Oral Answers to Questions

Christian Matheson Excerpts

Monday 23rd April 2018 Commons Chamber

[Gavin Williamson]

I thank my colleagues who have campaigned so hard to highlight the fact that 70% of service personnel based in Scotland will be worse off as a result of the Scottish Government’s “Nat tax”, which they are placing on our brave service personnel. We hope to be able to report back on the conclusions to that in the next six weeks. We do not want anyone who serves in our armed forces to be worse off as a result of the taxes being placed on them by the SNP.

[Christian Matheson (City of Chester) (Lab)]

Has the Secretary of State had a chance to review the misguided policy of his predecessor to close the Dale barracks in Chester, which has only recently been refurbished and enjoys high satisfaction rates among the soldiers stationed there and their families?

[Mr Ellwood]

The hon. Gentleman will be aware that there is a tough rationalisation programme going on. The MOD owns 2% of the UK, which is more land than we need, and there is a requirement for us to build housing on it as well. We are having to take some very tough decisions in certain areas that hon. Members will be concerned about. I am more than happy to meet the hon. Gentleman to discuss his case one-to-one.

Oral Answers to Questions

Christian Matheson Excerpts

Monday 15th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Guto Bebb]

The Crowsnest project will deliver instructor and initial crew training in 2019, and it will be operational from mid-2020 to support the initial operating capability for HMS Queen Elizabeth. We are on track for Crowsnest to enter service, and I thank Thales—a key subcontractor —for its positive engagement and its collaborative approach to supporting this vital Royal Navy project.

[Christian Matheson (City of Chester) (Lab)]

T8. When my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton (Dan Carden) pointed out that 20% of our defence procurement budget is spent in the United States, the Secretary of State replied by suggesting that we were selling lots of big contracts to the USA. Will he say what they are?

[Gavin Williamson]

Just the other week I was learning about all the things that we do in terms of supporting the United States through the F-35 project. United Technologies Corporation, which employs more than 2,000 people near my constituency, is applying the actuators, as is Moog, another American company that employs a British workforce. We are making sure that we are an absolutely pivotal part of the supply chain for this important project that will generate many thousands of jobs.

Oral Answers to Questions

Christian Matheson Excerpts

Monday 13th March 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mark Lancaster]

My hon. Friend makes a valuable point. The point at which spouses are overseas on deployment is absolutely the time when we must focus on offering support to their families. I will look very carefully at what he says.

[Christian Matheson (City of Chester) (Lab)]

Does the Minister agree that quality accommodation is central to satisfaction and retention rates, and does he therefore also agree that, having invested a large amount in service accommodation at Dale barracks in Chester, it would be a false economy to now close those barracks?

A Better Defence Estate Strategy

Christian Matheson Excerpts

Tuesday 21st February 2017 Westminster Hall

[Christian Matheson (City of Chester) (Lab)]

What a great pleasure it is to see you in the Chair, Mr Rosindell. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Mrs Grant) for leading the debate. I have found the Minister who is here today to be a listening Minister. He has engaged with me as much as I have engaged with him, and I am grateful for that.

I wish to speak about the situation in Chester, at Dale barracks. Some 2,000 years ago, a bunch of Romans came along and set up a camp—a castrum—in what was to become my city. The castrum gave its name to Chester, which has been a garrison town ever since Æthelfrith defeated the Welsh at the battle of Chester—apologies to my hon. Friend the Member for Caerphilly (Wayne David), who is on the Opposition Front Bench. The first Earl of Chester built a chain of castles around Chester castle in 1071. We have a history that goes right through the second world war, when we had RAF Sealand—still in place today—and the headquarters of the Western Command. That history is very much part of the city’s DNA, and we are proud of it. We are proud to have those links to the military and to have an Army presence. We have the Westminster Centre for Research and Innovation in Veterans’ Wellbeing at the university, we have a recruitment office in the centre of the city and we have Dale barracks, which is now under threat.

The barracks was traditionally home to the 1st Battalion the Cheshire Regiment, and then the Cheshire merged with the Worcesters and Foresters and the Staffords to form the Mercian, so I understand that things do not stand still in the Army. Things move and things change—we also had the Royal Welsh based there for a while. Although we are not an Aldershot, a Catterick or a Colchester, we are a military city and proud of it. There are advantages to that. Chester is an attractive place to live, and so many of my constituents are former servicemen and women and their families who have made their home in the area. Schools in the Upton area are set up to cater for children facing the disruption of military life, for example when their parents are sent away on duty at short notice. Personnel retention rates in Chester are therefore much higher than elsewhere, because families are happier and there is less pressure on the servicemen and women themselves. Closing the barracks may well be a saving in the short term, but it would be a false economy.

