Service Family Accommodation
Luke Pollard Excerpts(1 year, 4 months ago)
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Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)
Broken boilers, water pouring into homes, mould, vermin and painful waits for basic repairs—all while Ministers cancel troops’ Christmas leave. Our forces deserve so much better. It is a national scandal that the Government are leaving service personnel, their families and their children without heating and water during the coldest winter for more than a decade. Can the Minister say exactly how many forces homes are currently without heating or hot water, and what he is going to do about it? Can he guarantee here and now that no one in uniform or their family will be without heating or hot water this winter?
Although shocking, these reports are unfortunately not surprising. There are deep-seated problems with the Government’s handling of Defence housing, going back years. One third of our armed forces personnel are dissatisfied with the overall standard of their family accommodation and almost one in three service family homes are awaiting repair. Between June and October this year, more than 5,000 maintenance appointments were missed. Is the Minister confident that his contractors are meeting their mandated key performance indicators? It certainly does not look as though they are. The MOD paid £144 million to contractors to supposedly maintain service family accommodation this year. Is he satisfied that that represents value for taxpayers’ money?
These reports of dodgy accommodation not only are a breach of the contract the nation makes with those who serve, but pose a risk to recruitment and retention. More than one quarter of armed forces personnel said that poor accommodation increases their intention to leave the services. Decent accommodation is a fundamental part of our moral obligation to those who serve and their families. This Government are failing our armed forces when it comes to service accommodation and we need to see better from Ministers. In setting out what he has done, will the Minister now apologise to forces and their families, many of whom will be spending yet another Christmas in shoddy military accommodation?
Alex Chalk
The hon. Gentleman asks, quite fairly, whether I think that the contractors are meeting their requirements. We are absolutely clear that they are not meeting their requirements. Indeed, that is why a rectification plan was imposed as long ago as September; it was clear that there were some fundamental issues going wrong. I have spoken about the IT issues, but also, candidly, there were not enough people in the call centre. I think Pinnacle had 14 people, although that has now been increased to 60.
I get that there has been some snow and ice, but not biblical levels of snow and ice; these are things the contractors should have accounted for and prepared for. The hon. Gentleman asks whether the contract is value for money, and no, at the moment I do not think it is. If the contractors performed, it would be a perfectly sensible contract, but I reiterate: over and above the annual amount, we must ensure there is the £350 million of support to get ahead of this problem, so that we can have a well-maintained service family accommodation estate that does not run into problems in the first place. I am pleased to note that there is £76 million targeted towards improving thermal efficiency—to you and me, Mr Speaker, that means boilers, insulation and so on—which again will resolve some of these issues.
There are lessons to be learned, candidly, and I am clear about that. One thing that must be investigated is how this contract was entered into. Was it the case that some people were—how can I put it?—a little economical with the actualité when indicating what they could provide by way of support and IT? What did they say and when? We need—[Interruption.] Of course we should also look at the due diligence; that is a fair point as well.
The hon. Gentleman made a political point at the beginning, and I hope he will forgive me for saying this: it is true that a lot is being asked of our troops at Christmas, including to fill in for jobs that others are not doing. I urge him to join the Government in saying that those going on strike should call those strikes off so that our troops can get the Christmas they deserve.
Oral Answers to Questions
Luke Pollard Excerpts(1 year, 5 months ago)
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Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)
The Army’s most senior soldier says personnel are turning to food banks and second jobs this Christmas, just to make ends meet. Six months ago, I raised the alarm that some troops are having to take second jobs at McDonald’s because of the cost of living crisis. I know the Minister says he is supporting our armed forces during the cost of living crisis, but why is the Ministry of Defence still not collecting data on the number of service personnel using food vouchers and food banks or taking second jobs?
Dr Murrison
I visited the food bank in my own constituency and discussed the reasons that people use them, which are often complicated. The hon. Gentleman will know that we have accepted the Armed Forces Pay Review Body’s recommendation in full, in recognition of the work that men and women of our armed forces do. He will be aware of the very real big incentives to remain within the armed forces, including a generous non-contributory pension, subsidised accommodation and all the rest of it. He will also be aware of the Haythornthwaite review, which I hope will report soon on what more we can do to incentivise people not only to join but to stay.
Draft Armed Forces (Tri-Service Serious Crime Unit) (Consequential Amendments) (No. 2) Regulations 2022
Draft Armed Forces (Court Martial) (Amendment) Rules 2022
Luke Pollard Excerpts(1 year, 5 months ago)
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Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Fovargue, and I am grateful to the Minister for setting out the SIs and answering so many of my colleagues’ questions about them. It is good to see him in his place, even if it does mean that I have lost my co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on the National Trust, who will be replaced in due course. I warn the Minister that the last time my hon. Friend the Member for Blaenau Gwent and I served on a statutory instrument Committee together and I said good things about the Minister, the hon. Member for Wrexham (Sarah Atherton), she was sacked only hours later. It was sad to see her go, so I will be careful about how positive I am about the Minister today, because I would like him to stay in his place a little longer.
I think everyone in this House agrees that our service personnel deserve a system that is able to investigate and prosecute crime effectively, but there have been clear challenges to that system, and clear holes that have appeared over the past couple of years. It is good that the Government are looking at this issue, because there are serious flaws in our service justice system that need to be looked at. We need only to have read the news over the past few months and seen the lived experiences of many of our service personnel, especially women, to realise that it is not just the execution of justice at the end of a criminal inquiry, but a culture within our armed forces, that has enabled many of the most serious offences to be covered up and sidelined, or not get the attention that they should have done from commanding officers and peers within our armed forces. It is welcome that a journey has started, but more still needs to be done.
Reform is needed, and Labour will not be opposing either of the statutory instruments. However, I have a number of questions that I would like to ask the Minister, the first of which is about the Armed Forces (Tri-Service Serious Crime Unit) (Consequential Amendments) (No. 2) Regulations 2022. It is right that each branch of our armed forces has a service police that investigates crimes, and I put on record my thanks to the highly motivated staff for the work that they do. I am concerned that reports and investigations into many of our service police forces have found that personnel cannot be considered proficient in investigating serious crime due to their lack of experience. That is the conclusion reached by the Government’s commissioned review from 2020, conducted by the former chief constable of Merseyside Police, Sir Jon Murphy.
Labour welcomed the provision for the tri-service serious crimes unit during the passage of the Armed Forces Bill, and we note that the extension in today’s statutory instrument is a step in the right direction. I do have concerns, though, about the capacity of the defence serious crimes unit to do enough to remedy the legitimate concerns that we and service personnel have about restoring trust. It is in that spirit that I am going to ask questions of the Minister.
My first question is about staffing and resourcing of the defence serious crimes unit. I note that in his reply to my hon. Friend the Member for Garston and Halewood the Minister made the case that it would be 370 personnel. That is a sizeable commitment and is very welcome. I would be grateful if the Minister could set out where the expertise is coming from within that 370 personnel and where those personnel are being drawn from. Are they simply being transferred from other service policing, or is there a specific form of recruitment that the Department has undertaken to find the gaps in expertise and fill them with some of those 370 people?
