Armed Forces Bill

Mark Francois Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 22nd June 2026 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)]

I call the shadow Minister.

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

It is a privilege to follow the hon. Member for Birmingham Selly Oak (Al Carns), who I may refer to again in a few minutes. It is important to place on record the respect he has engendered across the House by resigning on an important issue of principle relating to the defence of the realm, which is, after all, the most important duty of Government, above all others. He and I have debated for five months on this Bill. We have not always agreed, but we have always dealt with each other respectfully. That respect has only been enhanced by his recent decision.

I rise to speak to new clause 11 and amendments 3, 4, 5 and 11 in my name and that of my hon. Friends. I will get into the detail of those amendments and the new clause in a moment, but before I do, I observe the courtesies of debate and congratulate the new Minister for the Armed Forces, the hon. Member for North East Derbyshire (Louise Sandher-Jones), on her recent field promotion. We hope that she enjoys herself in her new post, but I caution her that there appear to have been further command changes back at the chateau as of today. We shall have to see how she fares in the re-brigading exercise that will inevitably follow, but for today, well done.

In the meantime, this Bill, which had its Second Reading back on 26 January, has been extensively debated—when the Select Committee on the Armed Forces Bill received both oral and written evidence; in the Select Committee’s debate phase; in Committee of the whole House on 2 June; and now on Report and Third Reading. The Opposition’s summing-up speech tonight will come from my hon. Friend the Member for Exmouth and Exeter East (David Reed).

Over nearly five months, we have spent more than 40 hours taking evidence, conducting visits and debating this important Bill. As today is the culmination of its consideration in the Commons before it moves on to further scrutiny in the other place, I should say that throughout, we Opposition Members have attempted to act as a critical friend to the Bill. We have been able to do that mostly in a relatively consensual manner, although there have been occasional points of disagreement, as I suspect there may yet be this evening.

New clause 11 relates to a derogation from the European convention on human rights in the event of overseas operations under the auspices of the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Act 2021. I am afraid that I cannot agree with the proposition of the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn), despite the fact that I was born in his constituency, in Crouch End—or “Creuche Ende”, as the estate agents call it today. When we debated this matter in Committee, we tabled a similar new clause, based on the wording of the 2021 Act. It said that Ministers should at least consider derogating from the ECHR, if not doing so might constrain the operation of our troops when deployed overseas and leave them potentially fighting a ruthless enemy with no moral scruples, who behaved as the Russians did in Bucha during the invasion of Ukraine. Because of the ECHR, our troops could effectively be fighting with one hand tied behind their back, and could fear lawfare being used against them, perhaps even decades later, potentially at Russia’s behest. Unfortunately, the Government have been completely hopeless on this, and we have therefore firmed up the wording in our revised new clause; it says that Ministers “should” derogate in such circumstances. The principal argument, however, remains the same, and I hope that Ministers might yet be persuaded to accept the new clause.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I remind the Opposition spokesperson that new clause 1, which I tabled, would prevent the Secretary of State authorising the entry of members of visiting forces from states whose commanders are subject to International Criminal Court arrest warrants or proceedings of the International Court of Justice. I do not see how that is a problem for anyone who respects and understands the importance of international law in bringing an end to conflict, or preventing conflict. Surely the Secretary of State should not allow people to come and operate here when they have an ICC arrest warrant against them.

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[Mr Francois]

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.

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[Mr Francois]

I thank my hon. Friend him for his intervention. As patron of the Rayleigh branch of the Royal British Legion, I too am very glad to pay tribute to the amazing work that it does in support of serving personnel, veterans and the wider armed forces family. It has also played an important part in lobbying for what is now new clause 4, on which I am sure my hon. Friend the Member for Huntingdon will elaborate.

[Jim Shannon]

I thank the shadow Minister again for all his endeavours on behalf of the defence forces. He is an example to us all.

I understand that the Government have extended the armed forces covenant to Northern Ireland, but there is a question mark over the responsibility of local borough and district councils in Northern Ireland that may have adverse feelings about the covenant. Does the right hon. Gentleman think it is important that the Government bring forward legislation tonight to ensure that every district and borough council in Northern Ireland must adhere to the same rules as those here on the mainland?

