Speeches by Patrick.

“It has met four times. It is meeting again pretty soon, and the plan is to meet bi-monthly.”

“If we go to specifics, the Belfast region city deal is £1 billion. It is £350 million from UK Government, £350 million from the Executive and money coming in directly from businesses too. Academia plays a crucial role in taking advantage of these things. There is the input of the advanced manufacturing innovation centr…”

“She is on the transformation board.”

“It was established about a year ago. Clearly, you have to establish this and get things up and running, but what it is focusing on are some really important issues in Northern Ireland. The discrepancy in access to research and development funding in Northern Ireland will not be lost to this Committee. I hear it in busi…”

“On public sector transformation, it is so apt that we are being asked about it in this inquiry, because you do not get the level of economic growth that you want without the public services that can back it up. When you speak to businesses, if one of their team is trying to focus on when they are next going to get a ho…”

“I am sure that it could. There is work that we are doing to ensure that there is support to grow those businesses across Northern Ireland. I mentioned the city and growth deals before. That is hundreds of millions of pounds of public money that we will invest in infrastructure, skills and opportunities right across Nor…”

“There are shared ambitions. It is really important that we have economic growth in Northern Ireland. There are huge positives in the economy. We need to build on them. We need to remove other barriers and build on them. They are shared ambitions, whether you are in UK Government or the Northern Ireland Executive. It is…”

“We will always be seeking that. There is a huge amount of engagement that goes into the city and growth deals. Take the transformation board we were talking about before. There is not an expectation that the money goes in and we walk away and think, “I hope that worked”. Of course, you pore over every single penny of p…”

“The Executive hear that really clearly. I regularly do business roundtables. I sit down with small businesses. I do chambers of commerce. In Derry/Londonderry, I did the angel investors as well. You hear right across the board in Northern Ireland about this, and I know it is a well-rehearsed concern that the Executive …”

“We do.”

“You mentioned a couple of issues there, and you are right that they are devolved matters, but it is really clear, whether it is myself, the Secretary of State or Baroness Anderson, that we are not here to pass the buck when it comes to these things, where we can work with the Executive on helping drive the breadth of s…”

“The metrics that all of us would naturally look at in terms of growth in Northern Ireland, the growth of businesses in Northern Ireland, employment opportunities and wage growth are really important things that every one of us will look at, but we will also judge ourselves on some of the inputs. I am sure that, later i…”

“Through direct funding. There are issues around planning, for instance, which is devolved. We are putting a direct pot into hiring and training more planners, so that quicker decisions can be taken and there is not the backlog that we have seen and that was referenced in the Secretary of State’s reply to you. It is als…”

“It is a really fair challenge, Mr Kohler. The reality is that a separate vision with separate metrics and separate stats from the Northern Ireland Office could, frankly, muddle things. We have a Government that have a very clear agenda around growth. We all know what the metrics are for when it is working. For what it …”

“On the individual deals that have been signed, city and growth deals—some are still being developed as well—I am sure that there will be metrics that people have for success of those.”

“I am not in charge of individual deals. We have co-funded. We collaborate with the Executive. That is really important work. It is clear that you want to see businesses have more opportunities. You want to see better employment opportunities, better-paid jobs and more jobs. These are clearly things we would like to see…”

“We have not specifically said, “This metric has to be at this level or this will not have been achieved”. I mentioned city and growth deals. There is a real opportunity to measure the outputs of the defence growth deal as well, and clearly that will be in the jobs created, the businesses saved, the businesses created a…”

“All of us. Everyone who is committed to growth in Northern Ireland will naturally be judged on those. You cannot set metrics that are not applicable to and recognised by people. If every single person I speak to is asking, “Has economic growth been successful?”, they are going to be thinking, “Are there good, well-payi…”

“She chairs the Northern Ireland growth co-ordination group, but I might have misspoken, so apologies.”

“The work that falls out of that is taken forward by officials. The issue that I mentioned earlier about research and development is a prime example. On the back of conversations that we have been having, it has been raised in that group. Simultaneously, we have been raising that with UK Government Ministers and Norther…”