Speeches by Norman.

“Thank you. My final question is as much for Ms Buckley-Irvine as it is for you, Lord Case. In a wider context, higher education policy in this country has, without deliberate intention particularly, sucked talent out of the periphery and pulled it into the major cities. The higher education participation rate in Barrow…”

“It is important to say that—thank you.”

“It is not just about sand and cement.”

“I am sure that is right. I do not need to tell any of you that, over the last 30 to 50 years, different elements of the British nuclear enterprise have had a pretty inglorious career of building things up and then not leaving much impact. The same would be true in Sizewell A and Sizewell B, and people think, “Hold on a…”

“Lord Case, thank you very much for coming in today. How do you build a town up again? How do you make Barrow a rich, thriving, successful and inclusive place? A lot of people would say that it is about infrastructure and investment, but as you may know, I have a great interest in technical education, and it is also abo…”

“Picking up the point you made about MHCLG, Nona, it has been interesting to look at the stronger towns fund and at which areas have been successful in place making and which have not. I say this with a naked personal self-interest because Hereford is an outlier in terms of success. What has driven that is the bottom-up…”

“May I start by recording my thanks to the Leader of the House for agreeing to the request to have the Ukraine debate on 4 December? I think we all feel warmly about that decision. Politics at the present moment may not be enormously pretty, but it has been a week of triumph in the sporting world. We have had the joyous…”

“Will the Leader of the House give us the forthcoming business?”

“Okay. Do you spend a lot of time on pillar 2? What can be done to improve its credibility and pace of change?”

“When do you expect that? The end of the year?”

“Again, it should be technology led—we should not accept partners into pillar 2 just because they have money and interest. It should be led by their ability to make profound technological contributions that add to the collective capability of the whole.”

“The US hasn’t had an international track record of buying other people’s kit in the area of defence. Do you think it might start to do that in relation to Australian and British kit with AUKUS?”

“Therefore, the Pentagon would have an interest. ITAR would be permissive—the ITAR changes would allow this—but it would have a positive desire to buy a collaboratively created piece of best-in-class technology.”

“So if you had the Alex Baker problem—having to explain what pillar 2 was—it is not only that it was a farmers’ market of different things, potentially, but that people do not have a sense of even the one or two flagship technologies or projects that might characterise it.”

“So the maxim with new technology is to make them happen, get more excited about it, and then replicate.”

“So you don’t think pillar 1 is going to be thrown into some doubt by the Elbridge Colby review?”

“Okay. This is my final question. Obviously, there has been some talk about new partners coming into pillar 2. What is your view on that?”

“If everyone has to communicate and contribute to every piece of technology that comes out across a four or five-partner institution, it is hard to imagine that ever succeeding.”

“Do you think that view is widely shared across the other partners?”

“Thank you very much for coming in, Sir Stephen. To pick up on the point that Michelle raised, you will be familiar with the fact that the UK has a slightly inglorious history of doing stuff and then moving on. The nuclear sector is a classic example. If you talk to people in Sizewell, they will say that Sizewell A has …”