Will the Minister set out what the unit’s annual budget will be and, importantly—because we are in an era where the Defence Secretary has accepted annual real-terms cuts in the defence budget—could he set out whether the budget that the defence serious crimes unit will have will be the same this year, next year and every year until the end of this spending period? Having 370 personnel sounds good now, but if that is to be cut by the same proportion as the day-to-day cuts to the armed forces that we are seeing from the Government, that figure will be lower at the end of the spending review period. Will the Minister tell us what the staff capacity will be when the unit opens next month? Is 370 the establishment figure that the Department is aiming for, or will it be 370 people at their desks, operational, by the time it opens in December?
In relation to civilian expertise, we all recognise that there are pockets of expertise in our armed forces, but also in civilian policing. Finding ways to share expertise is really important. The Government have said that the DSCU will have access to civilian expertise, a promise that must be kept in light of the expertise deficit that was found in the Murphy review. The Murphy review also said that short, informal training placements are no good. Can the Minister confirm, when he talks about adding civilian expertise to the defence serious crime unit, the length of the embedding expected of reservists? Murphy highlights that short placements will neither benefit the overall operational capacity of the DSCU nor help the individual who is placed.
I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Blaenau Gwent about the recommendation of the Henriques review that the deputy Provost Marshal should be a civilian. I note that when this instrument was debated in the Lords, and the question was raised, the Minister replied that the embedding of reservists who are police officers in the Home Office police forces will be a way of adequately coping with the lack of civilian oversight, and will bring in more civilian expertise.
I want to test the Minister on the precariousness of the Ministry of Defence relying of the availability of reservists who are civilian police officers with relevant experience. Those people are really important. It is a welcome change that police officers can serve as reservists in our armed forces, but we should be drawing from the with the relevant expertise. I want to understand from the Minister how many of our reservists, on a tri-service basis, have police expertise in investigating serious crimes.
Sir Mike Penning
On a point of clarity, I think the hon. Member will find that we are not talking just about reservists from the 43 authorities that come under the Home Office. It will be British Transport police, nuclear police, port police and others—that is where this expertise will come from, not only from the Home Office.
Luke Pollard
I am grateful for that intervention. That is useful to know. In relation to where the specific expertise comes from within those forces—the Home Office and other forces—we need to understand how many of the 370 will be reservists and how many will come with specific experience, because there is a big difference between drafting in a reservist with many years of experience as a traffic officer and drafting in a reservist with many years of experience of investigating serious crimes, particularly serious sexual offences. I would be grateful if the Minister spelled that out, because the backfilling of the expertise that we need seems a bit woolly.
Paragraph 7.1 of the draft explanatory memorandum says that specialist investigative support will be provided to the DSCU. Can the Minister expand on what he means by specialist investigative support when it comes to additional civilian expertise? Who will that come from and on what basis? What expertise will be provided, or will it be commissioned on an ad hoc basis depending on each investigation? What budget will be allocated for it? With the addition of specialist investigative support and the embedding of reservists, the Government are seemingly putting a lot of weight on cavalry coming over the hill to resource the unit, rather than the expertise being built and trained in establishment figures every day. I would be grateful if he set out what he means by that in particular.
I would also be grateful if the Minister said what he means by embedding reservists. Is that on a case-by-case basis? Is it a formal drafting or a secondment? Will police officers who are reservists be moved into the posting? Will those individuals be given much choice about it, and how will that work? I want it to work; my concern is that a lot of emphasis is seemingly being put on something that we cannot quite understand the true extent of. I would be grateful if he set out what that will look like. Will he also set out the seniority of the civilian officers he expects to be embedded, and how they will be managed? Will it be part of the normal structure, or will there be another structure? Will a minimum threshold of training and expertise in handling serious crime be required to be embedded, or will the qualification simply be that of being a police officer in one of the forces, and being a reservist and having passed the necessary training?
In response to the initial intervention by my hon. Friend the Member for Garston and Halewood, the Minister said that there has been no impact assessment, but given the heavy reliance that the Ministry of Defence is placing on reservists it seems to me that some work will have been done to look at the overall capacity and availability of personnel to fill that role. I am not quite convinced by the argument that no impact assessment or work has been done to provide that information, because if it has not been done there is a real risk that it may not work, despite the Government’s good intentions.
I welcome the Minister saying that he would like more of the process to be aligned with civilian processes. That is a good principle, notwithstanding the unique environment in which many of our armed forces operate, but he also said that the DSCU command, as well as being operationally independent, will look at civilian policing qualifications for DSCU officers, I imagine to try to get greater experience and expertise across from civilian police forces. That seems welcome. Is there a similar ambition for service police? I am working on the expectation that many of the 370 personnel in the DSCU will be drawn from service police forces. Is it the intention that the training in civilian police qualifications will happen when they are moved into the DSCU, or will there be an attempt to match that qualification on to the DSCU feeders, which will be the individual services’ policing operations? It would help to look at that when ironing out discrepancies, as the Minister talked about.
The final thing that I want to understand regarding the DSCU is gender balance. The Minister was right that, when we discussed a previous statutory instrument about personnel not only on courts martial and other boards but in investigations, there was a discussion on the gender mix and the experience that can be brought to bear. That is especially true when we are looking at the large number of crimes against women in our armed forces. It is about ensuring that those who prosecute offences have appropriate lived experience, for the sake of the victims of those offences. Will the Minister set out the expectation for the gender balance in the overall unit, and whether there will be any specialist trained officers or personnel in that unit who will deal with serious sexual offences, if they will be investigated?
The hon. Member for Barnsley Central raised an important point on inspection, and I want to probe the Minister a bit further on that. It was said in the Lords debate on this SI that the DSCU would be
“independently inspected by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 8 November 2022; Vol. 825, c. 566.]
but the Minister did not concretely say that the findings would be published publicly. He says they will be published in the usual way, but I would be grateful if he could commit to them being publicly published, so that people can look into them.
On the extent of the scrutiny and inspection, section 104 of the Murphy review says that all three service police have
“an arrangement whereby from time to time they negotiate with HMICFRS as to what they consider they should be inspected upon. This arrangement could be regarded as ‘cosy’ and does not exist in civilian policing”
where
“Chief Constables have no say in when they are inspected or on what subject.”
Will the Minister set out whether the same cosy relationship will apply in the case of the DSCU inspection regime, or whether it will be sufficiently different? If the Minister is making the case that civilian policing and the operation of the DSCU should be parallel, such a cosy relationship should not be allowed with the DSCU—or, indeed, with the service police.
The Minister said that the SI had been introduced because of the Armed Forces Act 2021. That was three or four Ministers ago, and it has taken a long time for these small but important changes to be brought forward. Will he set out what other changes from the Act we are still waiting for? The reforms are moving at a snail’s pace. He will know about the regularity of armed forces Acts, and I do not want him to get to another one before many of the provisions from the last one are implemented. That means having a clear timetable for implementing the provisions.
The Minister said that the DSCU’s victim and witness care unit would be operational by early 2023. Will he set out more detail about the timetable for that and what will happen in the meantime? That may be only a few months away but, knowing Government timetables and what “shortly” sometimes means, I know that early 2023 could be at any point in 2023. Getting some specifics on the timetable is important to build trust.
