for greater transparency with key stakeholders and for key stakeholders to reciprocate this transparency. That seems like a civil service criticism.”

“How do you get on with the National Nuclear Lab? What is your relationship like?”

“I am grateful for your forbearance, Madam Deputy Speaker. I very much welcome the announcement made by the Secretary of State today, although its arrival is almost as late as my own arrival in the Chamber this afternoon, for which I apologise. The ban on LGBT people serving in the armed forces until 2000 was a failure …”

“I do not know if the Leader of the House has been caught up in the wild swimming trend, which we in the Western Isles just call “swimming in the sea”. One of my constituents has taken that to the limit: Colin S. Macleod, charity fundraiser extraordinaire, has been swimming a mile’s length of the beach every day this ye…”

“Let me follow on from what Chris was saying and turn back to community energy and community energy generation. My new best friends, Jürgen Maier and Michael Shanks, have both said that they want to see 8 GW of power coming from community generation, yet your connection plans do not mention community energy at all.”

“Why not? If you are winnowing out the zombie projects but keeping your queue—your gateways 1 and 2—if you do not designate community energy and you do not give community energy projects a derogation to get connected quicker, they will not get connected at all, because they do not have the professional back-up of the le…”

“Hello, Fintan and Kayte. Thanks for sharing your expertise and your evidence. To pick up on the point that Wera was making, isn’t one of the best ways to engage communities to give them a direct share in the profit flowing through the pylons? Isn’t one of the lessons from Ireland and Denmark and Germany that the larger…”