National Resilience Committee

16 July 2026

Contents updated on 16 Jul 2026

The session opens with the Minister outlining her cross‑government resilience role, followed by detailed questioning on current Whitehall resilience architecture, including COBR, the lead government department model, the NSC and defence‑related planning assumptions.

Committee Thu, 16 Jul 2026 Actual start 10:15 House of Lords

15:26 - 16:46

Speaker 1

Good morning, Minister.

Good morning, Mr. Hargreaves. Thank you very much for joining us today to help us with this important inquiry. I should remind you that it is a public session. It's being broadcast live. In a couple of days, you'll each receive a transcript of the session.

And so if you spot any inaccuracies there, that's your opportunity to make corrections. And if you think at the time that there's something missing that you might or that you should have said, then we'd always welcome additional supplementary evidence in writing. We've obviously got a lot of questions for each of you. And before you give your first answer, it would be helpful for the record if you just introduce yourself briefly. Yes, I'm going to kick off.

And first of all, I'd like to say congratulations, Minister, on your latest appointment. Very good to have you here. And Mr. Hargreaves, thank you for your letter yesterday and also for engaging with the committee at a much earlier stage. But it's good to have you here now in the public session so that we can get your thoughts and advice on the record so we can take account of that in our report. We've obviously all seen yesterday's statement.

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