Business of the House

Bob Seely Excerpts

Thursday 28th October 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I will continue my disagreeable line, as I disagree with the hon. Lady, too. I sometimes find myself in a surprising degree of agreement with her on local matters but, no, this Government want to keep the cost of living down. We want people to enjoy travelling around our great country. If it is £29.99 to fly from Bristol to Edinburgh or Glasgow, that is great for our constituents, and I hope they enjoy their trip.

[Bob Seely (Isle of Wight) (Con)]

May I suggest that resilience is an issue for the Leader of the House to consider? We have considerable resilience issues in this country, as we have seen with personal protective equipment and vaccines. We are now seeing it with energy supply, and we see it all the time with flooding and coastal defence issues on the Isle of Wight. Although it is not a specific departmental responsibility, resilience is a key overall responsibility of the Government. I will be talking to the Backbench Business Committee about a resilience debate but, given the work being done by the Government on resilience, will the Leader of the House also keep an eye on it?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

This is a very important point. The civil contingencies secretariat in the Cabinet Office makes preparations for the unexpected. The difficulty is that the unexpected we expect sometimes turns out not to be the unexpected that eventually happens, and therefore the planning does not always directly answer the difficulty that arises. The more one thinks about it, the more one debates it and the more one works out what the risks are, the better prepared one is likely to be.