Mark Francois MP: speeches

Speeches

• 26 Mar 2026 · Armed Forces Bill (Third sitting) · Hansard source

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  I beg to move amendment 14, in clause 3, page 7, line 26, at end insert— “(e) improving the satisfaction of service families with the accommodation provided.” This amendment would make improving customer satisfaction a specific objective of the Defence Housing Service.

• 26 Mar 2026 · Armed Forces Bill (Third sitting) · Hansard source

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  I beg to move amendment 15, in clause 3, page 7, line 26, at end insert— “(e) provide earmarked accommodation to facilitate “contact visits” for children of service personnel, who do not live with them (in accordance with any relevant court order).” This amendment would make the Defence Housing Service responsible for providing accommodation to facilitate “contact visits” for children of service personnel who have separated, in accordance with any relevant court order regarding access. My hon. Friends and I tabled this very specific amendment for two reasons. I remember that during my time as a Minister, which was more than a decade ago, when I visited Army garrisons, Navy facilities or RAF airbases and discussed service family accommodation, the issue often cropped up of providing accommodation for contact visits. In practice, that usually means providing SFA quarters that are ringfenced specifically to allow serving personnel to hire them temporarily, for example so that children who do not ordinarily live with them can stay with them on camp during a contact visit. This is obviously still an issue. I recall it cropping up in conversation when the Committee visited Portsmouth. When we visited the patch, we were shown some houses that, from memory, still had diggers outside because they were about to be refurbished for exactly that purpose. That tells me that this is still a bit of a challenge even now. Incidentally, that example bears out the value of the Committee visiting to see and learn these things for ourselves. As the Minister reminded me, it was Napoleon who said that time spent in reconnaissance is seldom wasted. Our visit was a very good example of that maxim in practice.

• 26 Mar 2026 · Armed Forces Bill (Third sitting) · Hansard source

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  I am so sorry; I have done it again. Mr Efford, I was not planning to press the amendment to a Division, but now I will—before I “retire”. Question put, That the amendment be made.

• 26 Mar 2026 · Armed Forces Bill (Third sitting) · Hansard source

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  Retired?

• 26 Mar 2026 · Armed Forces Bill (Third sitting) · Hansard source

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  Mr Offord, I was—

• 26 Mar 2026 · Armed Forces Bill (Third sitting) · Hansard source

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  I beg to move amendment 17, in clause 3, page 7, line 16, at end insert— “(4) The Defence Housing Service will operate within a budget which must be set out in any Defence Investment Plan published by the Secretary of State.” This amendment would ensure that Defence Housing Service’s budget is set out in any Defence Investment Plan published by the Secretary of State. Good morning, Mr Efford. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship again as we move on to clause 3, which concerns the proposed new Defence Housing Service and associated matters. I will speak to amendment 17 in my name. There are no Liberal Democrats in the room yet, but I am sure they will be joining us at some point. We have been assisted in examining this topic by our very helpful evidence sessions with Mr David Brewer, the putative head of the new Defence Housing Service, and Ms Natalie Elphicke Ross, a former parliamentary colleague of ours on both sides of the House, who has materially assisted the Government with their review and the creation of their new plan. We acknowledge her efforts. We also had a very informative Defence Infrastructure Organisation briefing during our visit to Portsmouth, where we visited a number of dwellings in a military patch outside the wire. That included houses representing both before and after, as it were: those that had been refurbished to an obviously good standard, and those that were still awaiting that work. I place on record our thanks to members of the DIO and to the Clerks for what was, as I hope the whole Committee will agree, an extremely informative visit. Before we get into the meat of the debate, I will take it as read that all members of the Committee share the same objective: an improved quality of service family accommodation for our valued armed forces personnel and their families. Again, for the record, we thank them for their service. We would also like to see good-quality accommodation for senior service personnel. The debate is therefore not so much about the objective, which I think we all share, as about the best way of achieving it. That is where we may have some genuine differences of opinion this morning, but hopefully for the right reasons. Amendment 17 focuses on the budget for the proposed new Defence Housing Service. Its essence is that the Defence Housing Service’s budget should be clearly set out in any defence investment plan published by the Secretary of State. [Interruption.] Good morning! The Liberals are now with us. There is an obvious historical context for the amendment. I think it is fair to say that down the years, under Governments of both colours—three colours, if we include the coalition Government of 2010 to 2015—there has been a constant tension in the funding of the defence housing estate. On the one hand, there has been a desire to provide capital to upgrade it; on the other hand, there have been general pressures on the defence budget. It has not been unknown for capital expenditure to be deferred from one year to another to free up resourcing for other operational priorities that were deemed more pressing or urgent by Ministers at the time. The aims and objectives of the new Defence Housing Service are rightly ambitious, which raises questions about how to secure the money and what safeguards there are, if any, against any future Government raiding that substantial pot of cash for other priorities should the circumstances arise. Both Mr Brewer and Ms Elphicke Ross were very clear in their evidence on the subject on 4 March: they said that after considerable discussion with the Treasury, a sum of some £9 billion had been put aside to create the Defence Housing Service and enable it to achieve its objectives laid out in the Bill. Nevertheless, during the same evidence session, it was established after some detailed—indeed, forensic—questioning from my hon. Friend the Member for Exmouth and Exeter East that the money had not been formally signed off by His Majesty’s Treasury. That is because the sum is currently included in the defence investment plan, which itself has not been signed off by His Majesty’s Treasury. As we all know, the defence investment plan has not been published, although Parliament was initially promised it by last autumn. I do not intend to labour—no pun intended—the point this morning, as we debated it at some length in the main Chamber on Tuesday evening. Suffice it to say that when the Government published the strategic defence review in July last year, they deferred many of the crunchy equipment and capability decisions to a subsequent defence investment plan. We were promised that it would be published in the autumn. We were then faithfully promised that it would be published by Christmas. We were then absolutely promised that it would be published fairly shortly thereafter. Here we are on 26 March, the day on which the House rises for the Easter recess, and still it has not been published. That leads to an additional problem, including for the Defence Housing Service. Part of the DIP, presumably including service accommodation in Scotland and Wales, could be affected by the outcome of the forthcoming Scottish Parliament and Welsh Senedd elections, at least indirectly. If the DIP is not published extremely shortly, it is likely to be caught by the purdah rules on those national elections. The putative date for the King’s Speech seems to be settling on or around 13 May. That means that the DIP is unlikely to be published until the second half of May, nearly two months from now, by which time the Defence Housing Service is meant to be under way. In essence, we are debating a plan based on a long-term budget that has not yet been agreed by the Treasury because, bluntly, the Ministry of Defence is at war with it. That is why the DIP has not been published. It is conceivable—although, for the record, I hope that this will not be the case—that whenever final negotiations are eventually concluded, the Treasury may insist on further reductions in the DIP, which in turn could lead to further reductions to the £9 billion currently allocated for the programme. That is why we tabled amendment 17, which states that the budget for the Defence Housing Service must be very clearly set out in the defence investment plan, whenever it is published, not least so that in subsequent iterations of the plan we can see whether the funding allocation is being reduced or increased. Will the Minister guarantee to the Committee that, as of 26 March 2026, the £9 billion in the forward programme has been formally signed off by His Majesty’s Treasury? In other words, can he guarantee that it is ringfenced in the DIP? If he cannot, can he at least tell us when the DIP will finally be published? A fortnight ago, I said privately to a Labour peer that waiting for the DIP was like waiting for Godot. He replied, “Yes, Mark, but at least Godot finally turned up.” Will the Minister answer those questions so that the Committee can take a view on the surety of the funding on which this admittedly very ambitious plan undoubtedly rests?

