Speeches by Cooper.

“DBT did have some involvement in this. You had some knowledge of what was going to be fed in. Let us put it that way.”

“Have you any sense of whether this is a permanent exclusion, or is it a temporary thing? Do we know? Do we have any sense of that?”

“There was an attempt by Ming Yang and Octopus to put together a deal that would have allowed Ming Yang to make equipment, but it would be Octopus software in there. Was that something that came across your desk, or was that looked at elsewhere in the forest?”

“Ming Yang dangled the prospect of a very big investment in the Cromarty Firth green port, such that the First Minister of Scotland started to send it letters of comfort in a bid to drive around the UK Government. Who took the decision to exclude Ming Yang? Was it a decision taken by your Department, or was it taken els…”

“Soft-touch fever is spreading across the land because in Scotland, the SNP Scottish Executive are about to start releasing rapists as much as 2.5 years early. Do the Ministers on the Front Bench not realise that they are so out of touch with the public on this issue that they risk the very fundamentals of the justice s…”

“In Scotland, benefit fraud has effectively been decriminalised; the number of prosecutions is vanishingly small. Given that the Department for Work and Pensions continues to have a role in Scotland—administering some benefits, despite devolution—what can the Department do to tackle fraud there? It is happening here, an…”

“The Mercure hotel in Dumfries is home to around 100 men of uncertain origin and, thanks to the good offices of the Home Office, I have been able to visit. However, I have not been able to get any clarity on the criteria for closure and certainly not on any kind of timescale for closure. Can the Minister, without recour…”

“15. What recent estimate he has made of the level of fraud and error in the social security system.”

“As a former journalist, I salute the Secretary of State’s ambition to leave no one behind, but as the hon. Member for Hexham (Joe Morris) pointed out, the death of terrestrial television risks leaving a lot of people in remote and rural Scotland behind. My constituency has a lot of notspots, and terrestrial television …”

“You are an enormous business. How much testing are you doing? How many hundreds of products go through your warehouse? How many are you testing?”

“There has been mention of the Product Regulation and Metrology Act, or PRAM. It is clear that you have concerns about the pace. The consultation on that closed today but, if I can take you back to July last year, the then Product Safety Minister, Justin Madders, said, “By giving regulators the teeth to clamp down on un…”

“I am not talking about a specific incident. I am talking in general. If a Chinese company says to you, “We’ve a machine that runs on 220 volts”, do you test that against 220 volts and say, “Yes, you have told us exactly what that product does”? In fact, the UK consumer is going to plug it into the wall and get a much h…”

“Mr Weber—very quickly because time is against us—you are happy, again, to operate different standards from the bricks-and-mortar stores that we have in the UK. If I buy something from a shop here and it goes horribly wrong, I can walk back into that shop—I have protections; I can speak to trading standards. If I buy so…”

“Of course; it was fantastic. But we might want our money back on PRAM. What are your concerns about PRAM? The consultation is out there now; it is going to take more time. I know you are worried about that timescale, but it is going to take more time until that comes back. What do you think about what is laid out in th…”

“When Justin Madders—who is on the Committee with us—was the Product Safety Minister, he said he hoped that Government legislation would “establish a level playing field and mean online marketplaces are held to the same high standards as bricks and mortar shops.” That is clearly not the case; there is obviously a gap or…”

“But that is not much help, is it? For instance, toys would not appear to be—prima facie—a high risk, but if a child ends up choking on something that is made unsafely, it is no use saying, “Oh, we’ll react now. We’ll no longer deal with those terrible people.” Should you not be more proactive on this front?”

“As I say, it sounds fantastic, but what is the reality on the ground? The input is great; the standard procedure is great. But if that applies to only one in 100 products, it is slightly less great, so numbers would be most helpful.”

“That comes back to my point: if a company in China makes something that runs on a different voltage to the UK, it may declare that to you. How do you test that? Do you test it against the electricity that is going to run through it in the UK or the electricity that is going to run through it in Europe? This country has…”

“Mr Klenner, you say that Temu tests the products. What standards does it apply? Does it apply different standards in different countries? Does it use British standards in Britain and German standards in Germany? How does that work?”

“That would be the opportunity to not only give these bodies teeth but to actually make sure that they use them. Wayne, can I come to you on that point? You were talking about e-bike batteries. Do you think this is the answer to stop them from going on sale in the UK and bursting into flames in the middle of the night i…”