Speeches by Twigg.

“I thank my hon. Friend for her statement; I know that she is doing all she can on the issue. We cannot have a defence industrial strategy unless we have our own primary steelmaking facilities, so clearly we cannot let these furnaces close. I was interested to hear what the Minister said about having various meetings in…”

“I refer the Leader of the House to the public office standards Bill, better known as the Hillsborough law, which is how I would like to refer to it. She will know my history in what happened at Hillsborough and, subsequently, with the independent panel report, and the involvement I had in the negotiations between Minis…”

“That is even though we do not know what the investment is currently.”

“Going back to your terminology in terms of state threats in the last five or 10 years, how have those become more of a difficulty in terms of resources that you have to counter state threats, and defence’s contribution to that? I get that it is a Government-wide approach, but I am just trying to get some sort of handle…”

“Does the MOD know what resources it has allocated to counter hybrid threats? Does it have any idea of what resources it has allocated, whether they are enough, and what the gaps are?”

“One of the things that we are trying to get at is how much this area is now taking up in terms of the impact that it is having on defence’s ability to provide resources, people and equipment. That is part of the reason for this inquiry. What I think you are saying is that you do not have really a handle on it, because …”

“Yes, but you do not have the money.”

“Just to be clear, you would like more defence assets, but you are also expecting industry to do more.”

“In terms of the protection of undersea cables, you could say that RFA Proteus is more suited to a hybrid type of protection. Do you need more hybrid-related assets?”

“You are not surfacing a submarine every day, are you? That is one thing out of the way. You may be, for all I know, but I guess you are probably not.”

“So we allow them to take out our communications but we would not take theirs out.”

“Is it an option that the Government might consider?”

“I understand. Basically, if we found that an adversary had cut one of our undersea cables, would we go and do the same thing to them?”

“We have that one, but what about others where you are being proactive?”

“Give us some, apart from the one that you have just outlined.”

“You have described the aggressive action from a Russian ship. Are we too soft? Are we not being proactive enough in taking more action against adversaries than we do? We are always reactive rather than being more proactive. Could we be more on the front foot?”

“Yes, we know that.”

“I am not asking for the detail of what the operations were. I am asking how many operations you have been involved in.”

“Can I turn to the issue about training? I will come back to you, General Walker. We had a debate on this Committee in 2023 with Minister Murrison about the threshold at the foundation college for, basically, removing people who are involved, so the trainers, from their job. There was an issue about what the threshold w…”

“I did say complaints, not convictions.”