I turn to the Armed Forces (Court Martial) (Amendment) Rules 2022. Labour will support these rules at the end of the debate, but I would be grateful if the Minister could provide answers to a few questions. They are worth asking, and they complement the discussions that many of us in this room had only a few weeks ago on the most recent SI on service policing.
The court martial system is one part—an important part—of our service justice system, but for service personnel, veterans and the public to have confidence in the whole system, every part of it must work properly. The prosecution of serious crimes in the service justice system is not working as well as it should. The conviction rate for rape cases tried under court martial was just 9% between 2015 and 2020, whereas the figure in civilian courts is 68% for parallel charges. If we look at the quality of justice, as the Minister suggested we do, we see a gaping divide between the expected outcomes in service justice on the prosecution of rape cases, compared with those in civilian justice.
Sir Mike Penning
This is a very difficult comparison. The Crown Prosecution Service decides which cases go forward, and its bar for that, particularly in rape and sexual assault cases, is very high. It wants to have confidence that it will win the case. There is no Crown Prosecution Service here, so, as former Victims Minister, I find the comparison of like for like slightly difficult to accept.
Luke Pollard
I am grateful for that intervention, because it allows me to challenge the Minister. If we are seeking to provide greater continuity between service justice and civilian justice, we need to question why those large gaps exist. Is the decision on whether to try a case based on the threshold of evidence presented in that case, or is it about the outcomes of the procedures within the justice system? We have a parallel justice system, and unless someone has been through it or operated in it, there is little public awareness of military justice compared to civilian justice. Notwithstanding what the right hon. Member for Hemel Hempstead has said, I think it is fair to try to understand what gaps exist to challenge the quality of justice.
The point was made well by my hon. Friend the Member for Garston and Halewood about which recommendations of the Lyons review the Minister has decided to accept. In our last SI discussion, I asked the hon. Member for Wrexham, who was sitting in the Minister’s seat at the time, about the recommendations for moving manslaughter, murder and rape from military courts to civilian courts. That recommendation was made in not only the Lyons review but the Defence Committee report that the former Minister drafted when she was on that Committee, to which more than 4,000 serving women and veterans contributed. The Government opposed the amendments on moving manslaughter, murder and rape and other sexual offences when we debated the Armed Forces Act last year.
If we are to look at the two systems in parallel and consider which is most effective, I am not convinced that the argument has been made as to whether we should be looking at simply defence of a system or at defence of an outcome. If we are to look, as the Minister has invited us to do, at the quality of justice and the quality of outcomes for murder, manslaughter and rape, we should perhaps look at that in relation to where this sits.
The Chair
I remind the hon. Gentleman that we are talking about the court martial rules. We are perhaps going a little off scope here.
Luke Pollard
I am grateful for that advice. If we are to look at court martial for serious offences, we need to look at whether things should be in the military system or should be dealt with via the civilian system, but I will go with your ruling on this one, Ms Fovargue.
If we are talking about courts martial, I invite the Minister to look again at the make-up of military panels. He mentioned the provisions for what should happen if a member were to become sick or otherwise indisposed and therefore not able to look at a case. Something that was heavily debated in relation to our last statutory instrument was the gender balance of those court martial panels—the provision brought forward was for a woman to be on the panel. Will the Minister set out whether the gender balance of the court martial panel would need to be looked at if the woman was disposed of by illness or other things? Will the guidance that his Department provides cover whether the gender balance of a depleted court martial board should be a reason for a trial to be re-resourced? What guidance will be provided?
I turn to the capacity of the service justice system to deal with the changes proposed in the statutory instrument. Dropping the level from seven to two seems logical. Looking at the number of personnel needed on a panel, the changes proposed seem to make sense. Will the Minister set out whether the increased numbers that would be required fit within the estimates of available personnel, and how those estimates were made, given that the Government have made no impact assessment? I am not convinced that without any work being done, it is sufficient for the Minister to say, “It will all be fine on the day,” when he has told this Committee that no impact assessment has been made. What assurances can the Government provide that the expansion of six-member boards will not contribute to a backlog in hearings? What assessment has been made of that?
Will the Minister look at the territorial extent of the regulations? As set out in paragraph 4.1 of the explanatory memorandum, the regulations deal with the United Kingdom, the Isle of Man and the British overseas territories, except Gibraltar. The Minister has probably been told by his officials that I ask this question fairly regularly. It seems that we are building up a large deficit of updated regulations that apply to Gibraltar. In the past, it has been said that is because the Gibraltar regiment sits outside the rules, which is an argument that I can understand. However, that does not apply to UK armed forces stationed in Gibraltar.
Will the Minister set out whether alternative provisions apply to Gibraltar for UK personnel stationed or based there, whether those provisions apply to the Gibraltar regiment or UK armed forces personnel stationed at a base in Gibraltar separately, and how the improvements being offered by the SI apply to UK armed forces personnel in Gibraltar? It seems that there is a deficit in relation to Gibraltar. It says in the territorial application—I say this for those who are following online; I am sure the debate makes good listening—that there is an ability for this to apply to courts martial held around the world. I understand that it does, but I would be grateful if the Minister could set that out.
Finally, in our last debate on these statutory instruments, it was obvious that there was a lot of cross-party interest from Members of all parties. However, there was not a huge amount of experience in defence justice. I suggested that the fantastic armed forces parliamentary scheme, which is co-ordinated between the Armed Forces Parliamentary Trust and the Ministry of Defence, could look at a component relating to defence justice. The previous Minister said that she would take that up. I would be grateful if the Minister who has taken her place could also look at that.
Although there are many parallels between defence justice and civilian justice, the approaches are very different. Some of the assumptions about how justice is delivered in our armed forces are sufficiently different that an introductory session into defence justice would make a useful addition to the experience provided to Members of Parliament in the AFPS.
Sir Mike Penning
The Committee will be pleased to know that I do not want to detain them for very long. I should declare my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests; I am the director of a law firm, even though I am not legally trained.
It is for the Minister to defend many of the points raised by the shadow Minister. However, as the former armed forces Minister—I have a lot of former ministerial titles—may I defend reservists? Many of the comments from the shadow Minister were about reservists’ experience. Modern armed forces around the world cannot operate without reservists. Those reservists can come under myriad different contracts. When I went to Afghanistan and Iraq, most of the American troops that I bumped into on a daily basis were reservists in some form. I used to be a reservist myself, but I am too old now—fortunately, for the armed forces.
The skills that reservists bring into the armed forces are often replicated inside the armed forces, but they often bring in skills that would be difficult for the armed forces to hold on to in terms of capacity. For that reason, it is a bit like when medics in our armed forces train inside the NHS, because we just cannot do that in military hospitals in the way that we used to many years ago.
Different contracts will be brought in, and it will be right for this specialist unit to bring in those skills—whether that is under a six-month or a two-year contract for a reservist is entirely up to the unit and the armed forces reserve to decide. But those skills are vital. I listened carefully to the shadow Minister. I am very proud of our armed forces. We could not have done what we have done around the world in peacekeeping terms without them. I recently visited Cyprus and the UN troops there, and our troops were reservists. That is very important.
