Mark Francois MP: speeches

Speeches

• 22 Jun 2026 · Armed Forces Bill · Hansard source

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  I am old school, and I was taught that in a debate, it is polite to refer to the Member who moved the lead amendment. That is what I was seeking to do. As I think the House would realise, I am making a very different point and a different argument from him. I will have to respectfully disagree, particularly given events earlier today. New clause 4, in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Huntingdon (Ben Obese-Jecty), has been signed by 64 MPs from across the House, including me. The law was changed many years ago to permit foreign, Commonwealth and Gurkha personnel who have served in our armed forces for four years or more to apply for UK citizenship in return for their willingness to risk their life in service of the Crown. That is now a well-established procedure. However, there is a long-running issue about their immediate family, who may also wish to apply for citizenship, being charged visa fees. Both the Conservative and Labour parties in their 2024 general election manifestos pledged to change that. Indeed, the Royal British Legion and Poppyscotland have been campaigning on it for some time. The case will no doubt be made eloquently by my hon. Friend the Member for Huntingdon, just as it was in Committee, if he is lucky enough to catch your eye, Madam Deputy Speaker. When we debated this issue in Committee some three weeks ago, the then Armed Forces Minister, the hon. Member for Birmingham Selly Oak, sought to offer the House some comfort that progress might be made on this issue by the time we got to Report. That being the case, and given that the Royal British Legion and Poppyscotland have been doing their best to press the case—including at an event in the House earlier today—I hope that his replacement as the Armed Forces Minister will be able to give us a positive update tonight. It is not really the money that is the impediment. We in the Conservative party have pledged that if we were in government, the Ministry of Defence would cover the additional cost of these visas, which would realistically run at most to a few million pounds a year. However, as everyone knows, the real blocker is not the MOD, but the Home Office. I very much hope that the Armed Forces Minister can tell us today that she has put some vim down the pipe, as it were, and that the Government will now accept new clause 4. If not, I feel sure that my hon. Friend the Member for Huntingdon will be present to press his new clause at the conclusion of our debate. Our amendments 3, 4 and 5 are on the subjects of special educational needs, the related matters of fostering and adoption, and care in the national health service. In essence, our argument is that if military personnel who have children with special educational needs are ordered to transfer from one military garrison or base to another, any support that they have for that child—including an education, health and care plan or its equivalent in the devolved Governments—should automatically be portable from one local education authority to the one that covers their new posting. One of the two overriding principles of the armed forces covenant, which is an important aspect of the Bill, is that military personnel and their families should suffer no disadvantage as a result of their service relative to the civilian population. Given that they may sometimes be compelled to move by order from one part of the country to another, this is a perfect example of where that principle should now bite.

