Speeches by Aquarone.

“These are commissioning things, not construction things.”

“That is fair enough. Sorry, Dean, do come in if you want to.”

“That was going to be my next question. So Mark asked the Secretary of State to ask him to look at what the impact would be of removing the highest peak of the high-speed element of this.”

“So—let me be really clear—this is not political meddling in the scope. You welcome this, and you think it is a sensible, achievable thing to do.”

“We are talking about stuff getting built. What is going to get built by the end of this year?”

“And I feel as though the arguments for that decision make sense. I am sure the arguments for previous scope changes were not done on the basis of delusion, and were done with the right intention—or were they?”

“Lord Hendy, forgive me for coming back to you. I am not needling you for any particular reason other than to come back on your previous explanation, because that still does not discharge the claim that the most reliable thing to do is to stick to the design of the entire project as it is—that is the lowest-risk way for…”

“The stuff that Scott has just asked you is probably the single most important decision to be made in the last two years. I put it to you gently that every review of this project has cited scope change, particularly due to politicians meddling with the project, as one of the single biggest impacts on cost. Are you not i…”

“But they need every incentive possible, don’t they? If I am still going to have to walk down my street to get to my car, or drive and, when I turn up, play an even more extreme version of chicken with other drivers to find a parking space, I need every incentive possible to make the transition. I accept that it is not …”

“But this is specifically about eVED and the impact on uptake. Surely, you would not be doing this were it not for the revenue requirement. You could do this two years later. You could admirably advertise that it is coming two years in advance, but still do it two years later. It could still be the right tax at the wron…”

“One level up from the leaseholder is the housing association. In my North Norfolk constituency, they took vast swathes of estate from councils and they are pretty much designed and laid out in the same way as they were when they were council house estates. It is even more complex than the typical town street, where at …”

“I get that the price in comparison is coming down. If it was just a case of existing EV drivers accepting the long-term truth that you have announced, it would be fine, but I am not sure that you have priced the convenience factor into this rejection of that modelling. I would not suggest you are being bullied by the T…”

“Can you repeat that, please?”

“Just to be an extra thorn in that side—I appreciate your commitment to do that—we do not have lamp posts in most of these places, so access to cheap charging is limited, as you know, and the undertaking that goes from having a parking free-for-all, which is already far from ideal, to necessarily allocated parking will …”

“High-value EVs are not exempt from it. They get charged the luxury vehicles tax.”

“I am not suggesting that; I am suggesting that you still give them two years’ notice, but you do it later, after the next wave of adoption, which as the Chair has said, is quite a different cohort of drivers. We do not want to risk putting them off any more than they already are with the incumbent inconvenience that we…”

“So the road budget is more important than the transition numbers?”

“I am grateful for the steps that the Government have taken today in recognising the importance of rural and coastal communities. The hon. Member for East Thanet (Ms Billington) made reference to my constituency earlier in this regard, and I thank her for doing so. The Government clearly realise how important it is to r…”

“I understand. Nick, if I can come back to you. I take Elliot’s point that delay management is subject, of course, to the challenges of measurement and analysis, but one of the things the ORR particularly pulled out was not so much that you should be measuring this stuff better, it was about the big picture, beyond enha…”

“Let us move on to the ORR; you are probably expecting questions on this. It has been reasonably critical, particularly on the issue of defining benefits and having a clear understanding of benefits, whether those are about schemes or strategies or overall approaches. How are you planning to address its concerns?”