Speeches by Martin.

“Q1. If he will list his official engagements for Wednesday 12 March.”

“My hon. Friend has just said that a lot of sewerage is unadopted. Say it was built in the 1800s by public subscription and nobody has adopted it since. That allows water companies to shrug and say, “Search me, guv’” when there is a problem. Does she think that the Government should by statute or law require that all of…”

“That sounds about right: lessons and structures. Is there a leadership role that the Government can play, particularly Government Ministers such as yourself, or perhaps MPs—I do not want to use the words “educating the public”—in terms of bringing the importance of these issues to the public. Perhaps the fact that the …”

“I would like to zoom in now from the grand strategic to the devolved Administrations. One thing that has struck all of us throughout this inquiry has been, as you mentioned in your introduction, this postcode lottery of the different geographical application. There is something specific about the devolved Administratio…”

“Is there going to be a covenant team within the MOD whose job is to drive that through?”

“Okay, that is great. Thank you very much. I have a very short one on Northern Ireland. There are particular obvious issues in Northern Ireland. Many service personnel do not want to advertise their service, for instance. We have heard that the Northern Ireland Executive do not necessarily prioritise the covenant in the…”

“Is that a commitment under this new legislation that they would be able to continue that treatment?”

“This is just a quick one, picking up directly off that point. Do you think that there are things that we could learn from other countries in terms of the relationship that their Governments have with their veterans but also service personnel? An obvious example is America, where there is all sorts of legislation and su…”

“The Government’s policy is actually achieving the opposite for social care of what the hon. Member for Farnham and Bordon (Gregory Stafford) suggests. Peter runs a small domiciliary service in my constituency that is going bust. That means 35 people without a job, a loss of £100,000 in taxes every year, and all those p…”

“When I speak to the police in Tunbridge Wells, they often comment that a large court backlog has a real effect on levels of crime. There are more criminals in circulation and, frankly, the system is seen as a bit of a soft touch if cases are never brought to court. May I simply ask the Justice Secretary what is the bac…”

“We do need that in Europe. That is effectively what you are saying. It is an essential precursor.”

“That is a much better analogy. Thank you very much.”

“I have one final question on something you said about access to EU defence structures. Okay, fine, but if we are going to do much closer procurement, joint procurement, unified procurement, whatever it is, there is a problem if we are outside the single market. By your figures, we constitute 22% of the European defence…”

“If I could just explore that a bit further, ideally you want your defence industrial planning to match the geopolitics of what is going on. I understand you guys cannot comment on the geopolitics, but let us just take as an assumption that one of the paths in the future might be that the Europeans, in which I include t…”

“I am hearing that a series of minilateral relationships will build us to where we want to get to. It is a bit of a nonsense that every single European country has a different rifle, tank or infantry fighting vehicle. Inefficient is the politest way I can put it. In a multipolar world, Europe needs to build unified mili…”

“No, it is absolutely fine. Needs must. What would that look like?”

“Hence standardised kit.”

“To your training idea, everyone would be training on the same equipment. If Italy needed 100 vehicles, we could just take them from anyone.”

“It is 500 million Europeans asking 300 million Americans to defend them from 140 million Russians. It is nonsense.”

“You almost need a Soviet Union-style agreement where you say, “You guys are going to build the tractors. You guys are going to build the light utility vehicles”, for example.”