Mike Martin MP: speeches

Speeches

• 1 Sept 2026 · Local Authorities: Aluminium Recycling · Hansard source

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  As a Kent MP, I am consistently amazed at how rubbish the Reform leadership of Kent county council is, but of particular note is the fact that when Reform came in, Kent was going to be the flagship for its DOGE, which is about saving loads of money. Does my hon. Friend know whether the council got on to that and renegotiated the contract? Are there any other options? Did it look into this? Can she tell me more about her interactions with Kent county council?

• 15 Jul 2026 · National Energy System Operator: Blackout Risk · Hansard source

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  I am curious about this mantra that there have not been any blackouts. Over the past six months, businesses in the St John’s area of Tunbridge Wells have complained of blackouts. I surveyed my constituents who live in the area, and 60% said that they had experienced some blackouts—not long-term ones, but intermittent blackouts. Will the Government engage with me on this issue and give my constituents some guarantees that the situation will improve?

• 14 Jul 2026 · Future of Thames Water · Hansard source

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  We have a similar problem with South East Water, which is probably the second-worst water company in the United Kingdom after Thames Water. With South East Water, too, this Labour Government have been too timid. Does my hon. Friend agree that the Government, by acting, or not acting, in the way that they are, they are privileging shareholders over consumers?

• 14 Jul 2026 · Future of Thames Water · Hansard source

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  Does the Minister think that the Secretary of State exercised those duties well when, under the Blair Government, Macquarie was allowed to come into Thames Water and South East Water and asset strip those companies?

• 14 Jul 2026 · Extreme Heat: Preparedness · Hansard source

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  Might the Minister comment briefly on the Government’s approach to water? In the recent heatwaves, South East Water reported that water usage went up by 15% because people were taking extra showers and so on. She will know that South East Water has had huge problems with resilience in the network; that pushed it right to the brink. What are the Government doing to get a grip on this so that we build in resilience to areas such as Kent, which will be in a water deficit by the end of 2027?

• 14 Jul 2026 · Public Office (Accountability) Bill · Hansard source

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  We actually have examples of water companies lying. We had South East Water coming to the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee in January and giving false evidence—so much so that the Chair considered bringing it back for being in contempt of Parliament.

• 13 Jul 2026 · Local Government Reorganisation · Hansard source

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  There are a number of options on the table for Kent, and no matter which one the Minister chooses, we will need to do some tidying up of ward and division boundaries, because there are vast disparities between the number of electors and some of the current county council boundaries. Will that be announced alongside the option chosen on Thursday, and if not, when will that information be given?

• 13 Jul 2026 · Immigration and Asylum Bill · Hansard source

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  Will the right hon. and learned Lady give way?

• 13 Jul 2026 · Immigration and Asylum Bill · Hansard source

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  The right hon. and learned Lady advocates leaving the ECHR. I assume that is after a process of analysis, so could she tell the House two good things that the ECHR does for British citizens?

• 8 Jul 2026 · European Entry and Exit System · Hansard source

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  I thank the Minister for all his efforts in trying to sort out a Tory mess. As a fellow Kent MP, I like and greatly respect the right hon. Member for Herne Bay and Sandwich (Sir Roger Gale), but is it not a bit cheeky to ask the Government of the day to sort out the mess that the Conservatives voted for? Will the Minister ask the Conservative party to respond with regard to creating the problem that he is having to sort out?

• 8 Jul 2026 · Rearmament and Warfighting Readiness · Hansard source

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  I will make some progress because I am having eyes made at me by Madam Deputy Speaker. The DIP commits £8.6 billion to the global combat air programme, which is the sixth-generation fighter jet that we are building with Italy and Japan. Realistically, we will get the jets in service sometime after 2040. They are manned fighter jets. I ask hon. Members to cast their minds forward to beyond Putin’s death—he will probably be buried by that point—and ask themselves whether, in 2040, humans will be flying fighter jets. I think the answer is no. The Minister is a former pilot, so he will always argue for humans in fighter jets, but I will present my argument. When we dig into GCAP, we find that it is a crewed rather than an uncrewed system because that is what our Japanese partners wanted.

• 8 Jul 2026 · Rearmament and Warfighting Readiness · Hansard source

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  All I will say is that the defence of the realm is the most serious issue for any Government.