Secondly, on the College of Policing, it is fantastic news that other police forces in this country that are not part of the 43 territorial police forces can make use of skills, training and qualifications from the College of Policing, because that never would have happened before.
Luke Pollard
I am grateful to the right hon. Member for giving way. Reservists do a brilliant job, and the blended force that we have between regulars and reserves is really important. The point I was making is that having the—
The Chair
Order. Can we curtail the debate on reservists? I think that is out of scope. We all appreciate that we are talking about the composition of the board and this statutory instrument on courts martial, so I think we need to curtail the debate on reservists and move back within scope.
Dr Murrison
I am very grateful, Chair, and my right hon. Friend’s insights into these matters are very valuable indeed.
I am also grateful to the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport, who speaks for the Opposition. He has asked a lot of questions that I will do my best to answer. If I do not give him satisfactory responses, I am more than happy to write to him.
I also thank the hon. Gentleman in relation to his comments about my hon. Friend the Member for Wrexham. Although she served for only a very brief time, I think she made an impact, particularly in relation to her report on women in the armed forces, which we debated on 31 October. I will not rehash that debate here today—I think we gave that subject a fairly good airing—and some of the points that the hon. Gentleman has made today were probably dealt with then.
It is important, just for context, to insist that this measure is a consequence of Henriques and Lyons, and their comprehensive review of this piece of service justice. We have genuinely attempted to incorporate their significant recommendations. I believe that the result is an improved service justice system, and I am convinced that the defence serious crime unit will be part of that.
It is also important to say that this unit is made up of elements of service police drawn from across the three services. I think that the Henriques’ concern was that we did not have a specific unit to deal with serious crime. We have seen reflections of that in civilian policing, too, with an increasing concentration of expertise to deal with crimes of a particular nature, especially when those crimes are serious.
In a sense, that is what we are doing here today. We are drawing together into one organisation the elements of service police who deal with serious crime, and I think that right hon. and hon. Members will understand the advantages and focus it will bring to the most serious three crimes in particular.
That said, it is important to put this matter into some sort of perspective because, in general, our service population is pretty law-abiding and does not engage in the sorts of crimes that we are chiefly concerned with today. Nevertheless, when such crimes happen, they need to be dealt with properly and in a way that is comparable to the way they are dealt with in civilian life.
May I deal with the point about reservists? Reservists are going to be important in this process for the reason that I have explained. They will be drawn from all elements of policing. We have very little control over that, in fact. It depends on our ability to recruit and retain reservists which, Ms Fovargue, I am certain you would call me out of order if I were to dilate on now.
However, reservists will be in addition to the 370. Regarding the length of time that they will serve at any one time, of course that will be in accordance with the reservists’ terms and conditions of service. The hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport will know that reservists are being used more and more these days in our armed forces. I recently came back from the Falklands, for example, where I saw, much to my surprise, reservists providing something like a third of manpower. I think that is extraordinary; I was not anticipating that at all. Very often, they are on three or four month-contracts, as it were, depending upon their civilian commitments.
I suspect that chief constables across the land would be rather concerned if their officers were disappearing for three or four months. Nevertheless, I anticipate that the service police will utilise their 24-day-a-year standard reserve commitment, and perhaps a little more depending on their agreement with their service and their civilian employer. The important point to make is that these reservists contribute now to service policing and will continue to do so in this new unit, but I hope in a rather more focused way.
On training, it is important to say that the constituents of the defence serious crime unit are already service police. They are trained, and in the main they do a good job. Under the Provost Marshal for serious crimes, the unit will focus its training more than is the case at the moment to ensure that College of Policing suggestions and guidance are carried out, and more courses will be provided to those who deal with serious crime from among that cadre. I hope the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport welcomes that.
Like the hon. Gentleman, I have an affection for Gibraltar. He is right that there appears to be a bit of an incongruity with the Royal Gibraltar Regiment and the Falkland Islands Defence Force—perhaps another could be cited. The Armed Forces Act applies to British forces everywhere, including Gibraltar. It applies to the Royal Gibraltar Regiment when it is operating with British armed forces with regular reservists from the UK. It is important to make that point. Otherwise, Gibraltarian law is by and large commensurate with that which applies to the UK.
Luke Pollard
I am grateful to the Minister for clarifying that point. That is not what the explanatory memorandum says, however. It says:
“The extent of this instrument (that is, the jurisdiction(s) which the instrument forms part of the law of) is the United Kingdom, the Isle of Man and the British overseas territories (except Gibraltar).”
It explicitly says that it does not include Gibraltar. I hope the Minister is correct, but if he is, the wording of the explanatory memorandum may need to be revisited.
Dr Murrison
The Armed Forces Act covers British forces everywhere, including Gibraltar. It applies to the Royal Gibraltar Regiment if it is operating with British armed forces. Otherwise, it does not in the same way, but the Gibraltarian Government have ensured that their legislation covers pretty much the same ground. I know it is untidy, but that is the reality of it—[Interruption.] Well, I am telling the hon. Gentleman what the situation is, and I hope he will accept that. He may wish to write to me, and if he wants me to write to him to clarify it further, I am more than happy to do that.
We are not relying on reservists in the defence serious crime unit, but we believe that, as elsewhere in defence, they will bring important value added to what we do. Obviously, that will evolve over time.
The hon. Gentleman asked what ranks are involved. Again, we are reliant on who the reservists are and who is tempted to join them. I obviously proselytise for them all the time, but we have to work with what we have got. That means that there will be a mixture of uniformed police and detectives, and we have to try to accommodate that as best we can. The hon. Gentleman will be delighted to hear that we will provide training where necessary to ensure that nobody in the reserve cadre is exposed to tasks for which they are not properly trained or equipped.
The hon. Gentleman perfectly reasonably asked about the budget. I will have to write to him, I am afraid, but he will have drawn from what I have said that, because the unit is constituted from officers from across defence, there will be a saving in those parts of defence, which will be translated to this unit. It is perfectly reasonable for him to ask about the additional costs that will be occasioned by setting up the unit, and I will write to him on that.
The hon. Gentleman suggested that no cavalry is about to charge over the hill. Again, I want to caution him. I do not want to give the wrong impression about service justice as it is. We have put a lot of effort into getting very senior judges to look at service justice and, in general, it is felt to be fit for purpose. The European Court of Human Rights, for example, has opined on the matter and has said encouraging things, although there is never any room for complacency. I think that the terminology, although I appreciate that it is well meant, is perhaps inappropriate. We are trying to improve the current situation and, in particular, enact the Henriques recommendations as much as possible.
On His Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary and fire and rescue services, I would expect those findings to be published in exactly the same way as the publication of any other Home Office constabulary findings. I would refute the suggestion of a cosy relationship, and, if I find evidence of it, I will certainly deal with it, because that is not the way, in my experience, that His Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary usually operates.