• 26 Mar 2026 · Gurkha Veterans · Hansard source

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  As former Officer Cadet Francois 24663730, and latterly Lieutenant Francois, 5th Battalion, the Royal Anglian Regiment (Volunteers), I am proud to be asked to sum up for His Majesty’s official Opposition in this important debate about Gurkhas and their welfare. I congratulate the hon. and gallant Member for Tewkesbury (Cameron Thomas), not just on securing this important debate, but on introducing it so very ably. As some Members of the House may know, I am something of a military history buff, so I have at least some appreciation of the noble and valiant service that the Gurkhas have provided to the British Crown for over 200 years. We have heard a number of important Back-Bench speeches this afternoon, including from the right hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell), and the hon. Members for Rochester and Strood (Lauren Edwards), for Tiverton and Minehead (Rachel Gilmour), for Doncaster Central (Sally Jameson), for Reading Central (Matt Rodda), for Bracknell (Peter Swallow), for Nuneaton (Jodie Gosling), for Ashford (Sojan Joseph), and for Esher and Walton (Monica Harding). The right hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington made the point that, in an important debate on this subject, 27 Back-Bench rebels made the difference on the day. He cited that as an example of how Back Benchers can affect the future. I remember how 28 Tory MPs changed the future on meaningful vote three in 2019—although, for our trouble, we were nicknamed “the Spartans” by the media, and not “the Gurkhas”. The Gurkhas celebrated their 200th anniversary in British service in 2015, when a very striking memorial was unveiled on Horse Guards Avenue, just across the road from the Ministry of Defence. As a number of hon. Members have mentioned today, the inscription on that memorial bears repetition in this context: “Bravest of the brave, most generous of the generous, never had country more faithful friends than you.” The Gurkhas entered British service in 1815, when a battalion of Gurkha troops was formed under the auspices of the East India Company. They continued in British service, and during the Indian rebellion of 1857, Gurkhas fought on the British side, and they became part of the British Indian Army on its formation. They remained in the British Indian Army, and fought valiantly in both the first and second world wars. In his brilliant book “Defeat into Victory”, which was written after the end of the second world war, and is arguably one of the greatest works ever written on the subject of generalship, one of the Gurkhas’ most famous officers, Field Marshal Viscount the Lord Slim, fondly recalled his association with the Gurkhas in the following terms: “I was able to visit my old Battalion, the 1st/6th Gurkha Rifles, in which I had served for many happy years. It was good to see them again, and to be told by the divisional commander that they had done well in the Bridgehead fighting. I spoke to Gurkha officers who I had first known 20-odd years before, when I was adjutant, and they were chubby recruits straight from the from the Nepal hills. Now they were subadars, commanding companies and platoons on a hard-fought field. Real soldiers and real leaders.” What a marvellous tribute to the Gurkhas from Bill Slim, an absolutely exceptional leader. The Gurkhas continued to fight valiantly in British service, including in the Malayan emergency and during the Falklands war, when a battalion of Gurkhas were part of the British taskforce that liberated the Falkland Islands from Argentinian occupation in 1982. The hon. Member for Tewkesbury rightly paid tribute to Ghanendra Limbu, who was part of that successful campaign. We thank all those who have served proudly in the Gurkhas for their service. The Gurkhas still form a fundamental part of the British Army today, serving in what is now known as the Brigade of Gurkhas, a collective term that refers to all serving Gurkha units. It includes three infantry battalions, one of which is based in Brunei. The second is in the United Kingdom, and there is now a third, smaller, specialist infantry battalion at Aldershot, as part of what is known as the Specialised Infantry Group. In addition, the Gurkhas have a number of other units, including signals, engineer and logistics regiments, and, interestingly, from 2025 onwards, there has been the new King’s Gurkha Artillery, which was based at Larkhill. Despite some disputes over welfare issues, which I will come to in a moment, recruitment from the Gurkhas’ ancestral homeland of Nepal is still very healthy. To this day, we recruit several hundred Gurkhas every year, and those places are massively oversubscribed. Many young men from Nepal still strive to emulate their forebears and join one Gurkha regiment or another to serve the Crown, and long may that continue. However, in the post-war period, the basis of the Gurkhas’ service was the 1947 tripartite agreement between Nepal, the United Kingdom and India, which established terms and conditions of service for Gurkhas in the British armed forces. Under the arrangement, Gurkhas served in the British Army on distinct terms and conditions. They also had access to a Gurkha pension scheme, first introduced in 1948, which, in essence, followed the Indian army model. It provided Gurkha soldiers with an immediate pension after 15 years’ service, but, as has been pointed out, at equivalent Indian army rates. In 2007, the Labour Government introduced the Gurkha offer to transfer—or GOTT, as it was sometimes referred to—offering Gurkhas who served after July 1997 the option to transfer their eligible service into the United Kingdom’s armed forces pension scheme, or AFPS. I remember much debate about the AFPS when I was a Minister, and about the different benefits provided by the different generations of the scheme, whether it was AFPS 1975, 2005 or 2015—I see the Minister nodding in acknowledgement. Significantly in this context, following the handing back of Hong Kong in 1997, the Gurkhas transferred their main base from that former colony back to the United Kingdom, where they are mainly deployed today. After 2009 and a sustained campaign led by, among others, Joanna Lumley—the daughter of a former Gurkha officer—the then Government amended the immigration rules, in essence to allow those who had served in the Brigade of Gurkhas for four years or more to settle themselves and their immediate families in the United Kingdom. That effectively remains the position today. As a result, there are now clusters of Gurkhas and their families living in the UK, mainly in current or former garrison areas, but some are dispersed further afield. For some time, there has been a campaign to amend the pensions of Gurkha veterans who served many years ago and still draw a pension, so that they are at the equivalent AFPS rate, rather than based on the comparable Indian army rate. The traditional argument is that because most Gurkhas returned to Nepal on the conclusion of their service, where costs were lower, it was appropriate to pay them under the old arrangements. However, after the end of their basing in Hong Kong and the switch of the brigade to the United Kingdom—and, indeed, given that many Gurkhas now avail themselves of the option of settling in the UK with their immediate family following their period of service—the question arises of whether the pension arrangements should be altered, including for older Gurkha veterans. I commend the hon. Member for Tewkesbury for advancing their arguments in the way he has done this afternoon. He has been a strong advocate of their case. I am afraid that I cannot, standing at the Dispatch Box, make an immediate spending commitment on behalf of my party to satisfy the hon. Member—

