Speeches by Bryant.

“Every time that I go back to my constituency in the Rhondda I drive down a road that was built with cohesion funds, but Amanda will answer that.”

“No. I was going to come on to the point about automotives because I met Willie Bain and others and the SMMT on Thursday afternoon, I think—the day after the Accelerator Act had come out—or maybe on the Wednesday. I can’t remember; it was one or the other. They made those points, and we have registered the points as wel…”

“Is Mr Cooper money?”

“You are asking me to negotiate publicly, and I am not going to do that. I haven’t got those details and I won’t be able to provide them to you.”

“It is a chunk of things that have been enabled by co-operation between the two Governments and would not have happened without that co-operation, although they are in the commercial interests of both ends of the equation.”

“Broadly speaking, we have existing schemes with Australia and New Zealand, so we want to have the same kind of pattern of agreement. That is the process we are negotiating at the moment. I know I have said this rather often today, but this is a Home Office lead responsibility, rather than DBT.”

“This is primarily a DSIT lead, rather than DBT, but because some of it was announced around the same time as our work on the economic prosperity deal, it has sometimes got conflated with it. I am happy to make sure that you get any information from DSIT that you want. Kate, is there anything that you want to add?”

“Look, I meet businesses that say to me, “10 years ago, I could easily just send a sample of something that I want to sell in country X in the European Union through the post, and now I can’t.” At one company I visited last week, the director actually flew to Madrid to take a sample to the licensing company. That is jus…”

“I have.”

“I can’t think of any.”

“Well, my understanding is that the research that is being done with TAE Technologies and the UK Atomic Energy Authority’s joint venture partnership to commercialise fusion technology in the UK is still proceeding. Kate Joseph indicated assent.”

“I think there are only about six countries that have produced a paper for the WTO so far. The US was early out of the doors and then the EU, and we have joined that group now. Part of our rationale is that we certainly want to see reform of the WTO so that it survives and meets the challenges of today. A classic instan…”

“There are lots of bits of it. It is a series of chunks; bits of it are still progressing, and other bits are—I think the Americans themselves have used this term—“paused”. For instance, in our work on quantum research we are still moving forward.”

“Yes—thank you very much, Amanda. Part of my anxiety is that, in essence, I am a free trader: I believe in having free trade wherever you possibly can—preferably free and fair trade, which means that you have to consider responsible business conduct as well to make sure that you have a world trading system that works fo…”

“I do not think that it is going to get worse in the sense of the cataclysmic version that you laid out there, but I will go through the individual issues. Let me start with the Accelerator Act. This is a draft; it’s a first draft. You know the processes through the European Union. We had been engaging with the European…”

“I have said these things several times in the past. Of course, I fully recognise the red lines that we have, which is that we are not joining a single market or a customs union. Frankly, if we were to consider either of those things, I think it would be unlikely that we would be able to do them in the next 10 years bec…”

“If you were to do that in all sectors, that would be the job done in one sense. I am conscious that the time taken is always much longer than you think—as, for that matter, is accession to the European Union. In many cases, it takes decades; manging to get all the way through the acquis communautaire is a slow process.…”

“That is not me announcing a tariff; it is just saying that I can be absolutely certain that there will not be a gap.”

“Sorry, thank you—mutual recognition of professional qualifications. We are working on a series of sectors at the moment. There are a series of other standards—not just in relation to foodstuffs but in relation to furniture and electronic equipment and so on—where I would like us to get to a position of as much alignmen…”

“100%.”