Armed Forces Bill (Second sitting)

Mark Francois Excerpts

Select Committee stage
Tuesday 24th March 2026 Public Bill Committees

During the transition from service to being a veteran, even if everything is marvellous, you will suffer a lack of comradeship. You have extremely tight bonds in the military—the team wins the war, because you will do anything for your comrades—but when you come to civilian life, as the Minister has done more recently than I have, you lose those tight bonds and that sense of belonging. That opens you up to other traumas that perhaps you were managing when you were there with your mates, whether that was moral injury or classic, trauma-induced PTSD. You become a veteran, because you choose to leave the service or your contract comes to an end, and that sense of belonging, which is like a salve, disappears and you are exposed to the traumas you have had.

[Mr Mark Francois (Rayleigh and Wickford) (Con)]

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

[Mike Martin]

The shadow Minister is exactly right. We have used a few metaphors today, including that of mental health as a journey. Another metaphor is that mental health is a garden that has to be tended. Each of us has a responsibility to introspect and check in with ourselves to see how we are doing, but the garden also needs to be tended by gardeners. The oversight position in new clause 2 is the chief gardener, if you like.

We have all heard stories in our constituency casework about how mental health services are being pared to the bone. By offering reports to Parliament, the veterans’ mental health oversight officer would be able to illustrate some of the particular problems that veterans who suffer with mental health problems have. They would report to Parliament and illustrate the problems in a way that would enable Parliament to adequately oversee the issue and make sure that our veterans are cared for.

--- Later in debate ---

[Al Carns]

I thank hon. Members for their contributions on clause 2 and the new clauses. They are based on the right intent, and Members are trying to do the best by our serving and ex-serving population.

I will leave the script and step back to look at where we have come on this journey. Under the previous Government, the Office for Veterans’ Affairs sat outside the Ministry of Defence. I sort of understand why that happened in some cases. I analysed this to and fro for a long time before making the decision to bring it back in. With hindsight, after a year and a half, the ability to amalgamate all the different parts of the veterans portfolio, including pensions, injury claims, records and the resource that Defence brings, has brought us far further forward. Would that have happened if the OVA had not been outside in the first place? I cannot comment, but its position in Defence, where it is safeguarded as an organisation, means that it harnesses all the bureaucratic power that Defence can bring to move stuff forward.

I will come in a second to the issues of veterans’ mental health and having a veterans commissioner. But if we step back and look at Afghanistan—where some Committee members here served; I did five tours there—there was a palpable feel among the population that the Government were not doing enough, or that the system was not flat and fast enough to deal with the scale of the problem that Afghanistan was kicking out on rotations. We therefore saw an explosion in the number of veterans charities, and the reality is that we now have more than 1,000 veterans charities in the UK. That number is growing every day. Some are the best, most well-meaning people, doing an amazing job and dealing flat and fast with veterans in our communities at the grassroots level. They do an outstanding job, and we have to harness the best charities. Some big charities, too, do a fantastic job of analysing data and providing the Government with clear advice on how to support veterans. There is also everything in between. I will be clear: there are the most amazing charities, very good charities, average charities and a very small minority that do not deliver as efficiently as perhaps they should.

In the veterans portfolio, how do we help the charities cohere their capacity, the £1 billion market that is the veterans charity sector, to deliver it more effectively? And how do we do that in conjunction with local government, while understanding the good, the bad and the other group that sits to the right of that mark? That will stem from Valour. It has taken small steps, but it is moving forward relatively quickly. The first one was about the establishment of an OC—officer commanding—Valour, the head of Valour. Who will run this programme, which is not just about England, but about England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland?

The reason why we need one central point of contact is that we have devolved Administrations that do things differently. We have a plethora of datasets that sit within big charitable organisations, sometimes feeding the output of the charities and at other times providing us with good, balanced analysis. The trouble is that we do not have a collective dataset to give us a clear understanding of the various issues across our veterans space. In fact, the RBL did a fantastic study on perception versus reality, on the statistics and the view of the population versus the actual realities for veterans at the grassroots level. It pointed to one thing: with so many charities needing to generate and raise funds, in some cases they had to champion the requirement for money to go to the most needy or individuals in most need of support.