• 22 Jun 2026 · Armed Forces Bill · Hansard source

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  I thank the hon. Lady for a very helpful intervention. I will come to the NHS in a moment, but during the Bill’s earlier stages we have suggested that if the Government do not feel that they can accept this amendment—amendment 3—in this primary legislation, which was our preferred route, now that we know there will be a new Bill on special educational needs, they should seek to address the problem in that Bill, and because it is a Department for Education Bill, hopefully local education authorities will then give it considerable weight. So we are in absolute agreement about that route, and, if I may say so, what the hon. Lady has said about education Ministers is heartening. Amendment 4 makes, in a sense, the same argument as we have made on the EHCPs with regard to fostering or adoption by service personnel. Amendment 5 argues, in a similar vein, that military personnel who transfer from one military location to another should not lose their place on any NHS waiting list as a result. Again, there is forthcoming legislation on NHS reorganisation, and we hope that this issue can be tackled via that legislative route. I believe this is a relatively straightforward moral argument, in all three cases, and I hope that the Government may yet accept the logic of what we are putting forward this evening. Let me now turn to the subject of funding for the proposed new Defence Housing Service. As I said during the Select Committee stage of the Bill, there is almost universal agreement that we want to improve the quality of accommodation for service personnel and their families. The remaining area of contention is how best to achieve that, given that there is almost complete unanimity on the desired end state. Nevertheless, following media reports—especially in The Sunday Times —Opposition Members are increasingly concerned about the possibility that money for capital improvements, and even maintenance, may now be taken away from the Defence Housing Service before it is even born, and reallocated to other priorities in Labour’s very long-awaited defence investment plan. We know from evidence sessions on the Bill that there is already a plan for the Defence Housing Service to reduce the spending on housing maintenance by 25%, compared to current practice. That sounds worrying, although officials, and indeed the previous Minister, were keen to stress that they believed the new Defence Housing Service would be able, by renegotiating certain contracts and the actual operation of maintenance, to do this more efficiently. The proof of the pudding for all that will be very much in the eating. However, what we understand is now being proposed is that the capital allocations for the Defence Housing Service will be raided in order to fund other defence priorities elsewhere. That process will only be exacerbated if, as has been widely reported, the amount of money that will be available for the DIP—if and when it is finally published—will be the lowest of the three options widely canvassed in the press, namely an additional £10 billion of spending on defence over the next four years. Given the challenges faced by defence—which were laid out starkly by both the former Defence Secretary and the former Armed Forces Minister in their powerful resignation letters—£10 billion over four years will not even touch the sides. Let me humbly remind Labour Members that all three authors of the strategic defence review, which was published over a year ago on 2 June 2025, were adamant that the price tag for delivering Labour’s much-vaunted SDR would be defence spending of at least 3% of GDP. What is on offer is clearly nowhere near that. Indeed, in his scathing resignation letter, the former Defence Secretary said that all that was being offered to him was an increase in defence spending from 2.6% of GDP this year to 2.68% of GDP by 2030—in other words, a 0.08% increase over four years. Those numbers completely and utterly demolish Labour’s constantly repeated mantra that they are now funding “the biggest…increase in defence spending since the Cold War.” That is simply not true. However, the situation is even worse than that. In addition to the headline “increases”, which are now minuscule, as the resignation letter starkly reveals, last year, at the Treasury’s behest, the Labour Government introduced a target of making efficiency savings—“cuts” in plain English—of some £2.6 billion from operational and revenue spending in the Ministry of Defence. What that means in practice is fewer ship days at sea, fewer hours for our pilots to fly, and fewer exercises on Salisbury plain. Incredibly, in this financial year—2026-27—the efficiency savings target has now been increased to £3.5 billion of cuts, which means even more operational and revenue spending reductions than last year. For Labour to continue the mantra that it has provided the largest increase in defence spending since the cold war, in the face of these self-imposed, Treasury-driven in-year cuts, simply destroys any credibility that the Government had that they really are striving to keep this country safe. This is not the result of enemy action—unless one regards the Treasury as the enemy, which many in the military now do. This is a self-inflicted wound brought about by a Labour Government who are completely paralysed by inaction, and who now have no idea whatsoever of how to credibly fund the defence of this country. In the light of today’s events, it remains to be seen whether the right hon. Member for Makerfield (Andy Burnham) will attempt to introduce any order into this chaos. If he does, he and his new Chancellor—whoever that turns out to be—will still have to say how the Labour Government are going to pay for it. Are they going to increase borrowing, which will frighten the bond markets, or are they going to cut welfare, which would probably provoke a Back-Bench revolt?

• 2 Jun 2026 · Armed Forces Bill · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend is bearing out the point that there are real-world examples of this issue coming into play, and he has done the Committee a service by reiterating that. The Minister for Veterans and People kindly met me and my hon. Friend the Member for Solihull West and Shirley (Dr Shastri-Hurst) last month to discuss whether the Government might be able to do more on this subject, and in fact the Minister for the Armed Forces referred to that meeting in his remarks a few minutes ago. During the meeting with the Minister for Veterans and People, we suggested—here is the leak—that, given the announcement in the King’s Speech that there would be a new Bill on the whole topic of special educational needs, one way of achieving the aim of the amendment might be to include such a provision in that Bill—in a DFE Bill, rather than an MOD Bill. That would still, at the end of the day, achieve the same desirable outcome. The Minister undertook to go away and look at the matter, including potentially in consultation with colleagues from the DFE. Having received her letter of yesterday, I have to say, more in sorrow than in anger, that I was extremely disappointed in its tone. It was a classic civil service boilerplate reply that bore little relation to the discussion that we had in the Minister’s office. I can only ask her to look at this again, perhaps in the context of the new DFE legislation, as I have just suggested.

• 2 Jun 2026 · Armed Forces Bill · Hansard source

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  There has been a leak: the hon. Gentleman has clearly had access to my speech. He has put a lot of work into this issue, so perhaps I can meet him halfway with what I am about to say. In fairness, there are already DFE guidelines that can facilitate the portability of an EHCP from one local education authority to another. The crucial point, however, is that that is by voluntary agreement, and there is no guarantee that if service personnel are transferred at the behest of their commanders, the LEA into which they will move will accept the EHCP on transfer. The essence of amendment 2 is that it would ensure that that process does take place, rather than leaving it as a matter of discretion for the receiving LEA, which itself may be under considerable pressure to meet the demand for SEN support. Amendment 3, which relates to adoption and fostering, is similar in spirit. It would mean that service personnel who have begun the fostering and adoption process under one local education authority would not have to go again to the back of the queue, as it were, if they were to transfer to another. The spirit of both amendments is the same.