• 26 Mar 2026 · Gurkha Veterans · Hansard source

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  —although I hear calls from senior Members behind me to do so. Nevertheless, I can perhaps provide at least some additional context to this debate. Let me set out what I mean by that. For many years, all western armies—be they American, Canadian, Australian, German or otherwise—have struggled to recruit and retain sufficient regular and reserve personnel. I would argue that there have been particular problems in Britain, because of an extremely poor recruitment contract with Capita, or —forgive me, Madam Deputy Speaker—Crapita, as it was nicknamed by Private Eye . I proved spectacularly unsuccessful at persuading Conservative Ministers to take away the contract, despite my best efforts. At a time when all western armies have struggled to recruit and retain, the Gurkhas have provided a constant source of willing soldiers for the British Army—and as I intimated earlier, each year, the recruitments slots are still very healthily oversubscribed. That is no doubt one reason why the new Labour Government decided to form an entirely new artillery regiment, the King’s Gurkha Artillery, last year. In addition, there are still large numbers of Gurkhas who have left regular service but are living in the United Kingdom under the immigration changes I referred to, who might perhaps be persuaded to form reserve battalions of what is now the Army Reserve. I believe that such units would have as strong an ethos as their regular counterparts, and there should hopefully be a ready pool of already trained ex-regular troops to sign up, if this idea were pursued. I mention all this because of the Conservative party’s recent announcement that, due to the worsening international situation, an incoming Conservative Government would add back to the Army; we would create a Regular Army of a minimum of 80,000 troops, and the Army Reserve would be expanded from some 26,000 soldiers at present to at least 40,000, making for an Army on mobilisation of 120,000—and there would be potential further augmentation from the strategic reserve by another nearly 100,000. That is excepting a situation in which there was full conscription. We hope to debate this matter in more detail in the Armed Forces Bill Committee after the Easter recess. If we were to expand the British Army, both regular and reserve, there might well be merit in seeking to use that willing pool of additional Gurkha recruits to achieve at least part, if not all, of the desired expansion. If we were to ask the Gurkhas to form a proportionally slightly larger element of the British Army in the future, that might make for a stronger case for improving their terms of service, including the terms of service of those who served many years ago. I hope the House can follow my argument. I table that suggestion for discussion, and I hope that it is a positive contribution to the debate. To finish, I pay tribute to the extremely loyal and valiant service to the Crown that the Gurkhas have provided for over two centuries, during which 26 Victoria Crosses and many hundreds—indeed, thousands—of other gallantry medals have been awarded to those serving in Gurkha regiments. The Gurkhas have been great friends to Britain over many decades—indeed, centuries—and we thank them most heartily for that record. As they have a fearsome reputation on the battlefield, we should be wary of upsetting them, and avoid doing so if at all possible. I therefore look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say, and to hearing whether he can provide any comfort to the hon. Member for Tewkesbury, or to the House more broadly, on this admittedly rather complicated subject, which affects some of the bravest and most dedicated soldiers the British Army has ever seen.

• 24 Mar 2026 · Defence · Hansard source

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  Will the Minister give way on that point?

• 24 Mar 2026 · Defence · Hansard source

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  When I spoke from this Dispatch Box barely a month ago, I had literally just returned, hot foot, from Ukraine. Those who were here that evening might recall that I conveyed to the House a personal warning from the Speaker of the Rada, the Ukrainian Parliament: “No one knows the Russians better than us. If we fall, you and your friends are next.” —[ Official Report , 25 February 2026; Vol. 781, c. 423.] Not only is that war in Ukraine sadly ongoing—and has been for 12 years, not four years—we now face a very challenging situation because of the two concurrent conflicts in the middle east and Ukraine. Yet again, as we debate defence in this House, the plastic patriots of Reform are absolutely nowhere to be seen. Tonight’s debate is all the more pressing given the Government’s fundamental failure to display the requisite sense of urgency that is now clearly required. As an example, the Government’s much-vaunted strategic defence review, published last July, states on page 43: “This Review charts a new era for Defence, restoring the UK’s ability to deter, fight, and win—with allies—against states with advanced military forces by 2035.” That is nine years from now. Our Chief of the General Staff is on record as saying that he believes we might have to fight Russia by 2027 and the First Sea Lord estimates only a couple of years after that, yet it is the official policy of His Majesty’s Government that