Speeches by George.

“3. What progress he has made on meeting social housing targets.”

“I welcome the Secretary of State to his position and declare an interest as a volunteer member of the Cornwall Community Land Trust. The Secretary of State will be well aware that a perfect storm has hit the construction industry as far as the delivery of social housing is concerned: tender forecasts are not encouragin…”

“I am repeating myself, but the hon. Gentleman must understand that those research papers were questioned heavily as, during the period over which the statistics were gathered, they were not based on the same baseline nor on the same system as cattle testing at that time. Therefore, they did not compare like with like. …”

“Meur ras—pur dha—to my constituency neighbour the hon. Member for Camborne and Redruth (Perran Moon). If we are being boastful about the number of people who are supporting the petition, the St Ives constituency, I should say that which includes west Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly, came first with 470 signatures. It …”

“On the effectiveness of culling, the scientific papers often refer to the figure of 56%, but when we dig down into the detail it becomes less clear. There was variation in the testing regimes during the period when the apparent reduction was detected, so it was not clear at all. There is certainly a lot of science out …”

“Is that licence in a low-risk area?”

“The conversations are going on at the moment? Or are you not talking?”

“So no, you are not having a conversation. We have Ministers before us shortly, in 10 minutes’ time. What should we be pressing them to do?”

“Are you not overcomplicating it really? They are saying the door is open, you are saying the door is open, but you are not talking. It is as simple as that, is it not? You just need to be around the same table.”

“To a certain extent, we are going over the same theme time and again. My question really is for Zubir. You have arrived shortly after the car crash that was the VPAG negotiations. What we hear from the industry is that the UK is full of potential—the words that it uses are talent and fertile ground—but we are losing ma…”

“You have mentioned VPAG a number of times. Tom, you said that it is a symptom rather than a cause. Richard, why did negotiations break down this summer? I note that you said that the lack of a deal undermines the Government’s plan for the UK to grow in its life sciences sector, arguing that pricing is the “core issue h…”

“The hon. Lady is making a powerful point. She will note that in excess of 90 MPs are taking part, or seeking to take part, in this debate. Given that she is sitting next to the Minister, I hope she will lean on, or nudge, her to recognise that we should not necessarily wait for the provisions of the—no doubt welcome—Wh…”

“Safe staffing ratios, you mean?”

“That would be really helpful. Finally, social workers were not included in the workforce plan, yet they are clearly essential in the workforce that you require. What are you going to say about them? First, will you make sure that social workers are included in the workforce plan? Secondly, what plans do you have to ens…”

“You mentioned 15 associate pilots. Do we know where those are? Can you provide us with a list?”

“So if you had a target, it would be something in the region of another 15% on top of that number. Have I got that wrong?”

“And what is the target number?”

“Thank you for that response—that is much appreciated. Maybe we could take this up, Minister, separately outside this meeting. Moving on to the workforce, you mentioned earlier the 8,500 additional mental health workers coming into the system. There is a severe shortage of staff within community mental health services. …”

“I hope we will have some rich answers; I do not know about the questions now. On the theme of lessons learned, and on the back of an earlier question from the Chair, we can learn lessons from successes like Trieste and the pilots, but we can also learn from the not-so-good examples, the failures and where things go wro…”

“In respect of sanctions, the Minister will be aware that I asked the then Foreign Secretary last week whether he would make sure that the UK has no involvement in the proposed Elbit contract, either commercial or governmental, that there is absolutely no use of the Akrotiri air base in Cyprus to the advantage of the Is…”