National Armaments Director

Debate between Geoffrey Clifton-Brown and Maria Eagle

Wednesday 25th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Maria Eagle]

What the hon. Gentleman said at the beginning of his speech was very simple, I must say. I understand the point that he has made, although I have not seen the answers to which he has referred, so I shall have to take his point away. I am happy to discuss it with him on another occasion, but I cannot give him an answer today.

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

I deliberately included a little bit about recruitment and retention in my speech. There will, I think, be a tension between the armaments director and the Chief of the Defence Staff over recruitment versus the budget for equipment. It is not possible to suddenly turn on the tap and recruit more people; it takes time. Can the Minister say anything today about when she will start to ramp up that recruitment?

[Maria Eagle]

A great deal of effort is already being made. Both the Minister for Veterans and People and the Minister for the Armed Forces are leading a number of efforts to improve recruitment and retention. As the House will know, in a “flow and stock” situation, it takes time to turn around a long-standing trend, and unfortunately the last Government did not meet the recruitment targets for the armed forces in any one of their 14 years. This is like turning around a supertanker. We have already made some reforms to try to speed up the time that it takes to recruit a young person who wants to join the forces, and that will start to show results in due course.

Nuclear-certified Aircraft Procurement

Debate between Geoffrey Clifton-Brown and Maria Eagle

Wednesday 25th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Maria Eagle]

I cannot say precisely whether any of the 100 companies that are UK-based suppliers on this programme are in my hon. Friend’s constituency or his region—I will have to go away and look it up—but I do know that these procurements spread prosperity around all regions and nations of the UK. That is one great thing about the defence industry: it provides jobs and growth across the UK.

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (North Cotswolds) (Con)]

I welcome the Minister for Defence Procurement’s announcement. This is welcome news for our country. Given that in-service dates for key pieces of military equipment are often later than predicted, has she given any thought to training our pilots in advance of delivery, either on a simulator or by embedding them into a unit that operates these planes around the world, so that we are ready to hit the ground running as soon as they are delivered?

[Maria Eagle]

The hon. Gentleman is correct. Anything that can bring in-service dates forward slightly by planning and training in advance is something that we will be in favour of trying to do. These days it is much more the case that such arrangements are thought of at the same time as the procurement, so I am certain that we will be on to the point that he makes.

Badger Culls (Assessment)

Debate between Geoffrey Clifton-Brown and Maria Eagle

Tuesday 4th November 2014 Westminster Hall

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

That is speculation, but even if it proves to be true, we will need to have a debate over what the target numbers were, and I shall come on to that later in my speech. We will begin after this second year, and certainly in the third year, to be able to analyse some of the results and see what is already known through some anecdotal evidence, which is that some farms that have had TB reactors for six or eight years have, this year, for the first year in those six or eight years, had no reactors. That may be anecdotal evidence, but it begins to point to the fact that the culls are having a beneficial effect.

[Maria Eagle (Garston and Halewood) (Lab)]

Does the hon. Gentleman accept that during the course of the randomised badger culling trial there were 472 new confirmed breakdowns to TB in the proactive culling areas? Would he therefore argue that the culls did not work in those instances?

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

I have great respect for the hon. Lady, but I think she is drawing a false analogy, because the numbers removed in the randomised badger culling trial per square kilometre were considerably lower than the numbers removed per square kilometre in either of these two trials. Let us give the trials a chance—[Interruption]—instead of chuntering about it. These trials are trials—they are exactly that. What we need to do is evaluate the science and see whether it is in favour of the trials or not. I think that would be a constructive way forward.

The cost will rise to £1 billion over the next decade if nothing is done to eradicate TB from our communities. I ask the hon. Lady what her party’s policy is going to be: is she just going to let this disease continue to spiral out of control? Does she want our farmers to continue to slaughter cattle, and does she want to continue to have to pay more taxpayers’ money in compensation? Her public statements so far—I am happy to let her intervene if I am wrong—suggest that she would discontinue the trials, so we will have gone through all the pain, yet we will not have the scientific evidence to be able to evaluate them properly.

[Maria Eagle]

In my view, there is no point in going ahead with a policy that has been shown not to work, as is the case with this one.

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

With great respect to the hon. Lady, it is too early to say. If she will not begin to take some of the anecdotal evidence of people on the ground who have to make their living from farming with cattle, I do not know what else I can say to her. Let us let these trials go ahead and evaluate them. Instead of setting our face against them, let us give them time and see if they work, and then let us hope that we can begin to eradicate this dreadful disease. I repeat what I have just said: this is part of an overall policy to eradicate TB in this country in 25 years. I will allow the hon. Lady to intervene again on me—does she agree with that aim or not?

[Maria Eagle]

Of course I agree with eradicating TB, but I do not see how one does that by pursuing a policy that does not work.

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

Well, that is the hon. Lady’s prejudiced view. She does not know yet whether it will work, because this is a four-year trial.

High Speed Rail (Preparation) Bill

Debate between Geoffrey Clifton-Brown and Maria Eagle

Wednesday 26th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Maria Eagle]

I do not accept the hon. Gentleman’s premise that there will be no benefit to Scotland before the high-speed rail line gets there at some time in the future. It is clear that it will benefit from the project.

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)]

Does the hon. Lady agree that, if we are going to spend this large amount of money on HS2, we should get the maximum benefit from it? At the moment, it is planned to connect HS2 with HS1 only by a rather tortuous single-rail route, but there is a better, double-rail solution available. Would it not make more sense to fully integrate HS1 with HS2?

[Maria Eagle]

I have a great deal of sympathy for the hon. Gentleman’s point. It makes no sense to me at all that passengers from the south-east should have to change trains in north London to reach towns and cities in the midlands, the north and up to Scotland. We do not see this connection as an optional extra that can be delivered in a patch-and-mend way; it needs to be re-thought.