The BBC's television, radio and online services remain an important part of British culture and the fact the BBC continues to thrive amongst audiences at home and abroad is testament to a professional and dedicated management team who are committed to providing a quality public service.

The British security industry has the capacity to be a world leader and it should be our shared objective to achieve this.

One of the marked characteristics of the U.K. security industry as compared with defence is the lack of company scale. This can put our firms at a competitive disadvantage when it comes to big contracts.

The suicide bombers who struck London on 7 July 2005 killed 52 innocent people and wounded hundreds more. All of them must live with their memories. And the rest of us will always remember where we were when we heard that London had been hit by the worst terrorist attack in its history.

Those who say that the West and Islam are eternally irreconcilable have more in common with the Islam extremists than they might like to think, for it's the very same argument of course advanced by Al-Qaida. And they do have it wrong. We need to work with mainstream Islam.

When I first left university, I thought about going into the private sector. But I discovered when I went to interview that I could only have a career in the back office, or doing HR. The attitude was, "My dear lady, you cannot possibly think about going on the board.

I was certainly never conscious of 'playing the woman'. I would not have approved of that. It is not a winning tactic. I operated in the world as I found it, and it was a man's world.