Armed Forces Day

Graham Leadbitter Excerpts

Thursday 26th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Luke Pollard]

I am sure the House will agree that the right hon. Gentleman is by no means a poor substitute for the shadow Defence Secretary.

We plan to publish our defence housing strategy later this year, which no doubt was not at all in the minds of the shadow Front-Bench team when they published their proposals ahead of time. I encourage the right hon. Gentleman to wait for the full work to be published in due course, but improving defence housing has to be a priority, because for many years as a nation, we have not delivered what our forces deserve—that will now change.

This year, we extended the ability to reclaim the costs of wraparound childcare to many of those deployed overseas, and next year we will go further and cover all overseas areas to help make family life a little easier. We are legislating for an Armed Forces Commissioner—an independent voice to help improve service life. We made a manifesto commitment to bring the armed forces covenant fully into law—a promise made by the nation that those who defend it will be treated fairly and will not be disadvantaged because of their service. That includes, for example, ensuring that service children have the same access to education as other children. We are transforming recruitment, and hope that many young people will be inspired to join up after attending Armed Forces Day events this weekend. We are also overhauling access to care and support for veterans through the Valour programme.

I turn to veterans because although Armed Forces Day is an opportunity to thank those people in uniform, we should also use it as an opportunity to thank those people who have served.

[Graham Leadbitter (Moray West, Nairn and Strathspey) (SNP)]

I very much welcome the work being done to bring the covenant into wider, and legislative, effect, with consequences where it is not applied. That will be important in delivering services to our armed forces right across the public sector, but there is a financial consequence. Parliament and Government need to seriously consider how that financial consequence is borne and distributed to ensure that those public services are empowered and financed to support armed forces personnel and, just as importantly, their wider families in the best way they can.

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[Graham Leadbitter (Moray West, Nairn and Strathspey) (SNP)]

There are many gallant Members in this Chamber, in the Scottish Parliament Chamber back home in Scotland, and in other legislatures of these islands, both national and local—Members who have served in the armed forces with distinction and bravery. I pay tribute to them, and to those family and many friends who have served, and in some cases continue to serve. I hold them in the highest regard for their commitment to protecting the freedoms that we hold dear. That commitment is demonstrated by every rank and in every location where our armed forces operate.

Scotland has a very proud and distinguished military history. Armed Forces Day has become a further focal point of community support for our serving armed forces and our veterans. In my constituency of Moray West, Nairn and Strathspey, there are around 4,500 serving personnel—around 3,000 at RAF Lossiemouth and around 1,500 Army personnel between 39 Engineers at Kinloss and the 3rd Battalion, Royal Regiment of Scotland, the Black Watch, based at Fort George. They are supported by hundreds of Ministry of Defence civilians and military contractors, such as Boeing and BAE Systems, who jointly, with our serving personnel, deliver significant defensive and offensive capabilities for our military system. In addition, there are around 12,000 veterans in my constituency; I believe we have the highest percentage of any constituency in the UK. That reflects the north of Scotland’s very long and distinguished connection with the military. Once we add in immediate family, around one in five people living in Moray West, Nairn and Strathspey have a direct military connection—quite some figure.

It is unsurprising, therefore, that the armed forces in the area are not viewed as a separate or distinct community, but rather as a significant and integrated part of the wider community. As is often the case in the north of Scotland, there is no fanfare, but rather an everyday respect and appreciation of the role of the armed forces embedded in community life. Frankly, it is something that just is. That is important. There is no “us and them”; we are a whole community.

That does not, of course, equate to the armed forces being ignored, as can be readily observed from the significant numbers that turn out, year on year, across the constituency to witness acts of remembrance. I am very pleased that those numbers have grown over the last 25 years very significantly, and show no sign of dropping off. There are military children in most schools in the constituency, and some schools have a very significant percentage of military children. Military charities are well supported in the region, including SSAFA, the RAF Benevolent Fund, Help for Heroes, and Erskine Veterans Charity, which fairly recently opened a very welcoming and well-attended facility in Forres that is providing fantastic support to veterans. They can get together for a chat, or for the more extensive support that Erskine can provide.

