Under his stewardship, the European Union has adopted an ambitious climate-change program that aims to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent or more by 2020.
VOA: standard.2009.09.16
"The Foreign Office have not traditionally been incredibly brave orambitious in negotiations and we certainly need to be braver in sticking to our corner" she told presenter Evan Davis.
However, from an institutional perspective there may also be a significant social cost to proceeding with too much vigor in cases that are questionable or overly ambitious.
The government is not blaming FirstGroup, but implicit in the minister's statement is that FirstGroup's risk projections were either over-ambitious or just plain wrong.