• 8 Jul 2026 · Rearmament and Warfighting Readiness · Hansard source

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  The original sin is divorcing the strategic defence review from the DIP—divorcing the vision from the resources. For the past year, the Department has been arguing first with itself about whether it can downgrade some of the things in the strategic defence review—there are a couple of instances where that has happened, which I will come on to—and then with the Treasury to get more money to fill the gap. Effectively, it wrote a vision that was far too grand for the money that was ever going to be available. Let me turn from the money to the metal and have a look at some of the capabilities. I could give a very long speech on military analysis about which capabilities should be in or out, but I will not do that. I think it would test— [ Interruption. ] I know that right hon. and hon. Members would like me to do that; perhaps I will set up a Substack or something. Let us look at the Royal Navy—the senior service. At the turn of this century—as someone born in 1982, I still feel weird saying that—the UK had 20 frigates. By the end of this year, we will have five. Pre-DIP, they were scheduled to go out of service in 2035. In a little-noticed line in the DIP, we are bringing forward that date. All five frigates, which have well exceeded their service date, are going in 2033. Their replacements, the Type 26s and the Type 23s, will come into service—you guessed it—in 2030-35. We therefore have old ships retiring on a fixed schedule and new ships coming in on an unfunded one. My back-of-a-fag-packet maths—probably the same quality of analysis goes into the MOD under this Government—shows that we will have three frigates in 2030, the year, according to our intelligence assessments, of maximum Russian threat against NATO. We need a frigate to protect our cables, another to get the carrier group out to sea, and another for our deterrent. According to the rule of three—for every three ships, we have only one at sea at any one time—that is nine frigates. If anything kicks off in the middle east or anywhere else, there is no contingency plan. We can see straightaway that there is a huge gap—the frigate gap, as many call it—and the DIP has made it much worse. The picture with our current Type 45 destroyers and their replacements is not much better. Our Type 45s primarily provide air defence. One was parked in the Thames estuary to defend the Olympics in 2012 because we do not have any other air defence. They go out of service from 2035. Their replacements are supposed to be crewed common combat vessels such as mother ships. Various autonomous ships, which provide missiles, sensors or underwater and above-water support, are meant to be arranged around them. A whole fleet of different ships is therefore meant to replace the destroyers and some other elements of our Navy. That is the hybrid Navy that was much touted last week in the media coverage of the DIP. I am totally in favour of moving towards autonomy as fast as we can. However, it is worth saying that the maritime domain, particularly the High North, is the most difficult in which to do autonomy. I have spent a lot of time at sea and I can tell hon. Members that everything breaks all the time. There is a reason why the maritime domain is the last to be autonomised. We started with air because that is predictable and quite easy to do, although the aircraft still do not fly in bad weather. We then moved to the ground stuff for picking up casualties and dropping off ammunition. However, the new ships—the common combat vessels—are simply PowerPoints at the moment, yet we expect to move from PowerPoints to power projection on the high seas in nine years with not just one class, but several classes of ships that have to work together. That seems quite risky to me. If we take what is happening to the frigate fleet and what is happening to the destroyer fleet together, it is fair to say that the DIP spells the end of the Royal Navy as we know it.

• 8 Jul 2026 · Rearmament and Warfighting Readiness · Hansard source

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  I will give way to the former Minister.

• 8 Jul 2026 · Rearmament and Warfighting Readiness · Hansard source

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  I am afraid that I will not because I want to make progress. We are privileging a good diplomatic relationship, which would weather the storm of our pulling out of GCAP, over military capability. We must consider whether we want manned fighter jets in 2040 or a Royal Navy right now. Do we want frigates and destroyers in the next four years? Do we want to transition effectively, in a funded way, to a hybrid Navy, or manned fighter jets in 2040? The same story is repeated wherever we look: deep precision strike missiles are due in the early 2030s; nuclear-enabled F-35As are due in the early 2030s; putting 76,000 soldiers in the British Army to reverse the Tory cuts is an investment through to 2035. [Interruption.] I know that hon. Members were waiting for that—I had to get one little elbow in the ribs. Time and again, the capability that the threat demands by 2030 is scheduled for after 2030, funded by a spending review that has not happened and has been signed off by no one. That leaves one final question: does the current Prime Minister believe his own threat assessment? If he does and he is not funding it—not putting his money, or our money, where his mouth is—that is highly negligent. Perhaps he does not believe his own intelligence chiefs’ assessments and those of his partners. In that case, he should tell us. I fear that future generations will look back at this Labour Government’s approach to defence with their heads in their hands.