• 2 Jun 2026 · Armed Forces Bill · Hansard source

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  I fully acknowledge the hon. Gentleman’s point about education being a devolved matter, which makes the SEN issue more complicated. He is quite correct about that, but does he acknowledge that amendment 2 allows for that and specifically refers to it? Secondly, there is no cross-border issue in England. If I agree with him that this would best be done via an education Bill, will he agree with me that in England there is no impediment whatsoever to making the transfer of EHCPs for service children mandatory?

• 16 Apr 2026 · Armed Forces Bill (Seventh sitting) · Hansard source

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  On the issue of recruitment and retention, the Committee will recall from an earlier debate that I produced a report called “Stick or Twist?” for a previous Prime Minister, which was submitted in February 2020, just one month before the nation went into lockdown. The essence of that report, which contained multiple recommendations—all but one were eventually adopted by the Ministry of Defence, to varying degrees—was that there are a variety of reasons why people twist, or leave HM armed forces. However, the overwhelming reason, which has been consistent for a number of years, is the overall effect of service life on family life. People can be picked up for short-term deployment, sometimes overseas, and not see their partners and children as often as they would like. Sometimes, the cumulative effect of that—the pressure—becomes too much. For the record, there are a number of other factors, and it is often a decision in the round—normally, it is a combination of factors that persuades someone eventually to leave—but sometimes there is one straw that breaks the camel’s back. I gave the example in a previous debate of someone who had to miss his best friend’s wedding because he was trawled to the British Army Training Unit Suffield as a watchkeeper. He was a rising cavalry officer, who spent nights sitting in a tent with a laptop or reading a novel, and he came back and basically told the Army to stuff it. That was a very poor leadership decision by somebody. Other factors could include pay, childcare and the expense and difficulty of obtaining it, housing—we have debated that previously at some length—and spousal employment, as people sometimes leave because of the effect on their partner’s career rather than on their own.

• 16 Apr 2026 · Armed Forces Bill (Sixth sitting) · Hansard source

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  The essence of the amendment, tabled in my name and that of my hon. Friends, is to place a requirement on the Secretary of State to create a plan to ensure and monitor the efficiency of the reserve forces and cadets associations in carrying out their duties and the relationship with local reserve and cadet units in their charge. I place formally on the record my thanks to the RFCAs as part of our overall national defence effort, and the appreciation of my party for the highly important role they carry out. Many people who serve on the RFCAs at national and regional level have tremendous experience of military life, often across each of the three services in the case of a regional RFCA. The fact that they wish to continue to make a contribution to defence, in many cases after their regular career is over, is to be welcomed and commended. Nevertheless, just occasionally, I come across examples of a perhaps overly bureaucratic approach by some RFCA staff, who are no doubt well meaning, but whose actions tend—perhaps inadvertently—to stifle innovation and creative thinking. I will illustrate that point to the Minister with two specific personal examples, one from some years ago and the other more contemporary. The first example relates to attempts to create new cadet units in my constituency. While I served as a Minister in the MOD more than a decade ago, I think it is fair to say that we had a successful programme to expand the number of cadet units in state secondary schools. We set a target of creating some 500 new cadet units at secondary level, specifically including some educational settings and some geographical areas that had perhaps not benefited from cadet units hitherto. We deliberately tried to set up some of those school cadet units in what might be termed quite tough inner-city areas. That went pretty well; we hit the target. That meant that thousands of young people at school had the opportunity to benefit from everything the cadet movement offers in terms of teaching teamwork, discipline, determination in adversity and all the other military virtues that they were therefore exposed to at a relatively young age. As the Minister knows, we do not have a cadet movement specifically to recruit people into the adult armed forces. Nevertheless, if many of those people, having experienced a taste of the military ethos, wish to continue their military involvement afterwards, that is all well and good, both for them and for their country. Therefore, on a personal level, I have always been a great believer in the cadet movement, and I am proud to say that I have four cadet units in my constituency: 1476 (Rayleigh) Squadron Air Training Corps and its sister squadron, 1474 (Wickford), and detachments of the Essex Army Cadet Force in both Rayleigh and Wickford. I have also, over the past year at least, made a point of attending both the Army cadets’ and the Air cadets’ annual awards ceremonies in Essex. After I left the MOD, and after we had hit the target of 500 new cadet units in schools, I was involved in conversations with the headteachers of two secondary schools in my constituency, who were also very interested in the programme but had not been part of the original cohort of 500. In essence, they were both keen to set up cadet units of their own. There was an original barrier to entry of a down payment of something like £17,000 by any school that wished to participate. Given the pressure on school budgets, even a decade or so ago, that was a prohibitive barrier to entry for many schools. Nevertheless, I am pleased to say that that requirement was eventually dropped, and, at that point, I had two headteachers who were very keen to go ahead. I attempted on numerous occasions to communicate that to the East Anglia RFCA, but I regret to inform the Committee that I got absolutely nowhere. Multiple attempts to raise this were met with a very lukewarm response; I was constantly referred to different people within the organisation, and then ultimately to one non-commissioned officer who appeared to have been given responsibility for new cadet units but, for various reasons, seemed very hard to reach. In the end, I am sad to report that the two headteachers in question lost interest. As one of them put it to me at the time, “Well, if they’re not interested in my school, I don’t see why I should still be interested in one of their cadet units.” That was a shame. I believe it was a missed opportunity—in fact, two. I raise that in the hope that if, in future, any hon. Member wants to help foster the creation of a cadet unit at a school in their constituency, they might have a more positive experience than I did. Perhaps, in responding to this amendment, the Minister could tell us where we are in terms of school cadet units. I think it would be handy if he could place it on the record that the Government would still like to see new cadet units in schools, and, very briefly, how hon. Members can go about encouraging that. Maybe I was just unlucky, but it would be a shame if we could not facilitate setting up new units in schools. Secondly—this is a more contemporary example—I have the honour and privilege of serving as the honorary president of 1476 (Rayleigh) Squadron. The Minister might recall that I alluded to an issue about the potential expansion of the squadron during one of the earlier evidence sessions. I was then invited to write to the head of the RFCA about that. I am grateful for that hint, and I still intend to do so following this debate. For the record, 1476 (Rayleigh) Squadron has won the Lees trophy as the champion squadron in the Essex wing two years running. A military type might well say, “Well, they must be doing something right then.” Suffice it to say, having declared my interest as the squadron president, I am slightly dismayed that attempts to refurbish and expand the facilities of 1476’s admittedly ageing base in Rayleigh have often fallen foul of what one might call bureaucracy at the RFCA level, even though a national house builder was offering to build a brand-new extension to the squadron base at Connaught Road as a gesture of good will and at absolutely no cost to the taxpayer. I am sure that we have all seen these things in our constituencies: a company offers to get together a group of volunteers at a weekend and do something up. The company was going to do that, and it also offered to build what was basically, in pub English, a large shed at the back of the unit, as the squadron has a particularly strong interest in engineering studies and needed a shed in which to store its equipment and conduct lessons. That was all to the good.

