Speeches by Collinge.

“One of my constituents, Joseph Towers, has experienced at first hand the brutality of brain cancer and the delays in treatment that affect people across the country. I am short on time, so I will say these few things directly to the Minister. The UK ranks 22nd out of 29 wealthy nations for our five-year brain cancer su…”

“Will the hon. Gentleman give way?”

“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Edward. I want to speak about the process of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, which was prevented from completing its parliamentary journey by a small number of unelected peers who showed through their actions that they had no respect for the constitution…”

“I am sorry; I will not give way, as I want to finish this speech. The House of Lords at its best provides detailed scrutiny of legislation, proposing amendments to make it more workable and addressing criticisms of it. But this was not the House of Lords at its best; this was the House of Lords that I remember from my …”

“The next question is for Elisabeth and Chloe. I want to think about co-ordination if there were an event that needed a response from the Government or from military. We have other energy infrastructure that has long been seen as a security threat. Nuclear is the key example there, where there is a well-rehearsed respon…”

“Thank you. Obviously there are different levels of threat. There are safety issues that the industry is used to dealing with, as you said before. Things can move from a safety issue to a security issue and then potentially from a security issue to a defence issue. Who decides what level of threat or threshold an indivi…”

“Thank you for that. The Government have said that they are going to develop a reporting portal. I think it was specifically for drones but I would have to check that. Do you think that is just adding another layer, or do you think that is a helpful collation of the reporting structures?”

“I am very aware, Chair, that we are focusing on the maritime today for understandable reasons. I think it might be worth the Committee’s time to try to get evidence on this from the wider energy industry. Chloe, do you have any comments on that?”

“We have already talked about threat reporting pathways. I want to dig into that a little bit more. Graham, you said before that you have pulled together into one document all the different reporting pathways. Are you confident that the energy industry is fully aware of those threat reporting pathways and is able to use…”

“Finally, we had some interesting evidence in the last session about the risks of putting too many burdens on operators, especially smaller operators and smaller businesses, around their responsibilities for energy resilience. Do you think there needs to be a dissemination of responsibility for energy resilience to wide…”

“Do you have an opinion on it?”

“Stuart, you touched on supply chain and things to that. Should the UK be prioritising the domestic manufacture of components, which could affect the cost of them, to reduce the risks of supply chain dependency and the dependency of our energy system on foreign supply chains?”

“Is there a risk there because our weather is changing?”

“Thank you. I want to move on to a different threat but one that is extremely important, and that is more frequent extreme weather events. Do you think we have the correct strategy and operations in place to mitigate that threat to our energy system?”

“That is very helpful, because you have gone immediately into something I wanted to ask about, the interdependency. As you said, North Hyde itself was not critical national infrastructure, but the impact it could have—and the impact any energy outage could have on things like transport and healthcare—is clearly very imp…”

“That is fair enough.”

“Thank you very much. I want to move on to threats that are not geopolitically related. When we think about ageing critical infrastructure—we have had the example of the North Hyde substation fire—what standards are being set for the maintenance and inspection of ageing infrastructure?”

“Yes, briefly.”

“Resources and responses from Government when those are needed with intelligence and information.”

“Do you get what you need to be able to meet that changing, emerging and increasing risk?”