• 8 Jul 2026 · Rearmament and Warfighting Readiness · Hansard source

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  I beg to move, That this House recognises the danger that Russia’s renewed illegal invasion of Ukraine poses to European and British security; further recognises the threat to the international order and the UK posed by China; also recognises the increasing uncertainty surrounding the reliability of the US as an ally within NATO; acknowledges the current shortfalls in the UK’s ability to deploy a credible fighting force; further acknowledges that this lack of military capability is resulting in the coercion of Britain and its interests in the international sphere; and calls on the Government to begin a programme of rapid rearmament to strengthen the defence of the UK and its allies. The key word of the motion on the Order Paper today is “rapid”—rapid rearmament, not eventual rearmament or rearmament with an asterisk. The reason it is the key word is that the clock is not ours to choose. Three weeks ago, before the defence investment plan came out, the Prime Minister said: “it is our intelligence assessment, and the assessment of other countries in NATO, that there could be an attack by Russia on NATO as soon as 2030.” The deadline is not contested. Intelligence confirms it, NATO proclaims it—they are speaking of this in Ankara today—and our Government accept it. We must be ready by 2030. That is why the defence investment plan is so maddening. I have read it from cover to cover—I am that kind of guy—and I cannot wrap my head around it. It fails the test of its own threat assessment. It does not go far enough, and what it does do, it does too slowly. Large parts of it are also unfunded. It is too little, too late, and there is not enough cash. It is worth considering how this plan came into being. Lord Robertson, the lead author of the strategic defence review, wanted to have the DIP—that is, the money bit—as an annexe to the SDR. That is really good practice when making strategy: set out a vision, which is the SDR, and then set out the resources, which are the DIP. If a Government do not have the resources to deliver their vision, they need either to downgrade the vision somewhat or to increase their resources. The decoupling of the two documents by a year, with the vision coming a year ago in the SDR, and the money and resources just recently in the DIP, is the greatest failure of statecraft committed by this Labour Government in the two years they have been in office. First, allow me to speak about the money in some detail. Quite well ventilated in the media is the £4.7 billion that quite blatantly must be found in the next Budget, in the autumn. Although the right hon. Member for Makerfield (Andy Burnham) has said that he intends to fund defence seriously, he has not specifically said that he will find those sums in that Budget. As the Government repeatedly tell us, defence of the realm is the most important duty of any Government. So why is £5 billion of that sacred duty in the in-tray of the next Chancellor—a person unknown at this point? Secondly, I would like to talk about these efficiency savings—£10.7 billion of them. Speaking in this Chamber, the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, the hon. Member for North Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown), called this the oldest accounting trick in the book. If we dig just one layer below, we can see the detail: £2.4 billion of that £10.7 billion is what the Ministry of Defence calls “high maturity initiatives”. I find that it is always worth really looking into what the MOD says, because the remaining £8.4 billion of that nearly £11 billion of efficiency savings is what the MOD calls “plans at lower maturity”. Lower-maturity plans, Madam Deputy Speaker, is MOD-speak for “we have not worked out how to deliver those savings yet.” Thirdly, and most egregiously, is a theme that I will keep returning to: the fact that this is a DIP of two halves. The first period is from now until 2030, which is covered by the current spending review, subject to the caveats that I laid out earlier. However, the second part, which covers 2030 to 2035, has to be confirmed in the forthcoming spending review. If the future Chancellor or Prime Minister do not agree to those sums going into the next spending review—due, one assumes, in the spring of 2027—the DIP will then not exist. It will just be an unfunded piece of paper.

• 8 Jul 2026 · Rearmament and Warfighting Readiness · Hansard source

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  I specifically said that I am fully in favour of moving to autonomy as fast as we can. All I questioned was whether we could go from a PowerPoint concept for multiple vessels to their being at sea on operations within nine years. That is all I questioned—not the idea that we need to move to autonomy.

• 8 Jul 2026 · Rearmament and Warfighting Readiness · Hansard source

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  I will not list the constituencies of all the hon. and right hon. Members who have contributed; they know who they are and I thank them very much. Three themes came out of this debate that were interesting and bear repeating. First, we are already in a war and it is happening in different ways and it is happening below the threshold, but the threshold is moving about and we need to think about that. Secondly, there is the point about national resilience, the economy and the industrial base. In an age of drones that get depleted, with a cycle in which the drone model changes every six weeks, it is about how quickly we can build stuff. Nations win wars, and we need our economy to reflect that. Thirdly, we need to trust the public and tell them not just about the threat that we face but about the current state of our armed forces and where they need to get to. Question put and agreed to . Resolved, That this House recognises the danger that Russia’s renewed illegal invasion of Ukraine poses to European and British security; further recognises the threat to the international order and the UK posed by China; also recognises the increasing uncertainty surrounding the reliability of the US as an ally within NATO; acknowledges the current shortfalls in the UK’s ability to deploy a credible fighting force; further acknowledges that this lack of military capability is resulting in the coercion of Britain and its interests in the international sphere; and calls on the Government to begin a programme of rapid rearmament to strengthen the defence of the UK and its allies.

