Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between John Healey and Connor Rand

Monday 1st June 2026 Commons Chamber

[Mr Rand]

This Government have rightly increased military support to Ukraine to its highest ever level. That is vital not just for Ukraine’s security, but for ours. Our leadership on this issue places us in the firing line of an increasingly desperate Putin. With the stark warning from GCHQ last week that our nation is being relentlessly targeted by Russian aggression, does the Secretary of State agree that as well as rightly increasing defence spending, we must unite against Russia by seeking a closer relationship with our most important and reliable allies in the European Union?

[John Healey]

I agree with my hon. Friend that we are right to seek a closer relationship with the European Union, which has an important contribution to make, from within a “NATO first” framework. That is why, last year, we signed the security and defence partnership with the European Union. The Prime Minister has said that we are looking to join the European Union’s Ukraine loan scheme, so that we can provide more aid to Ukraine, backed by the very best British companies, producing the best British kit for Ukrainian warfighters.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between John Healey and Connor Rand

Monday 3rd November 2025 Commons Chamber

[John Healey]

Quite simply, we have boosted defence investment. We have done so by a record amount since the end of the cold war, and three years earlier than the Conservatives’ unfunded plans proposed. Since the election, we have signed over 1,000 major contracts, 84% of them with British firms. We have brought £1.7 billion of foreign direct investment into defence, and we have won major export deals that the Conservatives never managed. On Monday, the Prime Minister and I signed an £8 billion deal with Turkey to buy 20 British Typhoons, which will help secure 20,000 jobs in the wider supply chain for the years to come. I would like to hear Conservative Members welcome that.

[Mr Connor Rand (Altrincham and Sale West) (Lab)]

2. What steps he is taking to improve housing for armed forces families.

[The Secretary of State for Defence (John Healey)]

We are making the most significant commitment and change to armed forces housing in 50 years. Within six months of the election, we acted to end the worst-ever Tory privatisation. We brought 36,000 military homes back into public ownership, and now we are making a £9 billion investment over the next decade to bring those homes up to scratch. At the same time, we are supercharging the building of new housing on surplus defence land. These plans are set out in our new defence housing strategy, which we published today, and a copy of which I will place in the Library of the House.

[Mr Rand]

In the week of Remembrance Sunday, it is important to restate that supporting our armed forces and their families is something we should be committed to every day. Over the past decade, two thirds of armed forces service family accommodation was allowed to fall into such disrepair that it was deemed not fit for purpose by the Defence Committee. How will our consumer charter for armed forces families ensure that we do provide homes fit for heroes?

[John Healey]

My hon. Friend is right to recognise remembrance as a time when we recognise not just the service of those in the past, but those who serve today. We make demands on them that none of us would have to meet. We ask them to deploy at a week’s notice to the other side of the world, and we ask them to move with their families every few years around the UK. The very last thing they should worry about is whether their wives, husbands, partners or kids are living in cold, damp and leaky homes. We are ending what my hon. Friend says is the Tory scandal of unfit forces housing, and we are getting Britain building the homes that we need on surplus defence land—[Interruption.]