Speeches by Patrick.

“Somewhere in my pack I will, but, to save the Committee time through me rifling through papers, am I okay to write to the Committee with those dates?”

“I totally take that because the advice will be for GB businesses looking to trade in Northern Ireland too. To your point, there is nothing more frustrating than dealing with a chatbot and thinking, “I am not quite sure about this”. There will be the opportunity for people to pick up the phone and speak to a human being…”

“I meet with them regularly. I have sat down with the Minister for Infrastructure. I have spoken to all of them about this. It has been very helpful to have those conversations. We talked before about public service transformation as well. You cannot have one without the other. They go hand in hand in terms of being abl…”

“You will be familiar with the AI growth zones, which are opportunities for clustering in private investment. As I am sure the Committee knows, there is a minimum energy threshold capacity, which has not been met in Northern Ireland. We hear people say what benefit that might bring to Northern Ireland, what additional i…”

“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…”

“The aim—I appreciate that it is an aim—is to have arrangements in place by next year on an SPS agreement.”

“They are the same thing. If you share best practice and what is working and going well, that is contributing to an infrastructure strategy that is going to be built by the Executive, because it is, as I say, a devolved matter. They are the same thing.”

“I would like to have been able to answer it. That would have been impressive.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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 …”

“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…”

“We have received advice on east-west trade.”