On the delay in the setting up of the victim and witness care unit, obviously, I would like it to be set up as soon as possible. I think that “early in the new year” does mean, “early in the new year”. I do not think that there is much plasticity in that, but I am absolutely resolved that this thing should be set up properly. That is why we are consulting with the Survivors Trust and the Victims’ Commissioner’s office in the hope that we can set it up as soon as may be.
However, I am sure the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport will agree that we do not want to set this up, only for it to go off half-cocked; I want it to be done proper. Certainly, authorities such as the Victims’ Commissioner ensure that what we end up having will be something that will pass muster when it is compared with its civilian equivalents. I hope that gives the hon. Gentleman the reassurance that he seeks.
The hon. Gentleman asserted that the prosecution of service crime is not working. Again, I just want him to be a little bit careful, because his suggestion is that the system is broken. I do not believe that is the case. In fact, we appear to be getting through cases more rapidly than our beleaguered civilian criminal justice system at the moment.
Conviction rates for rape—again, we covered this on 31 October—range from 4% to 75% on an annual basis over the past decade. Those figures are interesting, and, possibly, are the result of the relatively low numbers involved and so, to an extent, might be artefactual. However, what does appear to be the case, and the hon. Gentleman will know this full well, because he will have got briefing notes, just like me, is that we refer more cases to the prosecuting authority than is the case in civilian life.
The reasons for that are complicated. We will see how this develops over time, but one reason might be that awareness of the unacceptability of this, among the service population, is being heightened. I do not want to be complacent, but I am hoping that our efforts towards zero tolerance are working. If so, I would expect the referral rate to be as it is. I think that it might be an indication, although it is always easy, with data, to draw the wrong conclusions.
The fact of the matter is that more cases are referred than in civilian life, and you can deduce, Ms Fovargue, that that means that cases that would not have been referred in civilian life are being referred through the service justice system, and that, when they get to the prosecutor—because we want commonality between civilian and service life—proportionately more of those are not successful.
I think that would be one reasonable conclusion to draw but, because of the relatively small numbers, I think we need to be cautious about drawing conclusions. However, in all of this—running through it like a vein through a block of granite, I hope—is an insistence that we need to do better when dealing with serious crime, in the round, and particularly with sexual offences, as we know full well from what we have seen in the media recently.
On who should have jurisdiction, it is important to note that the final decision is always made by the civilian authority. In areas of doubt, a protocol, which is currently being worked up, will determine whether a civilian or service prosecutor has jurisdiction. However, if there is any doubt or disagreement, the civilian prosecuting authority will have the final say. Also—this has not been mentioned so far, but it is important to say—there is always recourse, ultimately to the Supreme Court. I think it is clear that there is a big interplay between both systems. I would encourage that, and think it will get greater over time. Indeed, everything that we have debated, from the 2021 Act through to these regulations, would underpin that.
The hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport asked what happens when women are disposed of. I am sure he did not mean to say that, but I know what he means. In other words, what happens when the woman on a court martial board has to stand down, through illness or for whatever reason? The answer to that question is that the judge has discretion. He has to weigh what is in the interests of justice. If he feels that the court martial board should be stood down and reconstituted, he will do that. He may think that the court martial board should continue, presumably because it has gone through a great deal of the evidence and is a long way through the process; he may take the view that the interests of justice are best served by the board continuing.
In respect of the new rules on the number of members and whether that will create a disproportionate burden on defence, I do not believe that it will; I think that the benefits far outweigh the costs. However, we plan to keep it under review over the next 12 months to see how it goes. The fact of the matter is that we are extending this to OR-7s. In my parlance, that is chief petty officers; in others’, it is staff sergeants, colour sergeants, and so on. That will increase the cadre of people and, bluntly, the experience and expertise of court martial boards.
Going through the list of things that the hon. Gentleman raised, it is important to make it clear that specialist capabilities, such as forensics, will be provided more or less as they are now, from the Service Police Crime Bureau. I think that the hon. Gentleman was concerned about where the specialist input comes from. Again, we are simply translating what we have at the moment but focusing it under the new unit.
I wonder whether I have missed anything out. I think that I have addressed most of the hon. Gentleman’s points, unless he wants to come at me again. I hope very much that I have answered his points. If he has anything more, I would be more than happy to—
Dr Murrison
The hon. Gentleman knows full well that that is not a matter for me. However, I am very sure that the defence serious crime unit will be more than happy to have a relationship with the armed forces parliamentary scheme, which is run by my excellent hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire (James Gray) and is a very fine organisation that has benefited a great deal of right hon. and hon. Members. I will be amazed if it does not take an interest in this. Indeed, I hope very much that it will choose to visit Southwick Park and see the new unit after 5 December, when it is stood up.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That the Committee has considered the draft Armed Forces (Tri-Service Serious Crime Unit) (Consequential Amendments) (No. 2) Regulations 2022.
Draft Armed forces (Court Martial) (Amendment) Rules 2022
Resolved,
That the Committee has considered the draft Armed Forces (Court Martial) (Amendment) Rules 2022.—(Dr Murrison.)
Ukraine
Luke Pollard Excerpts(1 year, 6 months ago)
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Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)
Before I make my remarks, I would like to pay tribute to our armed forces and veterans who came together on Remembrance Day yesterday. I was on Plymouth Hoe yesterday morning, but wherever we were we saw a nation pause, thank those who served and remember those who did not come back and those who were forever changed by war and conflict.
We are now on day 264 of Vladimir Putin’s criminal invasion of Ukraine, and with each day it becomes clearer that he is failing in this misguided war. Putin has not achieved his objectives: indeed, he has strengthened the western alliance, and with each of his decisions he further strengthens our resolve.
The Ukrainian liberation of Kherson, a region Russia had illegally occupied for more than eight months, is a testament to the skill, bravery and fortitude of the Ukrainian military and is a significant blow to the Kremlin. The Ukrainian advance comes only weeks after a ceremony in Moscow in which Putin announced the “forever” annexation of Kherson along with the Russian-occupied areas of Donetsk, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia.
Russia’s retreat from Kherson is a significant moment in the war, and the withdrawal shines a light on how badly the invasion is going for Putin. He has already forcibly enlisted more than 200,000 new recruits into the Russian army, and with around 100,000 Russian soldiers having been killed or wounded since the war began in February, the casualty rate of poorly trained, poorly equipped troops with low morale remains catastrophic. Body bags and burnt-out tanks are all Putin can offer his people.
As the Ukrainians continue to show incredible resilience in defending their homeland, we must continue to do all we can to support Ukraine both now and in the months ahead. The Minister will know that we on this side of the House fully support the help the Government are providing to our friends in Ukraine, and I want to put on record our thanks to the United Kingdom’s armed forces not only for their work supporting Ukraine and co-ordinating supplies of military aid and humanitarian support, but for reinforcing our allies on NATO’s eastern flank and training Ukrainian troops here in Britain through Operation Interflex.