[Mr Francois]

Yes, the armed forces covenant should apply equally throughout the four nations of the United Kingdom. The hon. Gentleman and I know that some local authorities in Northern Ireland take a different view on this matter, but even in Sinn Féin-run councils the covenant should still apply. Northern Ireland has a very proud tradition of providing troops for the United Kingdom’s armed forces, and those troops are as entitled to be recognised and supported by the civilian population as those drawn from any other part of the United Kingdom. So, again, my in-principle answer to the hon. Gentleman’s question is yes.

[Jayne Kirkham (Truro and Falmouth) (Lab/Co-op)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Francois]

I suspect that this might be about the Royal Fleet Auxiliary, in which case I am very happy to give way.

[Jayne Kirkham]

It is not, actually, although I can always talk about the Royal Fleet Auxiliary in the context of clause 31, in which it is brilliantly included and which will give the RFA a commissioner at last, which is fantastic.

May I ask the Minister to confirm—because I have had some correspondence about this—that clause 2 covers unitary authorities, single foundation strategic authorities and borough councils outside outer London? Some members of the Local Government Association have raised that with me. Will the right hon. Gentleman confirm, just for clarification, that those authorities are covered by the duties in the covenant?

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[Mr Francois]

I thank the hon. Lady very much for referring to me as the Minister. I was the Minister once and—who knows?—I may be one day again. I must say, in fairness to the previous Minister, that I believe the Government tabled amendments in Committee to clarify the matter that the hon. Lady has raised, and I think that on their behalf, if it is not precocious, I can give her and the LGA an absolute reassurance in that regard.

We believe that as military personnel are often moving at the behest of the state, the state has a moral duty under the covenant to ensure that any EHCP—and, as we all know from our constituency work, obtaining EHCPs is often a tortuous process—is then fully transferable. When we debated that in Committee, we received considerable support from the hon. Member for Leyton and Wanstead (Mr Bailey), who has received a field promotion of his own in recent days, and will therefore hopefully be a friend to these measures within the Department. I would welcome him too, but I am saving him up for Defence questions in July.

[Alex Baker (Aldershot) (Lab)]

We in the all-party parliamentary group on the armed forces community—including my hon. Friend the hon. Member for Leyton and Wanstead (Mr Bailey)—have been working on these issues with the Royal British Legion for the past year. The Minister for School Standards, my hon. Friend the Member for Queen's Park and Maida Vale (Georgia Gould), has come before us, has listened to the views of service personnel and their families, and has committed to ensuring that serving personnel are included in the SEND reforms process. I want to thank her for her work, alongside that of the Royal British Legion and the APPG.

[Mr Francois]

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?

[Fred Thomas (Plymouth Moor View) (Lab)]

Which would you do?

[Mr Francois]

We would reduce welfare spending and spend it on the defence of the realm. That is our policy.

[Luke Akehurst (North Durham) (Lab)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Francois]

In a moment.

I come back to the Defence Housing Service. Ministers have promised us ad nauseum that their plan will include £9.2 billion of investment in military accommodation over the next 10 years—that point has been repeated again and again over the five months that I have referred to. Given that the DIP has still not been published, I ask the Minister for the Armed Forces whether she can still repeat Labour’s mantra on the Floor of the House this evening. Is that £9.2 billion still there? Has it been definitively signed off by the Chancellor of the Exchequer —yes or no?

Moreover, can the Minister advise us when the DIP will finally be published? I see that the Secretary of State has kindly joined us, so he can bob up and answer if he wants. Will it be published prior to the NATO summit in Ankara on 7 and 8 July, as we have been told multiple times? Will it be published prior to the House rising for the summer recess on 16 July? Will it ever be published, or will we have to go round the loop all over again with a new Government? Are they going to publish it, and if so, when? We have now transitioned from frustration to filibustering from Ministers, and from there to farce. Our adversaries can see this as clearly as our friends can.

We have already rightly spent five months on this very important Bill, and I hope that the Minister will be able to give the House at least some comfort on some of the points that we have raised. Otherwise, we will have to test the will of the House, almost certainly in the matter of the ECHR and potentially on the Defence Housing Service and the DIP as well. Finally, when—if ever—will Labour publish the defence investment plan?