• 16 Apr 2026 · Armed Forces Bill (Sixth sitting) · Hansard source

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  That being the case, could the Minister place on the record—I hope he will say yes—that it remains the policy of this Government to create new cadet units within educational settings where that is appropriate, and where the headteacher is onside?

• 14 Apr 2026 · Armed Forces Bill (Fourth sitting) · Hansard source

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  This is not a criticism of the Minister, because no doubt he had other important things to do, but he was not on that visit, as I recall. As Her late Majesty once said, recollections may vary, but this was a point raised with us by the people presenting to us on the operation of the system. We did not invent it. They made the point quite strongly that, for instance, if people had been on staff courses together—let us say that they had done the Royal College of Defence Studies course for a year together—that would sometimes rule them out. I must make the point to the Minister that we have not fabricated this; it is a problem that was raised with us by the experts who actually deal with the process day to day.

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

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  For the record, that was the one recommendation in the “Stick or Twist?” report that was not adopted. All the other recommendations were adopted, including spending a lot of money on wraparound childcare because, again, childcare was a very important point for retention. Ben Wallace told me that he used the report to get quite a bit of cash out of the Treasury, so that recommendation about childcare was one that we did manage to get through. For the record, this was the one recommendation that was too much for the system to bear.

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

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  The essence of new clause 7 is that the Government should prepare a feasibility study of the relative merits of introducing a forces housing association, as recommended in the “Stick or Twist?” report, versus continuing with the Defence Housing Service. I apologise to you, Mr Efford, and to members of the Committee: as the new clause relates specifically to that document, I should as a courtesy have sent a copy—or at least a link—to all members of the Committee before this sitting. No disrespect was intended, but perhaps I can atone for that by leaving a copy with the Clerk. If anybody wants to refer to it afterwards, they can go to him. I will explain the background to the report and why I believe its recommendations are powerful. After I left government in 2016, when Theresa May became the new Prime Minister and I somehow did not end up in her Administration, I was commissioned by her as a former Minister—the Minister here today may one day, after he has retired, be commissioned to do something similar—to write a report about military recruitment. It was called “Filling the Ranks” and it took about a year to write; I submitted it in 2017. It covered a range of stuff, including trying to see past very minor medical ailments that were preventing people who desperately wanted to join the forces from doing so. All of the recommendations, bar one, were adopted by the Department and I think they have been worked on over the years, some of them more speedily than others. For the record, the recommendation the Department did not adopt was that I pleaded with it to sack Capita— I nearly called it something else—as the contractor in charge of recruitment. I said in 2017, “Give them a year to fix it and if they don’t, they should go.” Capita did not fix it, and it stayed on. I understand that it was unsuccessful in bidding for the new trial service contract, so maybe it got its come-uppance after all. Some people thought that “Filling the Ranks” was not completely useless, so I was subsequently commissioned to do a report on retention. The reason for that was partly that as soon as we started talking about recruitment, we ended up having a discussion about retention within 15 minutes anyway. As I am sure the Minister, with his experience, will know, there is no point widening the aperture of the recruitment tap, as it were, unless you can put a retention plug in the sink. If they are leaving faster than they are joining, we have a real problem. I had a very good team for the retention report. I place on record my thanks to Brigadier Simon Goldstein, a distinguished reservist who retired from the Army after many years as a brigadier, including in one or two regiments the Minister will be familiar with, and my then researcher, an extremely bright chap called Rory Boden who has now gone to the dark side and works in public affairs. The three of us, I hope, put together a credible document. We called it “Stick or Twist?” because that encapsulates the dilemma that service personnel often face at a particular junction in their career. Do they stick with their military service, or twist and go and do something else? We submitted that report in February 2020. It was commissioned by Theresa May, but by then Boris Johnson was the Prime Minister. We submitted it a month before the country went into lockdown, so it was written in a pre-covid context. The methodology was to make about a dozen visits to military establishments around the country, including Portsmouth for the Royal Navy, Catterick garrison for the Army and Brize Norton for the Royal Air Force. While we were there, we conducted a series of panels—I suppose one might call them focus groups—with warrant officers, senior non-commissioned officers, junior ranks and partners thereof. We tried