When we look at the realities, most veterans leave the military and do not have an issue. A proportion have medium-level needs, and a proportion have some really acute needs. The reality and the perception, however, are different. Some of that is skewed, because we have created a charitable sector network that must generate an income from championing or sometimes pushing the most injured and the individuals who need the most support to the very front of the limelight. That creates a national narrative that turns veterans into victims, and I tell the Committee now that it is 110% not the case. Some individuals need lots of support, some need some support and other people go on to contribute to society with no impact whatever.

[Mr Francois]

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

[Al Carns]

Sir Andrew is an exceptionally good man, and few are more knowledgeable than him on veterans matters. We have a position where, in some cases, veterans are seen as victims, but we have no central body that understands the totality of veterans issues across the United Kingdom. Head Valour is therefore coming into place in the next month or two, with a new headquarters. What does a headquarters mean? It means pulling in all the data sources to provide us with a comprehensive view of the issues that veterans face in this country—a balanced, analytical view, not one that is sometimes skewed by institutional organisations or other bodies. That is not because it is in their interests to do so, but it might be a passion project. It is about providing a balanced, analytical view, which must be data-led and have the horsepower to do that across all the devolved nations.

There is, of course, no point pooling data feeds if they come in all sorts of different forms. That brings in the Valour centres. The hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells talked about camaraderie. One of the issues at the moment is that when a veteran has a mental health issue, they have to go to eight different charities before they land on the right one. They usually start with family or a friend, and they will then go from one charity to another, having to bounce around, retelling the story, reliving the trauma. Sometimes, by the time they get three or four down the line, they give up. That is where we have some pretty catastrophic consequences.

The Valour centres are about taking some of the existing centres—we have more than 700, and growing, across the country—finding the very best ones, providing them with long-term Government funding, and standardising the services and engagement. We will ensure that they understand their local networks of the good, the bad and the ugly charities, and can then distribute resources down to them, to provide a set of standard-ish services as best we can—that goes back to the postcode issue. Secondly, we will ensure that the data flows back up to the headquarters in a manner that can be digested and analysed in the most effective way. On top of the Valour centres, field officers in local councils will help to control the centres, as well as to hold councils to account should they not fall in line with the covenant and some of the principles we have talked about today. We are in the foothills; in the future, we should have a far better, greater dataset for us collectively to analyse.

I do not believe that putting one individual in charge of veterans’ mental health would provide us with the systemic jump to deal effectively with that issue. Courage is a programme from the previous Government. We have taken it on and kept it going, because it is working well. For everything we have talked about today—mental health, housing, education, and special educational needs and disabilities—we need the data flowing in, proper analysis and then proper, comprehensive solutions flowing back down. That is one of the reasons why I cannot support new clause 2.

When I was Minister for Veterans and People and dealt with the veterans commissioners, I did not really know whether they were in the right place, in the wrong place or doing the right things. They were brought in from a devolved Government perspective to ensure that we could continue to check and balance the devolved Governments in line with central Westminster policy. Interestingly, 85% of all veterans, which equates to about 1.7 million people, live in England—a veterans commissioner for England would be a huge role.

I have been clear, I think on the record, that once Valour is up and running and we establish the framework for how the hubs will work, we then need to deal with whether we need a veterans commissioner for England. I would suggest that it may be positive, depending on the veterans architecture out there. Why do I say that? At the moment, we have armed forces champions, at different levels and with different terms of reference—some part time, some full time, some employed by councils and some not—and we have Valour field officers going into councils. We have veterans commissioners in the devolved Governments, and then we have the head of Valour, who will have a whole set of data, with the Valour centre network sitting below them. Throwing a commissioner on top of that, at the same time, would perhaps dilute the hierarchy and centralised control. I absolutely understand the utility of having a fourth commissioner in place over time and, although I have to oppose new clause 6, I would like to take on this discussion. I have a feeling that, in the next 24 months or so, we will be moving in the right direction with regard to the measure.

[Mr Francois]

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

[Al Carns]

Once we analyse the tapestry of veterans support, I would like to come to a solution on the English veterans commissioner to align with and amplify what we do on Valour. I think that Valour will take 36 months to be properly embedded in our local councils, with the structures and data network in place. It has taken us longer than I expected to get the Valour OC in place, but perhaps that is one for the bar downstairs.