The super-garrison structure in the south-west of England is part of the Ministry of Defence’s investment of more than £800 million in infrastructure in the Salisbury plain area, with a similar development proposed for the north-east, but super-garrisons do not cater for where troops are recruited from, and we have a high recruitment rate in the north-west. The net effect is that service personnel—in the Army in particular—find themselves bouncing around the country on Friday evenings and Sunday afternoons trying to get home or back from work. I know of one former officer living in Chester who spent two years driving up and down to Sandhurst. He described being so far away from family as a reason why people might leave the Army. The hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald referred to that. The armed forces attempt to post service personnel close to their home town during their final years in the Army to help their and their families’ transition, and closing the Dale will further reduce that option for those from Chester and the north-west, which, again, will have a negative impact on retention rates.

I ask the Minister whether all options have been exhausted regarding the utility of Dale barracks. Could we provide other services and place other units there, perhaps a centre for combat stress and psychological therapy to link in with the work of the university? Can we beef up the presence with cadet forces? The facilities are modern; they were upgraded only in the past 20 years, so it will be a false economy for the Army and the MOD, as well as damaging to the local economy, if we close them simply, I believe, because of the high land values in Chester and move servicemen elsewhere. I am most grateful to the Minister for his time.

Armed Forces Covenant

Christian Matheson Excerpts

Thursday 2nd February 2017 Commons Chamber

[Christian Matheson (City of Chester) (Lab)]

I, too, congratulate the hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Mrs Trevelyan), not just on securing the debate, but on what I thought was an outstanding introduction that revealed the depth of her knowledge and her work on this matter. I was not aware of the all-party parliamentary group before, but I certainly am now, and I pay tribute to her for its work. I hope to deal with some of the issues that she raised.

I welcome the report. With all respect to the hon. Member for North Wiltshire (Mr Gray), who talked about the importance of the serviceman, I want to say something about support for veterans and their families, and, in particular, about service accommodation.

The covenant is, and must surely continue to be, a lifetime guarantee for all those who have served our country, and now is as good a time as any for me to express my gratitude to them for their service. A couple of months ago, it was my great pleasure to open the annual conference of the new Westminster Centre for Research and Innovation in Veterans Wellbeing at the University of Chester. I have to say that, unfortunately, the centre is not named after this place; it is named after the late Duke of Westminster, who was a great supporter of the armed forces. It is led by Colonel Alan Finnegan, formerly of the Royal Army Medical Corps, and it has links with the veterans community and the regional Army brigade headquarters.

When I was at the centre, I recounted the story of something that had happened in Chester early in my term as the city’s Member of Parliament. One of the apparently homeless people who were begging in the streets—one of the regulars in the city centre whom we recognise—had a sign saying that he was an ex-serviceman, ex-Army. That great 21st-century phenomenon, the social media storm, then blew up: people were extremely angry about what they considered to be a crime of impersonation, and even asked for the police to be involved. They were not suggesting that it was a crime of impersonation on the grounds that this gentleman was not really homeless; their anger was prompted by their belief that he was claiming to be an ex-serviceman when in fact he was not. I do not know whether he was or not, but the incident takes us back to what the hon. Member for North Wiltshire said about his constituent in Wootton Bassett, and, indeed, to what was said by my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker).

There is a real sense of pride in the members of our armed services, which is a welcome change from the atmosphere of past years that my hon. Friend described. I believe that, not only in Chester but more widely in the country, members of the armed forces should be able to wear their service as a badge of honour.

[Bob Stewart]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Christian Matheson]

I will always give way to the hon. Gentleman.

[Bob Stewart]

May I remind the House that in the 1970s and 1980s, armed forces personnel were specifically ordered not to wear uniform in public because of the Provisional IRA and other terrorist threats? That is one reason why we did not see people wandering around in uniform.

[Christian Matheson]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for making that point. There is, of course, a terrorist threat today, but I believe that the atmosphere has changed, and changed for the better.

For me, perhaps the most important aspect of that conference was the reminder that, for all our important work on mental and physical health, which was mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling, and about which I shall say more later, most of our service veterans are not needy and suffering, but have benefited greatly from the training, experience and comradeship that service gives them, and are continuing to contribute to our society. Discipline, teamwork, initiative, ingenuity and personal responsibility from a young age are all huge benefits to the community as well as the individual. The report refers to some of the successes of the covenant in business, but I fear that we do not always emphasise sufficiently the contribution of ex-service personnel to society. We must certainly not allow them ever again to be seen as burdens on society.

As my hon. Friend pointed out, there are also health needs to be met. We know that military veterans present with a number of emergent health issues, including depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and obesity. We also know that the number of veterans who enter the judicial system as a result of violence-related crime associated with significant alcohol abuse is larger than the average. It is clear that a considerable amount of money is allocated to schemes involving the armed forces covenant, but the measurable outcomes of such initiatives are less clear. Covenant grants should, when possible, include measurable outcomes in the applications, and, when appropriate—it could perhaps be said that this is a shameless plug for the university in my constituency —the Government might consider using academic partners to shape the way in which valid and reliable information is collected and subsequently reported. I understand that the MOD covenant is looking at this and has invited expressions of interest, and I welcome that.

The hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed devoted a long section of her speech to service families, which are referred to in chapter 8 of the report, which I welcome. The role of the family can sometimes be overlooked—although clearly not today, thanks to her—when seeking to support our forces and veterans. Any stress on a serviceman or woman also has an impact on their family. As she said, one way of addressing this is to ensure that there is as much stability in family life as possible, with welcoming surroundings—and that stability might also be reflected in retention rates.

The hon. Member for North Wiltshire talked about the consensual nature of the debate, but I will now, if I may, depart slightly from that. The Government have decided to sell off the Dale barracks in Chester, which is home to the Mercian Regiment, a successor of the Cheshire Regiment.

[Bob Stewart]

A fine regiment.

[Christian Matheson]

Yes, indeed. The decision is myopic and damaging. It will do nothing to maintain morale among the servicemen and families, and the popularity of the barracks is reflected in the number of service families who stay in the Chester area after leaving the Army.

The local schools are used to dealing with service children. This does not just mean, for example, making an extra effort to welcome and integrate new arrivals, to give as much stability as possible; primary schools in the Upton area of my constituency, where the barracks are based, are skilled at dealing with the pressures on children when their mums or dads are deployed away. I was not aware of the ten-minute rule Bill of the hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed, but this issue is of great importance to three or four schools in that area, and I will now be looking at what support I can give her on that Bill.

Closing the Dale is unpopular and wrong, and I believe that it is being done solely because land values in Chester are high, which means that it can be sold off more easily.

[Bob Stewart]

Speaking as someone who has lived in the Dale barracks—my regiment was based there—I remind the House that the whole barracks was modernised only about 20 years ago, as the hon. Gentleman will know, and was considered then to be a future base for infantry.

[Christian Matheson]

I am most grateful to the hon. and gallant Gentleman, whom I consider a friend. His service in the Cheshire Regiment we should never fail to recognise, and the experience he brings to the House should never be underestimated. The House may wish to know that he is still held in extremely high regard in my constituency.

I do not think the closure of the barracks will assist the Army in its effectiveness and I ask the Government to think again.

I wish to touch briefly on two other issues. The first was mentioned by the right hon. Member for Lagan Valley (Sir Jeffrey M. Donaldson) and concerns Northern Ireland. The criminal investigations into every death there involving the British Army during the troubles are wrong. If evidence of a crime can be presented, it should be investigated, but a blanket inquiry cannot be justified. The hon. Member for Aldershot (Sir Gerald Howarth) talked about a statute of limitations; I do not know about that.

As I have mentioned, many former members of the Cheshire Regiment, which served with distinction in Northern Ireland, are either originally from, or have since settled in, my constituency. Their service should be their honour, and I will defend them. Some of them may be implicated now in the new inquiry. In the specific terms of today’s debate on the armed forces covenant, if the Government have not already done so— if they have, I apologise—will they consider guaranteeing full legal support to any ex-serviceman or woman who is dragged into this unfair mess?

My final point is also about veterans and ex-servicemen. I wish to mention my constituent Ray Tindall, along with John Armstrong, Nick Dunn, Nicholas Simpson, Paul Towers and Billy Irving. They remain incarcerated in a prison in Chennai in India wrongly convicted of a crime they did not commit.

[Kirsten Oswald (East Renfrewshire) (SNP)]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for raising this incredibly important point. Does he agree that, as service veterans, they are owed even more of a duty of care by this UK Government, who should be doing everything possible to get them home, where they belong?

[Christian Matheson]

I certainly agree with the hon. Lady and shall draw my comments to a close on that very theme.

Those people are all are ex-servicemen. Ray was in the Indian ocean with the other men to raise a little bit of money, in his case to grow his business in Chester. I will raise the case of the Chennai Six at every opportunity, because, with the greatest respect to MOD Ministers, I do not believe that our Foreign Office is being vigorous enough in its calls on the Indian Government to release the men. Ray has seen active service in recent conflicts, and if the covenant means anything—to them and to me—it means that we must continue all our efforts to bring him and those other lads home.

Oral Answers to Questions

Christian Matheson Excerpts

Monday 12th September 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mark Lancaster]

I commend my hon. Friend’s tenacity in pursuing this issue. He knows that significant challenges surround the viability of aerodromes and former aerodromes in south Wales for future cadet gliding, but following his persistence and that of the hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon) I am looking to see whether other sites are financially viable. I hope to be able to update them shortly.

[Christian Matheson (City of Chester) (Lab)]

Does the Minister welcome the establishment of veterans’ breakfast clubs up and down the country as a way of providing support from veterans to veterans? Will the Minister ask his officials why these clubs have been denied the right to use the veterans’ logo on their official literature, as the only person who ever turns up to the Chester veterans’ breakfast club who is not a veteran is me?

[Mark Lancaster]

I am a great fan of veterans’ clubs and I have visited several. They are a fantastic thing, which I am keen to encourage, and I am happy to look into the matter the hon. Gentleman raises.