to get four different perspectives on the challenges facing retention in the armed forces. It was very interesting to see how different ranks sometimes saw issues differently. One quote struck us so much that we stuck it on the cover. This was under a Conservative Government—I have been called many things down the years, but never a toady. The quote relates to accommodation and came from an interview at Brize Norton with a Royal Air Force corporal: “We had an Air Vice Marshal visit us a few months ago to give us all a pep talk about how what we were doing was extremely important to Defence and how the nation greatly valued our contribution to National Security. While I was standing at the back, I couldn’t help thinking, well Sir, if that’s true, why are my kids showering in cold water—yet again?” We put that on the front page of the report—on its face, as it were—because we thought it encapsulated the problem. I encourage hon. Members at least to have a glance at the report if they have a spare minute, but I realise they all live very busy lives. One thing that came out of the report was that when people leave the armed forces—when they decide to twist—it is often for a combination of reasons. We gave the example of an Army corporal having a kitchen table conversation with his wife when their kids have gone to bed. He has been offered promotion, and he says, “Should I stick or twist?” They go through factor by factor: his likelihood for promotion, her likelihood of promotion in a civilian career, the education of their children—in this scenario, they have an education, health and care plan, so if they move, they might lose that—care for an elderly relative and availability of medical support. In the end, they come to an amalgamated decision about whether to carry on. We learned from the focus groups that this sort of stuff goes on all the time. We were trying to reflect what the Minister would call ground truth. Sometimes there was just one thing—the straw that breaks the camel’s back. In some cases, it was that the partner in the services had been away on an unaccompanied tour and there had been failures with housing provision, and that did it. To give a completely contrary example, a captain in an armoured unit down on Salisbury plain said that he left because he had been looking forward for months to being the best man at his old university friend’s wedding, but he was picked up on a trawl and told that he had to be a watchkeeper in the British Army Training Unit Suffield. He pleaded with his CO. He wrote a letter to the brigadier, but the brigadier was unsympathetic. The captain missed his best mate’s wedding. He said, “I was sat there with a laptop at 2 o’clock in the morning in the middle of BATUS”—this was some years ago, remember—“reading a cheap novel, when I could have been at my friend’s wedding.” So he came back from Canada and told the Army to stuff it. To my mind, such brainless decisions can bring very promising military careers to an end. When my team and I looked at the housing issue, I looked at the history of the Defence Infrastructure Organisation, which at that time, it has to be said, was not coming in for a lot of praise. In fairness to the DIO—I want to put this on record—it was created in 2010 in something of a shotgun marriage between up to 24 different entities. The old Defence Estates and lots of attachments and detachments, to use military language, were thrown together to create the DIO. In 2012, when I came in and asked to visit the DIO’s headquarters, I was asked, “Which one do you want to visit, Minister?” I said, “What do you mean? There can be only one.” “No, sir. There are six.” We eventually decided that the principal headquarters was in Sutton Coldfield, but that gives some idea of how long it took that organisation to settle down. It was not given an abundance of resources with which to complete its task. In fairness to the DIO, which has come in for a lot of stick down the years, not least from me, it was set up in challenging circumstances and has had a difficult job to do for many years. If anyone from the DIO is listening, I hope they can appreciate the spirit of what I am trying to say. We found very clear themes from the focus groups. The partners definitely wanted the patch managers back—I have gone on about it because that is what they kept telling us everywhere we went. Some of the junior ranks in single living accommodation wanted to have slightly better conditions, but some of them at least accepted that, while their conditions may not have been great, they paid virtually no rent for them. Bluntly, at the age of 19, they were slightly more concerned about having a bit of spare cash for Friday and Saturday night than they were about their rent, but that does not mean they do not deserve to live in good accommodation. So we got a variety of feedback. Based on the DIO at the time, we came up with an alternative solution that we called a forces housing association. The rationale for it was to create a specific bespoke entity with the sole purpose—as established in its articles of association—to provide high-quality housing for armed forces personnel and their families while providing value for money, both for those families and for the taxpayer. The Minister will know that such an entity could be a retention aid because people often pay well below the market rate for a property that would cost them a lot more to rent in the civilian world. In some cases, service personnel value that, and in some cases it is one of the reasons they stick rather than twist, so it can work two ways. The idea is to create a bespoke housing association, chaired by a Minister and bringing in external expertise from the social rented sector.

