Speeches by George.

“That is three years now.”

“My apologies for missing the opening section. I thank Danny for protecting the inevitable spillover between his area of very good questions and that of workforce planning. Zara, a moment ago you were going to refer to the 2023 survey of members and those working in the service. Can you say a little more about the state…”

“There is no time for courtesies. Homelessness is one end of a continuum that starts with thousands of wealthy people purchasing holiday and second homes in places such as Cornwall and ends with 5,000 people annually presenting to the local authority as at risk of or experiencing homelessness. For a number of years, I l…”

“T2. I acknowledge that the Government have inherited local government finance and SEND requirements in what is probably their worst crisis in history. However, Cornwall has faced one of the steepest—indeed, the steepest—demands for education, health and care plans in recent years, and one of the greatest SEND needs, as…”

“I congratulate the hon. Member for Birmingham Erdington (Paulette Hamilton), my fellow member of the Health and Social Care Committee, not only on the manner in which she handled this inquiry but on the manner in which she stepped in, very appropriately, during our work on maternity care. This is a particularly excitin…”

“In terms of access to the fruit and vegetables, presumably because you are going to retail outlets where there is no issue with supply, they are getting the fruit and vegetables that they prefer.”

“Is eligibility clearcut? Presumably, you are able to data share with other Government agencies to identify those who are eligible for the scheme. Is that right?”

“So you are also looking at the out-turns in healthier lives, as well as healthy living.”

“First, my apologies for missing the opening of this session because of commitments elsewhere. I want to ask you about the prescription and voucher scheme, Corin. The figurework in your evaluation certainly suggests that it has been very successful. Could you perhaps say a little bit more about that? The figurework sugg…”

“Are there any parts of the country that are not facing bankruptcy?”

“If I said, “Could you go and replicate this in this other part of the country with no experience of this?”—what would you do, and how could you both scale up and expand into other areas? What lessons have you learned, and what would you do?”

“On the risk of stigma being attached, is that carefully managed in terms of the interface between the voucher holder and the wider public?”

“Presumably, you have no difficulty with the independent retailers that you are co-operating with the system. Do you ever have any difficulty with them? For example, complaints about recovering the value of the vouchers or anything of that nature?”

“Are there any lessons that you have learned from your experience in both London and Manchester that indicate you would do things differently, having learned what works and what does not?”

“It is quite critical, if we are saying, “This is how we need to go,” for us also to understand what the budgetary considerations are.”

“Say you were targeting—to pluck a figure—10,000?”

“What budget would they need?”

“Those points are all very welcome. Does my hon. Friend accept that global food systems already produce more than enough food to feed the world, but the problem is distribution and fair trade? As my hon. Friend the Member for Glastonbury and Somerton (Sarah Dyke) said earlier, the Groceries Code Adjudicator needs to be …”

“My hon. Friend is of course correct. The testing regime has been hotly debated—indeed, not just debated; successive Government Ministers and scientists have promised progress on the testing regime for many years. In 1997, the agriculture Select Committee looked at this issue and the benefits of shifting from the tuberc…”

“I am grateful for the Minister’s helpful remarks. She says that the DIVA test is currently being tested, which is wonderful, but does she accept that, given it was possible to produce a vaccine within a relatively short time in the pandemic—I appreciate that civil servants seem to have a rather stretchy temporal langua…”