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European Global Navigation Satellite System

I will not detain the House long. I welcome the Minister to her new position. She comes to the job with a good reputation in other Departments, and I very much hope that she can continue that in the Department for Transport. I am also pleased to see the hon. Member for South Thanet (Dr. Ladyman) in his place; I have enjoyed working with him since taking up this brief. I understand that he intends to spend more time with his Alfa Romeo. I am sure that I speak for Members in all parts of the House when I wish him well in whatever he does next. As I said to the Minister during an intervention, for once, I am pleased about the timing of a debate such as this, inasmuch as we are scrutinising a subject before the decision is going to be made. Too often in these European debates, we end up examining a measure after the decision has already been taken. All we are able to do is criticise and describe how things might have been. Having said that—the Minister might now be thinking, ““Some people are never satisfied””—I fear that, because so much of the detail on the Commission’s position is to be made clear in the months to come, the House is unable to have a fully informed debate. I hope that there will be further opportunity for some measure of debate. I appreciate that, as a result of the way in which we organise our business in the House, it is not necessarily going to be possible to have that debate before an October Council. However, be it through the European Scrutiny Committee or some other mechanism, I hope that those who have expressed an interest tonight in this issue can be kept informed before the December Council. We Liberal Democrats continue to hold the view that the principle behind Galileo remains sound. We hold the strong view that what is needed is needed for reasons of economic and strategic importance. We do not, however, take the view that that can be an open-ended commitment, which is why we think that the real debate here is the one highlighted by the Committee chaired by the hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Mr. Connarty). It states that"““we suggest that there is a prior assertion from the Commission, which the Minister touches on only briefly, which perhaps also needs to be fully tested — that is the case for continuing the Galileo project at all, rather than writing off the sunk cost and letting Europe's industry continue to exploit the existing and developing opportunities available through GPS uses.””" That is a point that the hon. Gentleman made a few minutes ago and I entirely concur with it. It is an eminently sensible approach to take. The question essentially for the House is how sustainable is the PPP model for which the Government express such enthusiasm. The true point, which will have to be addressed eventually, is if the PPP model does not look like delivering, what will the Government’s position be? Frankly, we cannot answer that question at the moment, because it is a judgment that can be made only once the figures are available. That is why I remain concerned that we are still being asked tonight to buy a pig in a poke. We concur with the Government’s position for now. I cannot go beyond that and I do not think that the Government would be sensible to try to do so. We remain keen to support this, but the sums must add up.