we will be prepared to fight a peer enemy almost a decade from now. That has terrible echoes of the so-called 10-year rule of the 1920s, and we all know what happened after that. The all-party, Labour-led House of Commons Defence Committee, with its excellent Chair the hon. Member for Slough (Mr Dhesi), recently accused the Government of proceeding “at a glacial pace” in improving Britain’s war preparedness. As my hon. Friend the Member for Spelthorne (Lincoln Jopp) reminded us, on 10 March, after a classified briefing, the Committee issued a joint statement and urged hitting 3% on defence spending in this Parliament. That is already Conservative party policy. The matter cropped up yet again at the Liaison Committee yesterday, when the Prime Minister was clearly floundering about the ability of his Government to respond to emerging threats and about why the defence investment plan—the DIP—has still not been published. Nowhere is the complete lack of strategic thinking from this Government more abundantly clear than in their barmy proposal to spend £35 billion of British taxpayers’ money to lease back the vital strategic outpost of Diego Garcia, which belongs to us in the first place. There is no credible legal threat to the sovereignty of Diego Garcia, and certainly none that would justify the expenditure of that much of taxpayers’ money. Instead, that money should be spent directly on our own defence. Why do I say that the threat is not credible? First, when we signed up to the International Court of Justice, we specifically included an opt-out for any cases involving current or former Commonwealth countries. Any judgment by the ICJ—even a mandatory one, and we should remember that this one is only advisory—would still not be legally binding on the UK, because of that crystal clear opt-out. Secondly, the Government attempted to argue that via the International Telecommunications Union, which is a UN agency like the ICJ, we could somehow lose control of our military spectrum. Again, that is absolute nonsense, because article 48 of the ITU treaty, to which we are a co-signatory, states clearly: “Member states retain their entire freedom with regard to military radio installations.” Again, that legal threat simply does not exist. Even the Government’s then telecommunications Minister, the hon. Member for Rhondda and Ogmore (Chris Bryant) confirmed that in a written answer to me a year ago on 12 February 2025. Thirdly, the Government’s last trench, as cited on Second Reading of their Diego Garcia Bill, was the desperate argument that we could somehow lose a case under the UN convention on the law of the sea at the international tribunal for the law of the sea. However, article 298(b) of the UNCLOS treaty, to which we are a co-signatory, states clearly that we have an opt-out in the event of any disputes concerning “disputes concerning military activities, including military activities by government vessels and aircraft engaged in non-commercial service”. Quod erat demonstrandum. We can throw in the Pelindaba treaty on nuclear non-proliferation, which Mauritius has signed and will prevent basing of nuclear weapons on the islands anyway, and, crucially, the 1966 Anglo-American treaty, which means that the United States has a formal written veto over Labour’s deal with Mauritius. The Americans are now almost certain to exercise that veto after we denied them the initial use of the runway, which our Ministers allegedly sought to protect in the first place. Ministers must surely know that the whole benighted deal is as dead as a dodo, and still they cannot bring themselves to admit it. They are totally and utterly in denial over Chagos. The same obsession with human rights from a Prime Minister who once described himself as a human rights lawyer first and a politician second—he was not kidding there, was he?—has also led to the utterly despicable position of the Government, in their Northern Ireland Troubles Bill, seeking to pursue our veterans through the courts via a process of lawfare and two-tier justice. That is while alleged terrorists, who those veterans were sent to the Province to fight, effectively walk free with letters of comfort in their pockets. Not only is that morally wrong on a whole range of levels, but it has a debilitating effect on recruitment and retention, especially within our own special forces community. That is an area where, even to this day—as I am sure the Minister for the Armed Forces would agree—our nation remains world-class. Then we come to the delay to the defence investment plan, which is simply unconscionable with not one war under way, but two. When the Government published the strategic defence review last year, they delayed most of the decisions on equipment capabilities to a subsequent defence investment plan, which we were promised would be published in the autumn. We were then faithfully promised it would be published by Christmas, and here we are in late March, all promises broken, and there is still no DIP. Ministers have been claiming for months that they have been working flat-out on this plan. What would have happened if they had not been trying? The reality is that we still do not have this document, because the Ministry of Defence is totally and utterly at war with His Majesty’s Treasury. That vital intergovernmental relationship has effectively broken down, and the Prime Minister is simply too weak to bang heads together and force the plan to be published.