On Britain’s military help to Ukraine, the Government have had, and will continue to have, our fullest support. We welcome last week’s announcement on the provision of further surface to air missiles to Ukrainian forces and welcome the announcement of support to protect and upgrade Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure, but given the parameters of the support we want to provide I wish to press the Minister gently but seriously on some of the uncertainties in that. The UK must support Ukraine for the long term, and I believe that there is cross-party support on that, but that means that we must move beyond the ad hoc announcements made by Ministers about donating weapons to being clear about a long-term strategy for military, economic and diplomatic assistance through 2023 and beyond.
Luke Pollard
And humanitarian support. In August, the Government announced that the UK and its allies would begin to establish a plan of action to support Ukraine into 2023, but we still have not seen one. Will the Minister say where it is and why there is a delay in producing the plan? We are running out of 2022—will the report and strategy be ready by the end of the year? What state is it in now, and is it a costed plan or just a set of ambitions? We ask those questions not to put the Minister on the hook or in a bad place but to press him, because we want to see the support gotten right, and scrutiny and clarity for the United Kingdom will help our allies to ensure that they are equally as robust in supporting Ukraine.
Even before the Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, Labour had been making the case for an updated integrated review. The Defence Secretary previously argued against that, but now argues for it, which is a welcome U-turn from the Government. I know that the Minister has had a similar change of heart, and that is also welcome. However, the Government have given little signal as to what will be in the integrated review refresh and how it will be updated. I would be grateful if the Minister also set out what he believes needs to be updated in the integrated review. Does the review have clear terms of reference that can be scrutinised? Will he tell us which cuts to the armed forces he now wants to reverse and whether further Army cuts will be halted?
At the last Defence questions, my hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley Central (Dan Jarvis) asked a fair question about why the Government are pressing ahead with cuts to our armed forces before the integrated review reports. What happens if the integrated review says that we should have kept the capabilities and equipment that the Ministry of Defence is scrambling to scrap now?
It is no secret that next-generation light anti-tank weapons have been vital to the defence of Ukraine, but the Secretary of State has yet to adequately explain whether a new contract to replenish UK NLAW stockpiles has been signed, and with whom. NLAW production will require old production lines to be rebuilt and restarted. If an order was placed today, how long would it be before a new NLAW rolled off the production line? Would it really be two years away? If that is true, that delay is dangerous and one that the UK can ill afford.
I turn to a technical but serious area that has not been addressed: dual-use technology, which is civilian technology that can have a military application. Last month, the United States imposed a set of new sanctions on Russia targeting a network accused of procuring military and dual-use technologies from US manufacturers and illegally supplying them to the Russian war machine. The Royal United Services Institute, the UK defence think-tank, confirmed in August that UK components are appearing in Russian weaponry. That can include oscillators and standard crystals. No UK-produced equipment should end up in the hands of Putin and his generals, but it is especially difficult to be sure of that when it comes to dual-use equipment. The House has already passed sanctions on such equipment, but the concern is that western electronics and technologies are still reaching Russian weapon manufacturers. That will be concerning to colleagues, so we need clarity that British firms are not, in good faith, making materials or contributing to the supply chain of western manufacturers whose end products could end up killing Ukrainian civilians.
What steps are the Government taking to identify dual-use technologies that could be used by Putin? What steps is the Minister taking to stop those technologies from getting into the hands of Russia or its agents? Does he feel that the current dual-use technology sanctions are sufficient? What steps can he take, working with our allies, to monitor and shut off possible purchasing routes for Russia of western dual-use equipment like gyroscopes, wi-fi technology, ceramic chips, resistors and semiconductors? This is a complex area, and I realise that I have put the Minister on the spot, with his colleague, the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, the hon. Member for Aldershot (Leo Docherty), replying to the debate, so if he cannot set that out, I would be grateful if he put a letter in the House of Commons Library. It is a difficult area but one that we must ensure that we are getting right.
Since the war began, Russian troops have been committing atrocities against Ukrainian civilians. Just as in Bucha, Izium and Mariupol, there is now evidence of Russian war crimes in the Kherson region. We will not know for some time how many civilians the Russians have butchered, but we must be unrelenting in our pursuit of those war criminals until each and every one of them has stood trial for their crimes.
As Ukrainians face the arrival of winter, it is becoming increasingly clear that Putin’s strategy is to target civilian infrastructure, including energy and water plants. The Minister set out some support that the UK Government are providing, but what additional missile defence is the UK providing to its allies to protect Ukrainian infrastructure from missile attacks by Russia? What plans does he have to deal with the potential for an additional flow of cold and hungry refugees this winter? The effect of Russian bombardment of civilian infrastructure is already degrading Ukraine’s ability to provide clean water and power to all of its population, and that will drive a further humanitarian crisis.
I turn to how we can afford the defence of the UK and our allies in Ukraine. The Government’s disastrous mini-Budget cost £30 billion—the equivalent of 60% of the UK’s current defence budget, which could have been better spent on hospitals, teachers and the cost of living crisis. That sheer amount of money—abused by the Government—is the cost of 23 brand-new Type 26 frigates. The MOD is the only Government Department in the current spending round with a real-terms revenue cut each year. New figures from the Institute for Fiscal Studies show that, adjusted for inflation, that is a £2.7 billion real-terms cut to defence spending. At the Defence Committee, the Secretary of State for Defence said that with additional defence inflation, he has £8 billion of additional costs on his budget. If we are to continue to provide support to Ukraine and ensure that we can afford an enhanced forward presence for our NATO allies and our other NATO commitments, we need certainty that funding will be available as required for our armed forces.
I have been re-reading the rather good “Shifting the goalposts?” Defence Committee report, which shows that Labour Governments have always spent more on our nation’s defence than Conservative Governments. Does the commitment to raise defence spending to 3% of GDP by 2030 still exist? Can the Minister see a point where Government defence spending will fall below the NATO 2% of GDP target? Given the Minister’s and Secretary of State’s previous comments on defence spending, can the Minister say whether he and the Secretary of State will still be in their places if Defence funding is cut in the Chancellor’s autumn statement on Thursday?
Catherine McKinnell
On defence spending—I do not believe that this has yet come up in the debate—Putin is clearly using propaganda as a serious weapon in this battle, and it is one that we all have an interest in countering. It would be helpful if the Minister, in summing up, could give some reassurance that the UK is committed to the counter-disinformation unit and working in collaboration with the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office to ensure that we play our part so that this propaganda does not win in Ukraine or elsewhere?
Luke Pollard
I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention. She is right. Putin has invested heavily in disinformation technologies and resources to spread misinformation and disinformation in social media news feeds right across the world, including here in the United Kingdom. That investment was not made on a whim. It was made against a clear strategy, with the wish being to divide, split and misinform western populations and use our democracy against us. To protect our democracy and our allies, we must be absolutely determined to tackle disinformation, misinformation and those dark cyber-activities online. We are talking about not just state-sponsored hacking and cyber-attacks—that is one end of the spectrum—but all our constituents seeing things on their Facebook news feeds that are deliberately deployed and shared to try to split and degrade public opinion and create the impression that the United Kingdom’s support for our friends in Ukraine is somehow coming from a dark place, when it is not. That means further action to strengthen our work on social media. It means looking at where Russia is investing in disinformation and how we can strengthen our civil society against that in future. I hope the Minister and his colleagues, for instance those looking after the Online Safety Bill, will take that seriously, too. It is not just military grade activity we need to look at; it is everything through to how each of us uses our social media.