The military, including contractors, offers a fantastic range of opportunities to young people in the region, and many take up those opportunities. In my pre-parliamentary life, I spent some four years as leader of Moray council. During that period, we strengthened our role in delivering the armed forces covenant. We worked cross party and across the chamber in the council to do that. That has continued, with cross-party support, and the council achieved the gold standard in the employer recognition scheme. During my time as council leader, I was very pleased to support the developing civic link between the council and HMS Spey, a Royal Navy river class offshore patrol vessel currently operating in the Indo-Pacific, giving the constituency and the wider region really strong links with all three services.

I will touch on some politics. I trust this will be taken in the positive spirit in which I present it. This is not a day for hard politics, but there are some things that could be better for our armed forces. First, on the covenant —I mentioned this earlier to the Minister—I very much welcome proposals to embed the covenant in legislation. There will, no doubt, be challenges associated with that, and financial implications, but it is, in my view, the right thing to do. I look forward to future opportunities to debate embedding the covenant in law.

Secondly, one thing that frustrated me in my council days was comparatively rapid changes in numbers, notably at RAF Lossiemouth, which happened with no financial support to the council. Many councils with military bases, particularly air force bases, are in rural areas with small populations and consequently smaller budgets to operate with. That makes them less agile, because they simply do not have the money available at short notice to make the changes required to deliver services at a bigger scale. Other Members will, I am certain, have similar experiences in areas with significant changes in military numbers. If the MOD were a private developer, it would be contributing substantial sums to support growth in childcare, education and health provision, and a range of other public services. It would also be required to invest in infrastructure, such as improved roads and junctions in the area. The current design of our armed forces and the Government Departments that support them does not lend itself to doing that. This needs serious work.

I am by no means a fan of everything that the US does, but in this regard when significant changes occur to military-related populations there, there is a Government Department that steps up for a period to support local authorities, including with finance, to help smooth changes, with investment in service provision and the local economy. Councils and health boards have to absorb big bumps in demand, and that is frequently easier said than done. We have a welcome opportunity to fix that.

The Department in the US is called the Office of Local Defence Community Co-operation. It used to be known as the Office of Economic Adjustment, but I think that perhaps sounded a bit Orwellian. I would welcome further opportunities to debate this issue to see what progress can be achieved. The team in the US describes its role as helping communities to navigate the impact of Department of Defence actions and programme changes. That is exactly what we need to achieve in the UK, and it is particularly important as we move into an era of significantly increased spend on our armed forces and growth in our base numbers. There will be demand for more dentists, doctors, teachers and wraparound childcare. That puts a lot of pressure on local services and we need to navigate our way through that.

Before I conclude my contribution, I would like to make three specific mentions. First, like a number of Members who have contributed to this debate, I am taking part in the armed forces parliamentary scheme—in my case, the RAF course—which has afforded me many excellent learning opportunities that enable me as a parliamentarian to better understand our armed forces and to more effectively represent constituents with connections to our armed forces. I pay tribute to the Armed Forces Parliamentary Trust, which is behind the excellent scheme, and the military officers who support the scheme here in Parliament, who have given so much time and effort to ensure that the scheme is the effective learning tool for MPs that it is. I commend the scheme to other Members who may be interested in taking it up.

Secondly, it was a real delight to give my constituent Evie Skinner a tour of Parliament earlier this week and to congratulate her in person for her well-deserved win in the Month of the Military Child poetry and art competition, set up by the excellent charity Never Such Innocence. Evie, who has a parent serving in our armed forces, should be really proud of her art piece on the theme of “Memories”, and I hope she and her family enjoyed their time in Westminster.

Finally, this morning, I was pleased to welcome to Parliament several members of the Battlefield Co-ordination Detachment with their associated ground liaison officers, who are based with 1 (Fighter) Squadron at RAF Lossiemouth. The group was led by Lieutenant Colonel Gee Jenner and Captain Ant Butler, who, alongside their colleagues, are developing their understanding of the role of Parliament and the interaction between Parliament and our military services. Achieving that mutual learning is as important to the military as it is to parliamentarians.

It is vital that we continue to support and celebrate the dedication and commitment of our armed forces, and Armed Forces Day affords us the opportunity to do just that.