Name: Industry and Regulators Committee
Uploaded: 2026-10-13T10:04:54+00:00
Duration: 6152 s

00:00 - 01:06

Speaker 3

The relationship between government and industry. I'm not sure, Secretary of State, whether you had a chance to see the Bayeux Tapestry. But if you had, you would have seen panel 32, which is William ordering the felling of trees, the building of boats, and the gathering of arms. I don't know whether nobody told Harold or whether they didn't respond. But some of the similarities now of how we respond to threats, which you yourself, I think, in Liverpool said are as most dangerous as you've known in your lifetime.

So we're really focused on really the relationship between government and industry. And I guess starting is in the light of what we're hearing, that there may be a delay, maybe for a year, to knowing what the expenditure is going to be. We're interested, therefore, in how you provide the sort of environment that defense companies can respond to the demands of the current threat and of the SDR.

01:06 - 02:54

Speaker 2

Good morning. Thank you, Chair, for inviting me to appear before your committee and for the focus on this particular area, which I think is extremely important. My overall priority is an easy one in terms of setting, a much harder to make sure we deliver, which is to make sure we're ready to deter and, if necessary, defeat those who would do us harm. And that means strengthening our capability, strengthening our defense industrial base, and strengthening our alliances. And the industrial piece sits across all of those things, providing the capabilities we need, working with allies to develop those capabilities where we can.

But also in an environment where NATO asks us to be ready to potentially fight and win a war, we need to make sure that we have not just the defense industrial base that we need now to meet our requirements, but also a wider industrial base that we would need in warfighting to sustain our warfighting machine and to see us to victory. So that's the kind of context in which we see this. And I think there is a big opportunity as we do those things to also support the key planks of the Prime Minister's overarching political agenda, which is to reindustrialize our country, backing Britain by buying British, and providing opportunities, particularly for the next generation and those million or so young people who find themselves not in education, employment, or training. So fundamentally, we've got to keep our eyes on our core business of defense, but there is also an opportunity for the Ministry of Defence to be both a ministry for growth and a ministry of opportunity. And we want to make sure that we're supporting the government's wider objectives.

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