Speeches by Alexander.

“Sorry, just repeat the question. I got slightly distracted.”

“Realistically it is going to take a long time to sort this problem out. By the autumn of next year we should be back down to the seven-week aspiration that we have.”

“Those discussions will continue to take place between EWR and my Department. It is probably the best value-for-money way of delivering the scheme but we will make sure that we are robustly testing any assumptions about novel aspects of the way in which that technology may be deployed.”

“The statistics that we have produced and published have not been particularly helpful in terms of average wait times so we are changing the statistics that we are going to be publishing routinely, broken down by driving test centre. My aspiration is to get us back down to a point where when someone is booking a test th…”

“The 2030 phase-out date for banning the sale of new petrol and diesel cars remains. There are no proposals to change that, and there are no proposals to change the 2035 phase-out date for hybrid vehicles. The way the ZEV mandate operates is pretty straightforward when it comes to customers and consumers, but it is more…”

“No, I am saying that it would be possible to use the mechanisms that will be set up via the Highways (Financing) Bill that we will bring forward in this Session. In theory, it would be possible to use that mechanism to fund new road infrastructure, such as a river crossing. Sitting here today, I cannot point you to a s…”

“It might be helpful if I provide a little of context on all this. Last year, having done a consultation, we announced some changes in April to the ZEV mandate, which gave manufacturers greater flexibilities to comply. We also confirmed the 2030 phase-out date for the sale of new petrol and diesel cars, and we confirmed…”

“Jo, I do not know whether you have detail on that? No. I might have to write to you on that, Alex, to be honest.”

“Yes.”

“One of the reasons we have committed to keeping the ZEV mandate under review is so that we can take account of how purchasing patterns are evolving. I have set out the work that we will be doing in the next six months on that, looking at that relative balance between the sales of pure EVs and hybrids. One of the other …”

“Officials within the Department have fortnightly meetings with airlines about this to make sure that we have the latest information about what their passengers are experiencing. Obviously, EES is an EU scheme and not a UK Government initiative, so we do not have direct control over it. In March, I met with my EU counte…”

“We need to see how it goes over the next couple of months and we need to be reassured that the planning for the summer period is rigorous, so that people travelling for their summer holidays are able to start that holiday as soon as possible. I would be happy to consider what more we could do with our European counterp…”

“I can understand why it is hard for people to get their head around but the way that Mark Wild has described this to me is that the civil engineering project has taken four years longer than it was originally predicted to do and then the original project team underestimated how long work on putting the systems in, test…”

“It was always going to be the case that HS2 trains would spend a lot of their time on the conventional rail network. Given the previous Government’s decision to cancel HS2 north of Birmingham, making sure that the rolling stock that we deliver aligns with our ability to improve services north of the west midlands is ab…”

“Yes.”

“We need to be increasing capacity on services between Scotland and the north-west and London. We know that the West Coast Main Line—”

“We need to address capacity constraints by considering both timetabling and rolling stock.”

“We have not covered ourselves in glory historically—that is probably an understatement. The lessons of the James Stewart review into HS2 should be well heeded. I took from it that a failure to plan properly in the early stages just results in bigger problems further down the line. You need to set your scope, stick to i…”

“There have been very public failures and we cannot repeat those mistakes. We have done a lot of work to understand what those failures were and learn the lessons, but we can also do infrastructure well and we should be proud of that.”

“I totally understand people’s frustrations about this and I have been absolutely clear with the leadership at DVSA that this is its number one priority in terms of the next year. We have done a lot but demand is still very high. We have a net increase of 147 driving examiners.”