[Alex Baker]

May I begin by congratulating my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for North East Derbyshire (Louise Sandher-Jones) on being appointed the Minister for the Armed Forces? She did an outstanding job as the Minister for Veterans and People, and I pay particular tribute to her work with the Gurkha community. I saw at first hand how she engaged with a community that for too long felt ignored and unheard, and she helped many feel that their voices were finally being listened to. I am delighted to see her promoted, and I look forward to her making many visits to Aldershot and Farnborough in her new role.

This weekend, Aldershot and Farnborough will have the privilege of hosting the national Armed Forces Day celebrations. As the historic home of the British Army, it is a huge honour for our community. I thank everyone involved in making it happen, including Rushmoor borough council and our headline sponsors: QinetiQ, BAE Systems and KBR Aspire Defence. Armed Forces Day matters because it gives us an opportunity to say thank you, but it should also be an opportunity to listen.

On Saturday, I was privileged to attend the launch of the Commonwealth military hub in Aldershot, which has been delivered by Op Belonging under the leadership of Samuel T. Reddy, in partnership with Aldershot Town football club. It was an extraordinary event. Serving personnel, veterans, families and organisations from across the Commonwealth came together to celebrate service and support each other. In some regiments based in Aldershot, more than 15 different nationalities are represented, and what struck me most was the theme of belonging. These are people who have served our country, and their families have sacrificed alongside them. They deserve to feel that they belong.

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[Louise Sandher-Jones]

We are committed to publishing the DIP before the Ankara summit in July.

Amendment 11 concerns the Defence Housing Service’s budget and the defence investment plan. I hope that the right hon. Member for Rayleigh and Wickford (Mr Francois) will understand that I will not comment on any figures in the DIP—it will be published soon enough. Our defence housing strategy will deliver a decade of renewal for defence family housing. Previously, military housing was subject to insufficient, stop-start funding. That did not deliver value for money for the taxpayer, or the improvements that our service families deserve. The Defence Housing Service’s budget will be clearly set out, and it will account for its spending to Parliament via an annual report. As the Select Committee heard during the evidence sessions, there is nothing in the defence investment plan process that stops the Department getting work under way. The Defence Housing Service will be up and running from April 2027, and the work of renewing the estate can continue.

[Mr Francois]

We were told multiple times—loads of times—over five months that the Government would invest £9.2 billion over 10 years to achieve the objectives of the Defence Housing Service, so I ask the Minister again: will she give a commitment to the House that that figure has not been reduced? If she cannot do that, people will believe that it has been reduced.

[Louise Sandher-Jones]

I will not comment, piece by piece, on what might be in the defence investment plan. We are getting on with the job of making improvements for service families now, and we are preparing for the launch of the new Defence Housing Service.

Amendment 11 states that the Defence Housing Service must operate within a budget set out in the DIP. That risks constraining the Defence Housing Service in a scenario where investment is set out in the plan, but has to rise thereafter. Any additional spending then risks being in breach of this requirement, unless and until a new defence investment plan is published. I am sure that the right hon. Gentleman will appreciate that that would constrain the service’s ability to respond swiftly and appropriately to changing requirements.

New clause 11 would require any future Secretary of State to consider whether to make a derogation under article 15 of the ECHR, which provides that

“in time of war or other public emergency threatening the life of the nation…a State may take measures derogating from its obligations under the Convention only to the extent strictly required by the exigencies of the situation”,

provided that such measures are

“not…inconsistent with the State’s other obligations under international law”.

When the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Bill was being considered, concerns were raised that its clause 12 risked damaging the UK’s reputation for upholding the rule of law. It was also seen as unnecessary, because the Government can already derogate under article 15 of the ECHR, so the provision did not add any additional legal power and was largely symbolic. It was the last Government who agreed to its removal from that Bill, and I have not heard a convincing case for its inclusion in this Bill.

I will address new clauses 3 and 5 together, as they both deal with how we care for our veterans. I thank hon. Members for tabling them. I appreciate their concerns about our armed forces veterans, and I acknowledge the sentiments behind the new clauses. We have published our new 10-year veterans strategy, which sets out a new narrative around the remarkable men and women who have served in our armed forces. It applies UK-wide, is cross-Government and cross-sector in scope, and will provide significant opportunity for both data collection and data sharing, and we do not wish to distract from the progression of this work.