• 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 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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  I accept the hon. Lady’s point, but in effect the EHCP relates to the child, and the parents have to fight the system to get it. I am very happy to take her advice on board if I bring the amendment back on Report. Nevertheless—this is why I have placed an emphasis on budgets—the cost of SEN still places a significant in-year pressure on local authorities that are trying to set realistic budgets. Of course, there is the related issue that many Committee members will be familiar with—the cost of home-to-school transport for SEN children, some of whom are driven from home to school, in some cases over quite long distances, often effectively in taxis provided by the local authority. Amendment 11 relates specifically to the portability of EHCPs, but it is important to understand that in the February 2026 White Paper, the Government delineated three tiers of SEN support, which I will briefly summarise. The first or lower tier is targeted support. That is defined as providing targeted support in the child’s education setting, which is set out in an individual support plan—an ISP, as opposed to an EHCP. That could include small group interventions to develop language skills or pre-teaching key vocabulary to help access the curriculum. The second tier is targeted plus, through which support from the setting will have input from education and health professionals, and may include access to a support base. That will involve time-limited support in an alternative provision or specialist setting. The third and highest tier is specialist support, where support is provided through an EHCP, whether in a mainstream or specialist setting. It may also be provided through a specialist base at this level. Once reforms are completed, EHCPs will be provided only at this level of support. In other words, they will be more difficult to get. According to the White Paper, these layers will be guided by national inclusion standards to be developed in the coming years, which will set out what the layers should look like in practice. Again, as so often, we await further Government guidance. I have deliberately gone into this level of detail because, at the moment, the amendment is drafted only to include EHCPs. To be clear, it is my intention today to deal with this effectively as a probing amendment to promote debate. Depending on the Committee’s reaction, I would like to bring back a refined amendment for discussion in Committee of the whole House or on Report. I am signalling in advance that I might withdraw the amendment today and tweak it to bring in those other levels of support.