To conclude, let there be no doubt that Labour Members share the Government’s resolve to support Ukraine for as long as is necessary to defeat Putin. As the Ukrainian countryside turns to mud and then freezes over, we are about to enter an incredibly difficult winter, as military doctrine normally suggests, with frontlines frozen and civilian populations suffering further. The Ukrainians are showing incredible resolve in standing up to Russia, but they cannot do it without continued western support. How we use the winter months to prepare for the expected spring offensives—ensuring our supply lines, commitment, resolve and technologies are available to our friends in Ukraine—will be crucial in keeping the pressure firmly on the Kremlin and ensuring that Ukraine wins.
Oral Answers to Questions
Luke Pollard Excerpts(1 year, 6 months ago)
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Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)
Putin’s criminal invasion of Ukraine has led many NATO members to reboot their defence plans. The Defence Secretary now agrees with Labour that the integrated review needs updating. Would it not be absurd to cut the Army any further when Ukraine and our NATO allies are facing such clear and rising hostility? Can the Minister tell us which cuts he wants to reverse? Can he tell us whether further Army cuts will finally be halted, as Labour has consistently argued for?
James Heappey
The integrated review is indeed being refreshed—quite rightly, because in the past nine months we have seen war in Europe and growing belligerence by China in the far east. Exactly what the shape of our nation’s armed forces must look like must be a consequence of those new threats. I am not going to rule anything in or out at the Dispatch Box today, because we need to look at what those competitions with Russia in the immediate term and China in the longer term look like, and what our armed forces therefore need to look like.
Royal Navy: Conduct towards Women
Luke Pollard Excerpts(1 year, 6 months ago)
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Urgent Questions are proposed each morning by backbench MPs, and up to two may be selected each day by the Speaker. Chosen Urgent Questions are announced 30 minutes before Parliament sits each day.
Each Urgent Question requires a Government Minister to give a response on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)
I welcome the new Minister to his position. Those who serve in our armed forces should expect the highest standards of professionalism and personal conduct, which must be supported and reinforced by the Government. As the son of a Royal Navy submariner, I know that the Submarine Service is on the frontline of our national defence. Every submariner must be confident that the people they serve alongside in the Royal Navy have their back. These claims of abuse are extremely serious and must be thoroughly investigated, and those responsible must be held accountable.
These reports lift the lid on a culture of abuse and cover-up in our armed forces. In far too many cases, victims are unable to raise their experiences within the chain of command. Women account for 11% of our forces personnel but, between 2019 and last year, 81% of victims of sexual assault in the military were women, and almost half of them were at the start of their military career. Behind these statistics are hundreds of women who have been let down. This cannot be allowed to continue. Victims of sexual abuse serving in our armed forces must have confidence in the processes that allow them to report their experiences, and they must know that robust action will be taken.
I suggest that the Minister reads the Defence Committee’s report before coming back to the House to tell us how he will implement all of it. Will he make the investigation he has just announced a public investigation so we can see what action is needed? Can he explain why the Government continue to resist Labour’s proposal that the most serious cases, including murder, manslaughter and rape, should be tried in civilian courts instead of military courts? What progress has been made on the RAF’s review of allegations of sexual assault, which was announced in August? Will those findings be made public?
Our armed forces are the very best in the world, and they deserve the very best, too. The Government must step up and protect those who protect us.
Dr Murrison
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his points. I agree with him about external scrutiny. That is why the investigation that has been set up, which will report soon, to which I referred, will include an individual from outside Defence, who is currently being selected for his or her independence, probity and integrity, who will be alongside that investigation. I do not know where this is going to go. I suspect it is going to be complicated and may take a while. I want it to report quickly, but I do not want to put a time limit on it necessarily.
However, it is going to report “soon”—that wonderful, plastic term. It will have within it an independent individual —the hon. Gentleman will understand that that is a divergence from the norm—because I am absolutely clear that there needs to be oversight of this that is outside the process. He will know full well that these investigations are conducted properly always—I have been involved with a number myself—but there has to be the appearance also of their being transparent. I hope that that will give him some reassurance.
The hon. Gentleman refers to the Henriques report, most of which of course was accepted. He may also be aware of the joint protocol that will be drawn up for the very serious offences that he cites between the civilian and the service prosecuting authorities. I hope that that goes some way to addressing that outstanding concern that I know he has.
A parallel strand of work is being set up by the commander of the submarine flotilla to look into conduct and culture. That will be headed by Colonel Tony de Reya from the Royal Marines. That will report, I hope, by the end of the year. It is separate from the investigation on the specific that I have cited in my opening remarks, but, obviously, it will touch on much of the same material. I look forward to returning to the House to discuss that once Ministers have had a chance to examine its findings and conclusions.
Draft Armed Forces (Covenant) Regulations 2022
Draft Armed Forces (Service Court Rules) (Amendment) (No. 2) Rules 2022
Luke Pollard Excerpts(1 year, 6 months ago)
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Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)
It is good to see you in your place, Ms Bardell.
I welcome the Minister to her first statutory instrument Committee on the Front Bench. I hope that the Prime Minister was listening to her speech because, having sat through an enormous number of statutory instrument Committees since I was elected in 2017, it is good to hear a Minister on top of their brief and able to speak beyond the words given to them by officials. That is welcome, and I hope that the Minister stays in her place if any reshuffle comes her way. At a time of such severe international difficulties, we need good people who know our military and can make good decisions.
Labour will oppose neither of the draft statutory instruments. They both move in the right direction. However, I have a few questions and a few points to make. A number of Opposition colleagues have participated in the armed forces parliamentary scheme, as I know have Government Members, which gives parliamentarians an opportunity to look at service life. Indeed, I have just returned from Estonia, where I saw the amazing work of the King’s Royal Hussars and 2 Rifles in defending our allies there. We need to make sure that the systems put in place are suitable for not only service personnel but, importantly, their families. I know that the Minister has an interest in defence families, which is a fresh injection into the way the Ministry of Defence works, and I wish her the best of luck with that. I will ask a few questions about defence families, but I encourage the Minister and all parliamentarians to fully participate in that scheme if possible.
The AFPS could benefit from a slight tweak. At the moment, the three basic courses do not include a module on defence justice. Given the important role that defence justice plays for our service personnel and the confidence that we must have in defence justice, the ability for parliamentarians to have a passing understanding of how the defence justice system differs from the civilian system and why there is a difference would not only aid Committees such as this in scrutinising legislation, but would help us to understand daily service life.
Carol Monaghan (Glasgow North West) (SNP)
I thought the hon. Member was going to add the experience of women. Although the Minister has done a huge amount of work on the issue, that would be another useful addition to the parliamentary scheme, so that parliamentarians could sit down and hear, behind closed doors, the true lived experience of women in the armed forces.
Luke Pollard
I am grateful for that intervention, and I agree. It is quite refreshing to see the freedom that service personnel have to speak to parliamentarians on visits, and experiences of sexual violence within the forces, which the Minister will know about from her time on the Defence Committee, are very relevant to what we are discussing today.