• 24 Mar 2026 · Defence · Hansard source

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  If I may, I will make just one more point and then give way. Moreover, Labour claims repeatedly that it is introducing the largest increase in defence spending since the cold war, but that is simply not true. In the current financial year, it has actually done precisely the opposite. It has introduced a £2.6 billion efficiency savings programme that viciously cuts operational spending across the British armed forces at the Treasury’s behest. That means fewer ships at sea and longer times to regenerate them, as with HMS Dragon; fewer training hours for our pilots; and fewer exercises on Salisbury plain. So here we are, with two wars under way, and nine months later this completely dysfunctional Cabinet is still unable to publish a forward equipment programme for the British armed forces. Do Labour Members not realise that they can also see this in Moscow, in Beijing and, indeed, in Tehran? If Labour Members believe, as I always have, that the role of the armed forces is to save life by preventing war and by persuading any potential aggressor that they could not succeed were they to attack us or our allies, how in God’s name are we supposed to deter the likes of Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping if we are unable to publish the forward equipment plan for our own armed forces that is now nearly a year overdue? On what planet do Labour MPs think that this is an act of credible and effective deterrence? To be fair to the Government, they have published something today. Just a few hours ago, they published the defence diplomacy strategy. They have been working flat out on it for months. They have been absolutely knocking themselves out to get that one away. I apologise to the House that I have not had the opportunity to read it yet, but I hope that it contains one very firm recommendation: “If you are going to maintain effective diplomatic relations with your strongest ally, the United States, whatever you do, don’t send to Washington an ambassador who had to resign from the Cabinet not once but twice for effectively being a crook and who has now had to be fired third time around.”

• 24 Mar 2026 · Defence · Hansard source

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  I cannot; I do apologise. The international skies are rapidly darkening, and the response of the Labour Government is, first, to cut operational spending in our armed forces by £2.5 billion and, secondly, to be completely unable to say when they would reach spending of 3% of GDP on defence, which all three authors of the SDR have said repeatedly is fundamental to delivering it. Until they do that, they cannot deliver it. Thirdly, because of the utterly dysfunctional relations within Government, with a Prime Minister whose authority is shot to pieces, they are totally unable to produce the defence investment plan, even though the House rises and we go into purdah for the Scottish and Welsh elections 48 hours from today. This has become a farce, but it is a very dangerous one. We are now, quite literally, a laughing stock in Washington, and there is no way we can possibly deter our adversaries if we carry on like this. It is just not a credible defence posture to maintain, so I conclude by saying to Ministers: you have had long enough to produce it; if you can’t do the job, get out of the way.