• 26 Jan 2026 · Armed Forces Bill · Hansard source

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  I want to make a bit of progress, but perhaps later if I have time. Turning to housing, I should declare a different interest, as this was an area I cared about very much when I served as an MOD Minister. When I left ministerial office in 2016, the then Prime Minister Theresa May commissioned me and a small team to write a report about military recruitment, including terms of service such as service housing. We eventually entitled it “Filling the Ranks”, and it was submitted to the Prime Minister, with a copy to the Defence Secretary, in 2017. The report made 20 recommendations for improving recruitment, ranging from better advertising and further expansion of cadet units through to taking a more realistic approach to minor medical ailments such as mild eczema and temporary childhood asthma. Nineteen of the recommendations were accepted and actioned, to varying degrees, but unfortunately the one that was not was to consider sacking Capita—or according to Private Eye “Crapita”. Unfortunately, I never managed to persuade our Ministers to do that, despite the company’s truly awful record on Army recruitment. The peer review of “Filling the Ranks” was positive. However, as we were making visits to military establishments and interviewing everyone from privates to very senior officers, including on many of the issues contained in the Bill, in nearly every case within 15 minutes of talking about recruitment, we found ourselves involved in a related conversation about retention. In simple terms, we learned very quickly that there was no point widening the aperture of the recruitment tap if we could not put a retention plug in the sink. We were, therefore, delighted to be recommissioned to undertake a second report specifically into retention, which we subsequently entitled “Stick or Twist?”, as we thought that that encapsulated the serviceman’s dilemma, and which was eventually submitted to the new Prime Minister—one Boris Johnson—in February 2020, a month before the country went into lockdown. This report touched on a number of facets of the armed forces covenant, which are also part of the Bill. I have copies of both reports here with me. Quite a few of the recommendations in “Stick or Twist?” were adopted, and the then Defence Secretary Ben Wallace used it to persuade the Treasury to provide some extra tens of millions of pounds to improve childcare facilities at a number of bases around the country. It was worth doing the report if only for that. I should like to pay tribute to the small team that helped me to compile the two reports: Colonel—now Brigadier—Simon Goldstein, himself a former distinguished reservist; and my two researchers Mrs Sophie Doward-Jones and Mr Rory Boden, who worked tirelessly to produce two documents written in a Select Committee style, with all the work that that entails, for the attention of the Prime Minister and Defence Secretary. Again, however, the most controversial suggestion in “Stick or Twist?” was not adopted. It was a proposal to form a forces housing association and thus bring in expertise from the registered social landlord sector to better manage service families accommodation—SFA. Frankly, at the time this was simply too much for the vested interests in the MOD’s Defence Infrastructure Organisation to accept. Nevertheless, I was delighted that my hon. Friend the Member for South Suffolk (James Cartlidge), the shadow Defence Secretary, announced a few months ago our intention to introduce such a body if we return to government. The Armed Forces Bill has much to say on this topic—as indeed have many Members this evening—especially in clause 3, which heralds the creation of a defence housing service. This is conceptually similar in some ways to what was first recommended in “Stick or Twist?” six years ago, but with some important differences. I genuinely look forward to debating the respective merits of the two approaches with the Minister in Committee. The Bill also touches on the issue of the armed forces covenant, which is a matter that we have discussed in this House on many occasions. In essence, the intention is to spread the authority of the covenant to cover other Government Departments, including Education and the NHS. We have a number of suggestions for how this process might be improved—for instance, in special needs education, which we hope to explore in Committee. I would like to pay tribute to the hon. Member for Birmingham Edgbaston (Preet Kaur Gill) for what she said about the Queen Elizabeth hospital in Birmingham. I had the privilege of visiting the military unit there on two occasions—once in the company of His Royal Highness, the then Prince of Wales, now His Majesty the King—and I echo everything she said about the excellence of that department at that hospital in caring for those who have served their country. The Bill goes into some detail about potential improvements in the service justice system. This touches in part on a number of quite sensitive areas, not least those highlighted by my former Defence Committee colleague Sarah Atherton in what became known as the Atherton report. We shall again attempt to explore the merits and details of those proposals in Committee. Before I conclude, I want to refer to the remarks of President Trump about the brave soldiers who fought alongside the United States and other allies in Afghanistan. Would that he had not said such things, especially as our troops also fought with the Americans in Iraq and in the caves of Bora Bora in 2001 after the United States invoked article 5 after 9/11—the only nation ever to do that. We traditionally avoid discussing royal matters in this House, but if it is true that President Trump’s volte face on this was in some way due to royal intervention, all I can say is: God save the King. We should endeavour to take a broadly positive attitude to the Bill, but I must caution that there are two areas where the traditional consensus might struggle. First, the Government claim to be fully committed to the two principles of the armed forces covenant—namely, that no members of the wider armed forces family, be they regulars, reservists, veterans or their loved ones, should suffer any disadvantage as a result of their military service, and that special treatment may in some cases be appropriate, especially for the wounded or bereaved. All that rings hollow, however, when we see what the Government are currently doing to our brave Northern Ireland veterans—a matter we were debating in the House just last Wednesday evening over Labour’s remedial order to undermine the Conservative legacy Act, which protects our veterans. Over 100 Labour MPs failed to back that order on the night, including, interestingly, the Prime Minister himself, who abstained, as did over half the Cabinet, including the Defence Secretary and even the Armed Forces Minister. The Government have performed 13 U-turns in the past few months alone, and we very much hope for a 14th U-turn over two-tier justice and facilitating lawfare, especially against our own vital special forces, allowing our brave Northern Ireland veterans to live out their lives in peace instead.

