Speeches by Doogan.

“I did not mention a cause, Mr Leenders; I just mentioned a fact.”

“How has it managed to commit to making no branch closures until 2030? Is it purely coincidental that its branch network is owned by its members and every other branch network is owned by shareholders?”

“Sorry, Mr Leenders, we will get on to hubs in a moment. I do not want to interrupt, but I know that we are running out of time. We spent a lot of time on the last question. In Pitlochry, they are not getting a hub and Bank of Scotland has just shut. That means there is now no bank between RBS in Inverness and RBS in Pe…”

“I hear you. Every time a branch shuts in my constituency, I get that data from the bank as well that shows who is using physical banking and what they are using it for, and who is on the telephone and who is on digital. I get all that. You did not answer it very well on the last question, Mr Leenders. You say that olde…”

“Importantly, are they the same 11,500 post offices?”

“I thank the hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells (Mike Martin) for bringing such a prescient and timely debate to the House. I pay tribute to the right hon. Member for Rawmarsh and Conisbrough (John Healey) and the hon. and gallant Member for Birmingham Selly Oak (Al Carns) for the step they took against what, in their view…”

“That would be my concern, Mr Ashton. When you make your assessment, you make it—you have to; you have no option—in the here and now. You cannot look at the past or project forward to the future. Nobody knows the future. In Pitlochry and the whole Atholl and Breadalbane community up and down the A9 corridor, the last ba…”

“Mr Foden, there are 11,500 post offices currently across the UK. What was that number five years ago?”

“Mr Ashton, accepting that you have to work to the criteria you are given by the FCA—this is not a reflection on you—as part of the review, would you like to see the as-the-crow-flies criteria bend off so that you do not end up saying things that frankly do not put LINK in a great light? For example, when the last branc…”

“It has been around for 50 years; it is not novel. The hon. Member for Macclesfield (Tim Roca) referred to £45 billion for the nuclear enterprise. I think the figure in the DIP is £64 billion. That is an important point, because the Government and the one before it have refused to publish the rolling 10-year nuclear ent…”

“The hon. Gentleman is very kind to give way again, as he is right in the middle of unpicking the DIP thread by thread. Does he agree that we need to look at the manifest, substantial disappointment that we and everyone in uniform see in the DIP now that it has been announced, and try to reconcile that with how delayed …”

“Mr Leenders, you talked about an objective analysis of access to cash. I am sure it is objective in a sense, but it is also very binary. It is a very binary assessment of access to cash. Are you aware that there is no assessment on access to banking, only on access to cash? If you are lucky enough to get a banking hub,…”

“I am accepting that on its merits. I might disagree; I might not. Therefore, do you not accept that the threshold, nebulous as it is, about whether you get a banking hub—entirely in the gift of LINK, subject to what the FCA tells it to do, and subject, I suspect, behind closed doors, to what the banks want it to do—is …”

“The Minister is talking up the economic performance of the United Kingdom since his party took over in 2024. He is labouring the point about the first quarter of this year, but I detect that he is less confident about the second quarter—we will see what that brings. Youth unemployment stood at 626,000 last year, so wit…”

“It is always nice to be the Minister’s first refusal. Have I put him off his stride?”

“Looking to the future, a job vacancy has just come up in Clacton. It would be good to know whether the Labour party will be putting forward somebody of a youthful nature as its candidate. To get back to the core issue of the debate, the Minister, in his meandering rebuttal to the motion from His Majesty’s Opposition, t…”

“Will the Minister give way?”

“We learned from the defence investment plan that there will be no new Type 83s or Type 32s, but we will get some unspecified, undetermined and uncrewed—and currently unbelievable—replacement. That is precisely the same sort of budget-cutting, finger-crossing nonsense from the MOD that sees the geriatric Land Rover not …”

“I am gravely concerned that time after time this Prime Minister, in response to the abject and honest criticism of his defence investment plan, cites recent trends in defence spending, when he should be calibrating it against the chronic and very real threat the people on these islands face. In his limited time left in…”

“This defence investment plan is 300 days late and £13 billion short. It ensures that we fall further behind our allies and face greater exposure to those who would seek to do us harm, and it leaves us falling short of our NATO commitments. That £13 billion is just one year of costs for the Defence Nuclear Enterprise. A…”