Speeches by Downie.

“Linked to some of the questions Lizzi asked earlier, do you think you have the right skills, particularly in the Environment Agency and elsewhere, to meet the targets you are talking about for the GDAs, and particularly thinking about new technologies?”

“Another thing to pick up on—”

“Yes, you touched on it there. The concern with the voluntary redundancy process is that you lose people who can, frankly, go and get other jobs elsewhere. They take a package and off they go, and good luck to them—”

“—but you end up having people in the organisation who are not the ones you want. How exactly are you guarding against that?”

“You have 200 redundancies and you think you will want to rehire those people in six months?”

“I want to talk about the generic design assessment and ask each of you to describe very briefly what your view is on how effective it has been up to this point, given that only one has led to construction. We will then explore some issues around that. Andy, a very short answer to start with, please, and then we will ta…”

“Did you get feedback from DESNZ or the Treasury about how your spending review submission maybe was not quite there? How has that been improved upon to make sure that you can secure the funding you need in the future?”

“You mentioned the multi-year spending review. Why were you not successful in gaining the support you expected or would have wanted, keeping in mind that the UK Government have said that nuclear should be one of their top priorities?”

“You talk about this as a short-term measure. How do we make sure that these skills are not being lost at a time when we need them? I will possibly ask Simon to contribute here as well. How are we making sure there is a connection between GBE-N and the NNL on how those skills are not lost? You say it is short-term. Is i…”

“What would you like to see that guidance say? What should the role be of Government in that? What should that guidance say and how strong would it be? How do you assess the current threat?”

“Which Department is that?”

“And why?”

“And why?”

“I want to develop some of the points that Lizzi has just been talking about around defence and energy security. Dan, I am aware that you just had to answer all of that. I will come back to something with you around cyber in a second, but to David and Ana in particular, given the threats that we see from both physical a…”

“Is that co-ordinated with the Ministry of Defence and other Departments?”

“To be honest, that would be my larger concern. A large attack on one thing is easier to spot. It is much easier to assign blame, frankly, and it would have larger global consequences. Small distributed attacks may not immediately look like an attack.”

“Do you work with the National Cyber Security Centre as part of the exercises that you both described?”

“What more do the Government need to do to help you do that?”

“You have just picked up the next point, actually. Maybe I will ask Dan and Ana to pick that up. I am thinking about what co-operation we need to have with allies, whether it is Norway or the Netherlands, and who pays for this. Dan, you say you have done a lot of work in this area generally, but are there things you wan…”

“David, just to move back to something you mentioned earlier, notwithstanding the comments you made about the importance of security from oil and gas, there is something I get asked by constituents a lot, and I would like to make sure I can give them a very clear answer. If we increased oil and gas extraction now, would…”