• 24 Mar 2026 · Armed Forces Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  I am loath to interrupt the hon. Gentleman, because he is making an extremely powerful speech. I pay tribute to his service. When I was the Veterans Minister a decade ago, I looked at the issue. One thing that we looked at closely was the point that the hon. Gentleman is making, which is that some veterans leave in very good mental shape—they have an exit medical and they are fine—but a few years later there can be a trigger event, such as the sudden death of a parent, and suddenly all the suppressed anxieties and difficulties seen in combat can come out very quickly. That person can deteriorate extremely fast. Is the hon. Gentleman’s proposed appointment partly intended to address that problem?

• 24 Mar 2026 · Armed Forces Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  To reinforce what the Minister is saying, Lieutenant General Sir Andrew Gregory, who for many years was the controller of SSAFA, always used to make the point that while clearly some people suffer as a result of their military career, as the Minister admits, the vast bulk emerge in good shape, remain in good shape and benefit immensely from their time in service. I put on record what Lieutenant General Gregory, the head of SSAFA until recently, said, if only to back up absolutely everything the Minister is saying.

• 24 Mar 2026 · Armed Forces Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  The Minister has made a strong argument. I place on the record my admiration for the three veterans commissioners for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, all of whom are excellent at what they do. I seem to recall—I do not have the Hansard here—that when we were debating the Armed Forces Commissioner Act 2025, I asked the Minister when we would get an English veterans commissioner, and he was pretty clear that we would get one. The Minister today has intimated that we will probably still get one, so he is being consistent, but can he give us some idea of the timing?

• 24 Mar 2026 · Armed Forces Bill (First sitting) · Hansard source

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  On this point.

• 24 Mar 2026 · Armed Forces Bill (First sitting) · Hansard source

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  Having been a Member of Parliament for 25 years in June, I have learned not to look a gift horse in the mouth. I say that in the nicest possible way, so I will take the hint, and having gone to the trouble of writing the speech, I will definitely submit it. To continue, if a service family were based at Tidworth and, perhaps after some considerable time, had secured an EHCP from Wiltshire as the local education authority, but were then posted to Catterick, they would potentially have to go through the process all over again in Yorkshire. It could be another two years of agony to get back to where they already were before they moved. As the Minister pointed out in his helpful letter to the Committee of 9 March, the Department for Education has produced—here is that word again—“guidelines” that should help facilitate the passporting, in effect, of EHCPs from one military garrison or equivalent airbase or naval base to another in a different LEA area, so there is already a process in place to do that. The problem, however, is that those guidelines are facilitative rather than mandatory. In other words, if the receiving LEA—in Yorkshire, in our example—was already under serious financial pressure and already had delays in its system for granting EHCPs, it is possible that, despite the armed forces covenant, the receiving LEA might yet be unreasonable and still force the service family to go back to square one and start all over again. Without taking the Committee for granted in any way, I strongly suspect that Members from all parties would find that situation highly undesirable.

• 24 Mar 2026 · Armed Forces Bill (First sitting) · Hansard source

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  The hon. Member is making my point for me. In the civilian context they might not be ordered to move, but in a military context their whole unit might move, so they do not have a choice. If they are going to follow the drum—follow the flag—they have to go from Tidworth to Catterick. If, therefore, the LEA covering Catterick were difficult about it, they would have to start the journey all over again. When I was doing the “Stick or Twist?” report, I spoke to a number of service personnel, so we had anecdotal evidence, although I am afraid not a league table. We certainly spoke to people who were contemplating leaving the military because they were in exactly that situation and simply could not face the challenge of having to move and start all over again. They would rather leave the service of the Crown and keep the bird in the hand—for want of a better phrase—staying with the EHCP that they had, than move to a new location, roll the dice and start all over again. That is the fundamental difference. An absolute principle of the covenant—as, to be fair, the hon. Member for South Ribble rightly elucidated—is that service personnel and their families should suffer no disadvantage as a result of their military service. This is a very specific example of where they do, and we called the report “Stick or Twist?” because, in this case, that is the dilemma that they would face. I have done my best, I hope, to answer the hon. Gentleman’s question, so I will try to move towards a conclusion without trying your patience, Mr Efford. In essence, amendment 11 seeks to make provision for the Secretary of State to produce guidelines within six months such that the receiving authority must accept that transfer as legitimate and seek to passport across whatever benefits were provided for in the EHCP, or in the national equivalent in the devolved Administrations. On a point of detail, as an EHCP usually includes a named school for that child to go to, whether mainstream or specialist, the service family should also be given a reasonable period of time in order to help negotiate and select a named school in the receiving area, ideally before their posting comes into effect, so that the child could, as it were, know their fate and begin to establish links in the new school. I hope Committee members appreciate that for children with certain SEN conditions, moving educational settings can be a disturbing experience. That is why I put that provision into the amendment. I hope the Committee will forgive me for having gone into considerable detail about all this, but special educational needs is perforce a rather complicated subject. Nevertheless, I hope that the Committee can understand what I and my hon. Friends seek to achieve here, and I hope that we might somehow be able to co-opt the Committee on a cross-party basis to bring it through. The spirit is simple: one of the key principles of the armed forces covenant is that service personnel should suffer no disadvantage relative to their civilian counterparts by virtue of their service, and I believe that that should apply equally in the field of special needs education as elsewhere. Having presented my case, and so as not to try the Committee’s patience, I genuinely look forward to hearing other members of the Committee, especially the Minister when he sums up, and their views of amendment 11. I shall not discuss amendment 12 now, but will let someone else have a go. Perhaps, Mr Efford, you will call me to speak briefly to that amendment later. Other than that, I rest my case.

