Defence Personnel Data Breach

Mark Francois Excerpts

Tuesday 7th May 2024 Commons Chamber

[Grant Shapps]

I have outlined the Government’s position on this a couple of times, but I do want to note that the hon. Gentleman says “consider it likely”; I am saying that I cannot rule it out. Those are two different things. We need to allow for this forensic work to go ahead before we start attributing it. However, if there is attribution, there will clearly also be consequences.

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

Well, at least it wasn’t Capita. This will be very worrying for service personnel and their families and for veterans, who will feel disrespected by the fact that the Government seem to have briefed that it was China overnight and then not had the nerve to confirm that in the House today because someone rang up from the Foreign Office and said, “Don’t do that.” When, oh when, will we start standing up to the Chinese in the way that they are clearly not frightened of doing to us?

[Grant Shapps]

Indeed, it was not my right hon. Friend’s favourite contractor on this particular occasion. None the less, we will be carrying out a comprehensive review of the contractor’s work. Again, I want to make it clear to the House that we did absolutely everything that we could to avoid this being made public until I had the opportunity to come to the House. We proactively endeavoured to ensure that our own approach towards removing the data that was online—closing that system down, ensuring the personnel were paid, making sure the alternative payments system was in place for expenses and other things—could all happen ideally before we came to the House. We most certainly did not wish to see nor brief out the story. Unfortunately, as a large number of people were impacted or potentially impacted, it was almost impossible to expect them not to go and talk about it, and I believe that that is how it came into the public domain.

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right about this. He is a champion for ensuring that these contractors do the jobs they are actually paid to do. We are now trawling through all the detail and, as I have said before, we will not leave this hanging. We will take every appropriate action because, as he might imagine, my entire team and I are very concerned about the welfare of our personnel—brave men and women who do not deserve to have this happen to them. We do not want to see it happen in the name of the MOD, either.