Speeches by Lowe.

“Rachel has a question, doesn’t she?”

“Sterling might collapse, too, in which case your costs go up.”

“People can go bust, though, Nigel, as you know. That can knock you off course. If you sign a fixed contract with somebody with a deficient balance sheet and they go bust, that costs you.”

“Only about the coastline: if you start building defences on the coastline, that is exactly what creates problems further down the coast. In our case, sand dumped above my constituency built a sandbar below it and you then got coastal erosion, so we need sea defences built to stop houses being destroyed, at a vast cost.…”

“On Lowestoft, which you mentioned, along with Hinkley Point C—I want to ask you a question about that in a moment—there is a lot of kit coming in from France that is made in France. To your point about how much of this is constructed in the UK, I think that a lot of the big kit is still being made in France, and French…”

“You also mentioned that Hinkley C was financed at the time when interests were virtually 0%, but let me tell you that that is not normal in history. Those interest rates were an outlier; where we are now is far more common in terms of long-term interest rates. That was because the Government were printing vast sums of …”

“I am pleased that you are all so confident that you are going to deliver the project, given your previous experience, but we have to come back to the Committee’s experience of past overruns that set out with all the best intentions and ended up in catastrophe. I have written a list of things that I think have already s…”

“There are not enough in Great Yarmouth, Nigel.”

“It is still outdated technology, though.”

“Their return is still very good. I have looked at their return, and it is still very adequate, even if that happens. Jonathan, do you know what it is?”

“On data, the Post Office was quite confident about prosecuting people with the delegated authority that it had. To your point, Clive, often people were paying back money that was their own money, but ultimately the Fujitsu software was a double-entry bookkeeping system and a credit would have been thrown up the other s…”

“I suspect I am, but I do not know for sure. All these things are shrouded in so much “need to know”, “can’t tell”, lack of transparency and time lapsing that no one knows where the truth lies.”

“Thank you. I don’t think I can say any more to that, Geoffrey.”

“It will have shown up somewhere.”

“I have studied this Post Office situation in quite some depth—indeed, I have written articles about it—and I could not disagree with the both of you more. I think this is a massive state fraud. The flaw in the Fujitsu-written software was known about for a long time, and it was covered up. As you know, the Post Office …”

“As usual, I would like to thank Gareth and his team. This is a fascinating document, and you have put together some great data in it—in particular, things like figure 3 on page 18—but I do not want to go into the detail, because it is now about getting the principle right, not looking at all the detail and failures of …”

“So this is a massive Government error. Basically, the Post Office is a Government organ, it is an organ of the state, so we need to get to the bottom of this. You say that the information was not there, but it was apparently there to prosecute people. At the end of the day, when I talk about fraud, people knew that the…”

“Fine, but there are a lot of people who died without getting any compensation at all, as you know, because this has taken so long to be dealt with.”

“We need to know what happened to the positive balance. I would like to know what happened to it, because a positive balance would have been thrown up the other side. If you have double-entry bookkeeping—this is in any company—there will be a positive balance. I bet you that got written back to P&L, and probably paid ou…”

“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dame Siobhain. I thank the 260,974 British men and women who signed the petition to make this debate possible, and I welcome the brave survivors who are sitting behind us in the Chamber. This debate is about them; as the hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mr Brash) quite righ…”