• 11 Nov 2025 · Remembrance Day: Armed Forces · Hansard source

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  I completely agree with my right hon. and gallant Friend—the history of the 14th Army is a proud one. It was a marvellous amalgam, under a brilliant leader, of people from countries and races from around the entire Commonwealth who fought with one common aim: freedom. They were sometimes called the forgotten army, but they are not forgotten tonight. After the horrors of the trenches and an understandable aversion to war in the 1920s, with Britain exhausted—both financially and emotionally—by the horrors of the great war, the Government of the day introduced what came to be known as the 10-year rule. This was not just the policy of the War Office or the Admiralty, as they then were; it was a pan-Whitehall edict, the essence of which was that Britain would not have to fight another major war for at least 10 years. This key planning assumption became the centrepiece of British strategic theory and, with strong endorsement from the Treasury, the 10-year rule soon became a rolling one, extended on an annual basis. Given that no war was expected for at least a decade, this allowed for major economies in the financing of the armed forces and an associated running-down of all three services. As one example of how seriously the 10-year rule was taken and implemented, even Winston Churchill during his time as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1920s exerted pressure to cut back on his beloved Royal Navy—the same service he had fought tenaciously to expand as First Lord of the Admiralty barely a decade before. Indeed, as a mood of pacifism gripped the nation, in 1933—the same year in which Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany—the earnest students of the Oxford Union, who are having their own problems at the moment, passed a motion by a majority of over two to one that “this House will under no circumstances fight for its King and country”. The subsequent policy of appeasement from the 1930s British establishment—the blob of their day—was as erroneous then as it would be today. Authoritarian dictators tend to admire strength, particularly their own, and despise weakness—a lesson that any British Government, including this one, would do well to remember. History tells us again and again that the appeasement of dictators does not work, just as it failed to work in the 1930s The 10-year rule, which by that stage had lasted well over a decade, was eventually rescinded in 1935-36 as Britain began to rearm in response to Hitler’s increasingly bellicose behaviour. Nevertheless, that rearmament, and comparable action by our allies, was ultimately insufficient to deter what then became the second world war—a brutal conflict in which over 50 million people died, far more even than had perished in the supposed war to end all wars some two decades before. I mention all this not just because I studied history and then military history at university, but because if—as Members of this House believe, and as I have always believed—the ultimate goal of our armed forces is to save lives by deterring war and persuading any potential aggressor that they could not prevail, then even today we all need to ask ourselves, regardless of party, whether we are doing enough to secure the peace by maintaining sufficiently strong armed forces to provide such a vital deterrent effect. It is a historical fact that twice in the last century, this country paid an immense cost in both blood and treasure to defeat militarism. Today, the threats are somewhat different, with a war on our doorstep in Europe following Russia’s barbaric and illegal invasion of Ukraine. The Ukrainians are in effect now fighting for our freedom too, and we must back them to the hilt as a result. We also see a major rearmament by China; North Korea continues to develop even longer-range intercontinental ballistic missiles, now with support from Russia; and Iran continues to exert malign influence across the middle east, even after the successful American strike on its emerging nuclear capabilities. The circumstances may have changed, but the principle remains exactly the same. We in the western democracies cannot drop our guard against the growing powers of the 21st-century autocracies—something that those who fought in the second world war would instinctively understand only too well. Bearing in mind the Minister’s caution, I was genuinely concerned to read one passage of the Government’s recent strategic defence review—its seminal defence policy document. On page 43, under the heading “Transforming UK Warfighting”, it states: “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.” I say to the Minister in all sincerity that that seems to contain an echo of the 10-year rule of the 1920s. While there was a great deal of good in the SDR, not least the intention to speed up our highly bureaucratic procurement system—about which I have always held firm views, as the Minister knows—I nevertheless worry, given increasing threats from Russia and now also from China, about whether the Ministry of Defence today displays the genuine sense of urgency that is required to meet the challenges we now all clearly face. Before I am accused of selective quoting, the same paragraph of the SDR goes on to say: “This vision could be achieved more quickly should circumstances demand it and should more resources be made available.” Notwithstanding those words, with much of the new money in the SDR unavailable for at least two years and a multibillion-pound programme of in-year efficiency savings now under way, I merely ask whether we have really learned the lessons of the past century as well as we might have. In conclusion, we in these islands have always ultimately been prepared to make great sacrifices to uphold the freedom of Europe, and indeed of the wider world. That is why, given our history, we should never forget that the first duty of Government remains the defence of the realm. In response to the philosopher Edmund Burke’s famous challenge that all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing, twice in the past century our own good men and women across the nation stood up to and defeated such evil, with our armed forces in the lead. Rightfully, we solemnly remember that sacrifice each and every November, including in this House tonight.

• 10 Jul 2025 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  May I join the tributes to Lord Tebbit? He was a political giant in his day and far more capable than the “Spitting Image” puppet ever gave him credit for. May we have a debate in Government time on emerging proposals to cancel education, health and care plans? I say in all sincerity to the Leader of the House that we all know from our constituency work that the special educational needs system is broken and needs reform, but abolishing EHCPs would only lead to a backlash from angry parents and probably a major Back-Bench rebellion. Whatever her Government are going to do, please, in all seriousness, don’t do that.