• 24 Mar 2026 · Armed Forces Bill (First sitting) · Hansard source

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  I do not think the Minister ever served in local government—he was serving his country in uniform, so I mean no slight by that comment—but I did for four years, albeit in the last century. I remember that primary legislation had more effect than guidance on councils, not least because even then we were drowning in such guidance—there is even more of it to drown in now. Would he accept that having something in primary legislation is more likely to get a councillor to do something about it than if it is included in reams of guidance, which they tend to drown in anyway on a weekly basis?

• 24 Mar 2026 · Armed Forces Bill (First sitting) · Hansard source

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  No, Mr Efford, and I was just going to say why not. I tipped my hand earlier and said that I probably would not press it. I will accept the Minister’s kind offer of a meeting to discuss the issues in amendments 11 and 12. I hope I have managed to convince the Committee that I have done my homework, if nothing else. I will not press either amendment.

• 24 Mar 2026 · Armed Forces Bill (First sitting) · Hansard source

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  I did not want to push my luck, but briefly, amendment 12 is similar in spirit and relates to portability and adoption. In this instance, I want to raise a specific case of two serving officers. They asked not to be identified, but perhaps the Minister will take my word that it is a genuine case; if he wants me to provide the details privately afterwards, I am happy to do so. This married couple, both serving majors based at Shrivenham, have been looking to adopt. They are both due to be posted to PJHQ—permanent joint headquarters —in Northwood at the conclusion of their course, in under six months. They reached out to their future local authority to start the adoption process, but they were told that they could not start the process unless they had been living in that local authority area for at least a year. Also, they would have to commit to staying in the new local authority area for a minimum of two to three years after they had adopted—a potential total of more than five years. That is clearly not feasible for a military family, used to two-year posting cycles. Our amendment 12 would therefore simply give military families the same rights as civilian families, who do not have to move wherever the nation needs them. It is very similar in essence to the point about EHCPs, but representations have been made to me by that family and others, so I undertook to draft a parallel amendment that specifically covers fostering and adoption. I hope the Committee can understand the spirit of what I am trying to achieve. With that, I rest my case.