• 8 Jul 2026 · Rearmament and Warfighting Readiness · Hansard source

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  This actually speaks to the delay. Had the DIP come out when it was meant to, in 2025, it would have been a 10-year plan, because it would have gone from 2025 to 2035. However, the Government were unable to get their ducks in a row and the DIP was delayed by a year. If we had waited for them to rejig the plan to go up until 2036, I think we might have waited until 2040 for the plan. This is a DIP of two halves, and the really worrying bit is that most of the investment is in the second half, which is unfunded. Let me give the House some examples. In the air domain there is £27.8 billion before 2030, and £70 billion after—unfunded. In the maritime domain there is £18 billion before 2030, and £32 billion after—unfunded. In the land domain there is £19.2 billion before, and £36 billion after—unfunded. For weapons and munitions there is £11.1 billion before, and £20 billion after—unfunded. It beggars belief. Why bother publishing a plan when, by my calculations, almost two thirds of the investments that the Government seek to make are in the second half, which is unfunded? One of the reasons that we have pulled this plan together is to give certainty to industry, so that they know how to invest.

• 8 Jul 2026 · Rearmament and Warfighting Readiness · Hansard source

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  I think we have all heard stories of firms such as the one in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency, whether in our own constituencies or in the conversations we have as Members of Parliament who are interested in defence. It has been catastrophic for British industry, and rushing out an unfunded DIP, which is effectively what this is, has not helped. It has meant that some small capital investments, one third of the total pot for the next four years, can be made by firms. However, for anything that stretches beyond 2030, nobody can be sure enough to make that investment.

• 8 Jul 2026 · Rearmament and Warfighting Readiness · Hansard source

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  I agree with everything that the hon. Member has just said, and I thank him. However, all I am highlighting is that, on past performance, going from PowerPoints to ships at sea in nine years with several classes of ship seems extremely risky. Moreover, the DIP sets aside only £1.3 billion in the first funded period to set up those ships. The remainder of the investment falls beyond 2030. I want to move to autonomy because it is the right thing to do, but that seems like an incredibly risky bet.

• 7 Jul 2026 · Water Supply Resilience in Tunbridge Wells · Hansard source

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  I rise to present this petition regarding water supply resilience in Tunbridge Wells. This is further to a local petition on the same matter started by the fantastic students at St John’s primary school, which has gathered 610 signatures—children’s signatures—and has since been shared with 15 other local primary schools. Tunbridge Wells recently experienced two severe water outages due to failures in South East Water’s network. The outages caused significant hardship and forced 23 schools to close over many days, which deprived children of valuable learning time. The petitioners request “that the House of Commons urges the Government to take into account the concerns of the petitioners and take immediate action to require South East Water to improve the resilience of its network in Tunbridge Wells, so that families and pupils do not again face a prolonged period without access to clean running water.” Following is the full text of the petition: [The petition of residents of the constituency of Tunbridge Wells in Kent, Declares that a local petition by pupils of sixteen primary schools calling on the Government to require South East Water to improve their water network in Tunbridge Wells has generated a lot of interest; notes that Tunbridge Wells recently experienced two severe water outages as a result of failures in South East Water’s network; further declares that these outages caused significant hardship and that 23 schools were forced to close, depriving children of valuable learning time; and further declares that access to clean running water is a basic necessity, and that South East Water must take urgent action to improve the resilience of its network to prevent such failures from recurring. The petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urges the Government to take into account the concerns of the petitioners and take immediate action to require South East Water to improve the resilience of its network in Tunbridge Wells, so that families and pupils do not again face prolonged periods without access to clean running water. And the petitioners remain, etc.] [P003216]

• 6 Jul 2026 · High North · Hansard source

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  Protecting British interests in the High North requires a strong Royal Navy. Under the current DIP, the Type 45s will go out of service in 2035 and be replaced by some CCVs and other uncrewed systems that currently exist only on PowerPoint. The idea that it will be nine years from PowerPoint to power projection stretches credibility somewhat, so will the Minister stake her personal credibility on confirming that these systems will be delivered on time and that we will not have a gap in our air defences in the High North?