• 24 Mar 2026 · Armed Forces Bill (First sitting) · Hansard source

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  I appreciate the hon. Lady’s point. Having looked at the White Paper in a fair bit of detail, I have tried to incorporate how the system will change into what I am going to say. There is still a fundamental problem, however, which I hope I can explain to her satisfaction. I have come to understand at least a bit about the complexities of the situation, including the important fact that some 99% of appeals to SEN tribunals for an EHCP to be granted are eventually approved anyway. That is a phenomenally high percentage. It struck me that the system was expending a tremendous amount of resource in trying to exercise the judgment of Solomon as to whether child A was marginally more entitled to a scarce SEN school place than child B. That can apply to the children of service personnel as well. It therefore seemed to me, after some years of experience, that the only way to cut the Gordian knot was to increase the supply of special needs education. With all the SEN schools in south Essex already heavily oversubscribed, that meant creating a new special needs school from scratch. I spent three years trying to do exactly that. I am delighted to tell the Committee that Wolsey Park school, the first ever SEN school in the Rochford district, is now under construction and will hopefully open in the spring of next year for 150 children with severe or profound learning difficulties—the most challenging SEN cases—in Rayleigh. There will also be an annexe with a further 100 places on the former Chetwood primary school site in South Woodham Ferrers. The school will be called Wolsey Park, although light-heartedly I thought “Francois academy” had a certain ring to it. Others, unfortunately, disagreed. It should provide high-quality education for those very special children. As a result of that process, I have been on an educational journey that has taught me quite a lot about the complexities and challenges of the whole area, which of course also applies to service personnel who have a child, or in some cases children, with special educational needs. I know that this can sometimes be an emotive subject, not least for parents, but I hope I can convince the Committee that what I am attempting to do is not any kind of partisan initiative, but will hopefully be to the benefit of all service personnel and their families in this category. The hon. Member for Truro and Falmouth raised the new White Paper. In February 2026, the Government published a long-awaited White Paper on this subject, “Every child achieving and thriving”. There are a number of positive suggestions in that document, and I should like to touch on them, as they potentially affect armed forces personnel. According to the latest estimates, by which I mean the gov.uk statistics concerning SEN and EHCP provision in England for the academic year 2024-25, there are 482,640 children with an education, health and care plan in England. Obviously, the number increases when Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are included in the total; they have different names for the document, but they are essentially quite similar. The definition of special educational needs, which is included in the SEND code of practice for England, is brief and very clear: “A child or young person has SEN if they have a learning difficulty or disability which calls for special educational provision to be made for him or her.” At present, that provision, whether it is in a mainstream educational setting or a dedicated SEN school, is often supported in the most challenging cases by an EHCP. The White Paper estimates that around 5.3% of children in England, or just over one in 20, currently qualify for an EHCP. Although I have not seen specific statistics relating to the military community, it seems logical that the proportion is unlikely to be lower, so at least one in 20 service children, and perhaps even more, qualify for an EHCP. One of the challenges of dealing with SEN children—this point relates directly to amendment 11—is that providing the additional support they require is often relatively resource-intensive. Local education authorities are therefore often reluctant to speedily grant EHCPs because of the financial pressure that it adds to their budgets, even though 99% of those cases tend to be settled in favour of the parents and the child concerned anyway, sometimes after a gruelling and time-consuming appeal process. Because of the funding pressures placed on local authorities by the growing demand for SEN support and for EHCPs in particular, several years ago the then Conservative Government introduced what was known as the statutory override for local authority budgets. In essence, it meant that although local authorities are required by law to set a balanced budget each year—would that central Government had to live by such discipline!—the one exception whereby they are allowed to run a deficit deliberately is the case of costs arising from SEN education. As we have local elections approaching, it is fair to say—without being partisan or going into the cases of individual councils—that rising SEN costs have placed a number of local authorities that are also local education authorities, such as county councils or metropolitan or London boroughs, under considerable financial strain in recent years. As a result, under the Conservative Government, the statutory override that was introduced in March 2020 and was initially meant to run until March 2023 was extended to the end of March 2026. Now I am about to give this Labour Government some credit. The question of what would happen when the statutory override ran out is obviously still pertinent. In June 2025, they announced that the statutory override would stay in place until the end of the financial year 2027-28—so they extended it. Moreover, in autumn 2025, the Treasury announced that the Government would absorb the cost of the statutory override through central budgets—in other words, via general taxation—once the override expires in 2028. As the Library briefing notes on this subject point out: “Future funding implications will be managed within the overall government DEL envelope, such that the government would not expect local authorities to need to fund future special educational needs costs from general funds, once the Statutory Override ends at the end of 2027-28.” In February this year—last month—the Government further announced that they would be writing off 90% of councils’ historic SEND-related deficits, at least up to the year 2025-26. All of that is very costly in terms of general taxation, and I have yet to see a comprehensive estimate of exactly how it will be paid for, but the Committee might feel that, in these very particular and emotive cases, the money is none the less well spent.

• 24 Mar 2026 · Armed Forces Bill (First sitting) · Hansard source

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  Although my hon. Friend the Member for Exmouth and Exeter East is leading for the Opposition on clause 2, I nevertheless want to make a particular point in relation to special educational needs and to adoption and fostering. I want to emphasise some issues related to educational aspects of the armed forces covenant. I shall therefore speak to amendment 11, tabled in my name and that of my hon. Friends, which relates to the continuity of special educational needs plans, and to amendment 12, tabled by the same Members, which relates to fostering and adoption. I am sure that all right hon. and hon. Members on the Committee will be familiar from their constituency casework with the challenges presented by the special educational needs issue. I therefore rather hope they might have some sympathy with amendment 11, the essence of which is to allow serving families with a child who has been awarded an education, health and care plan, or its equivalent in the other nations of the United Kingdom, to transfer that support without penalty if they are required to move between bases, for operational or other reasons, from one area of the country to another. In the modern parlance, I have been on a journey in relation to this issue, so let me explain briefly to the Committee why I feel so strongly about it. Over the past few years, multiple parents have come to my constituency advice surgeries in connection with this issue. In a number of cases, they have been through what I admit is a bureaucratic assault course, sometimes lasting two years or longer, to establish an EHCP for their child or children. Having been through that gruelling experience, which can sometimes even involve attending an appeal hearing in front of a judge, they have often been confronted with the further challenge—even having won such a valuable document, which provides important additional support for their child—that they still cannot find a special needs place. Their child therefore has to be accommodated somehow in mainstream education, even if their condition is such that mainstream education is simply not appropriate in their case.

• 24 Mar 2026 · Armed Forces Bill (First sitting) · Hansard source

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  Does my hon. Friend agree that the words that we have used in the amendment are taken verbatim from the Minister’s letter of 9 March 2026? We asked him to provide a definition of due regard; he duly wrote to the Committee very promptly, and we have quoted the first sentence verbatim. These are not random words; this is the Minister’s definition. All we are seeking to do is place it in the Bill.

• 24 Mar 2026 · Armed Forces Bill (First sitting) · Hansard source

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  Let me say briefly that I hope that, if nothing else—