I will first talk about the covenant regulations and then move on to service justice. We need to recognise that it is not just our service personnel, their families and people who have served in the past who need to have a robust armed forces covenant that is as effective as possible. Across the country, there are some locations—Plymouth is one—that do the armed forces covenant very well. There are other locations where the armed forces covenant sits gathering dust on a shelf, and the ability to make sure it is truly implemented and lived is a challenge that still has not been fully met.
I would like the Minister to consider important ways in which the covenant could be strengthened. One of those is the extension of the covenant beyond education, healthcare and housing to include other areas of central Government activity—employment, social care, pensions, compensation and benefits, to name but a few. Our service personnel, veterans and their families should not incur unfair disadvantage in any walk of life, and the importance of the armed forces covenant as a principle needs to be extended to all public bodies.
There is a second area where this SI could seek to go a little further. Despite the Minister mentioning the 2023 review of the covenant, there are still no plans for the covenant to apply to central Government, including the Ministry of Defence itself. It is worth taking a moment to consider that omission. If the armed forces covenant is to be real, and if service personnel, their families and veterans are to have confidence in it, the Ministry of Defence must lead by example. I would like to see Ministers, including the Minister here today, put more effort into making sure that happens.
A whole host of service charities, including the Royal British Legion, Help for Heroes and the Confederation of Service Charities, have expressed concern that central Government do not have a duty under the covenant. In terms of the duties under the covenant, it is fine for this place to put additional responsibilities on local government—which has a lot of responsibilities already, but not the resources to go with them—but the Government need to walk the walk if they are to talk the talk, and that means applying these duties to central Government as well. This is not a small point. National Government oversee many policy areas that service personnel experience difficulties with, so they should have clear, measurable duties under the covenant to deliver for personnel, their families and veterans.
Satisfaction with service life has dropped below 50%, according to the Government’s own figures, which should worry Members on both sides of the House. I seek not to make a party political point; we need to make sure that we increase morale among our armed forces personnel if we are to retain their skills and experience, and honour our obligations as, in effect, employers. There are still clear failings when it comes to housing, healthcare, social care and other issues.
As we approach Remembrance week, attention will naturally turn to how the covenant is implemented, and rightly so. As parliamentarians, we should not only ask questions publicly, but challenge constructively in private and ask when it will apply and whether the 2023 review of the covenant will include consideration of its greater applicability to central Government. I am afraid 2023 is already too late.
Let me turn to the draft Armed Forces (Service Court Rules) (Amendment) (No. 2) Rules 2022. The Minister will know, because she and I have spoken about this many times, that the Labour party stands four-square with our armed forces and backs the Government’s effort in Ukraine to support our NATO allies, but we do need to make sure that we get all aspects of service life right. Although the rules are a step in the right direction, I have some questions about how we can make sure that they are delivered appropriately.
It is entirely sensible to introduce the overriding objective that the Minister has set out for courts martial and to give the Director of Service Prosecutions responsibility for warning prosecution witnesses of trial dates. Those were pragmatic recommendations from the Lyons review, which we welcome.
Likewise, it is welcome that the statutory instrument will ensure that there is at least one woman on the board of each court martial in circumstances where there are lay members on the court. A normal board will have between three and seven people, so it is a step in the right direction to have one woman there, but I would like to have a greater sense that we are moving towards balance. We need to see more women in our armed forces full stop, but the explanatory memorandum could have shown a greater sense of the direction of travel that Ministers wish to take. I would be uncomfortable with the idea that it is good enough that there is a woman on the board and that some additional women may, although not necessarily, be provided by the shuffle that the Minister explained. We need a sense of the direction of travel.
I encourage the Minister, in the implementation of the SI, to look at how the language can be tweaked to make sure we have greater representation, which is particularly important when the board considers cases that include servicewomen or situations in which a servicewoman has been affected as a victim. The lived experience of the people who are judging someone and making decisions on their career and on prosecution should have an element of familiarity with the experiences of either the person on trial or the witnesses and victims.
Some Government statements on upholding military justice are still more rhetoric than reality. I wish to put on the record the Government’s rejection of the headline recommendation of the Lyons review that murder, manslaughter and rape should be prosecuted in civilian rather than military courts when the offences are committed in the UK, with the Attorney General able to rule otherwise in exceptional cases.
It is a shame that the Government have chosen not to adopt fully the proposal—the headline recommendation—but it is more than disappointing, because the Minister may not have listened to her own recommendations. I do not wish to embarrass her, but last year she co-authored a Defence Committee report on women in the armed forces that argued that the Government should remove court martial jurisdiction over cases of rape and cases of sexual assault with penetration, as well as for cases of domestic violence and child abuse. I know the Minister has been in post for only a short time, but I encourage her to continue to provide challenge within the Ministry of Defence in respect of why the full recommendation was not included in the statutory instruments before us and on how quickly the change will come. Will she set out whether any work on that is in train in the Ministry of Defence?
There is a litany of reasons why this issue is important, including serious backlogs, investigators missing obvious lines of inquiry and the unnecessary retraumatisation of victims. Let me give the Committee two examples taken from the written evidence submitted by the Centre for Military Justice to the Defence Committee inquiry on women in the armed forces. In one case in which a servicewoman reported an alleged sexual assault, the Service Prosecuting Authority accidentally revealed the victim’s home address to the alleged assailant by sending to the alleged perpetrator a letter intended for the victim. That is clearly unacceptable. In another case, where a servicewoman reported sexual assault, court martial transcripts show that a judge advocate remarked of the
“quite appallingly bad police investigation…how stupid was it not to interview the people who were at the scene”.
There is still work to be done, and I encourage the Minister to look at whether that recommendation can be brought back.
It is unsurprising that the recent service justice system policing review said:
“The Service Police do not investigate enough serious crime to be considered proficient”.
That makes a clear distinction between service policing and the civilian role. We must understand the particular demands, stresses and secrecy that may apply in a military environment, and have examples of where that should not apply and where the expertise and familiarity of civilian policing could produce better results for victims and greater confidence in the justice system. The numbers speak for themselves. Ministry of Defence figures show that from 2015 to 2020, the conviction rate for rape cases tried under courts martial was just 9%. Recent data shows that the conviction rate was 59% for similar cases that reached a civilian court. We know that prosecution rates for rape are far too low in civilian courts, but that comparison shows a problem.
I would be grateful if the Minister answered a number of questions. First, my hon. Friend the Member for Blaenau Gwent made a point about the explanatory memorandum. I am afraid that if the Minister is to serve on Delegated Legislation Committees with me, she will need to know that I, too, read the explanatory memorandums quite closely. I am interested in why the territorial extent of the regulations includes United Kingdom overseas territories but not Gibraltar. Considering the large UK military presence in Gibraltar, why is that particular overseas territory excluded from the regulations? Are the provisions replicated elsewhere, or is a separate statutory instrument needed to deal with Gibraltar’s specific legal jurisdiction?
I am not a fan in impact assessments of the phrase
“no, or no significant, impact”
because I believe that those are two very different things. I know that it is not the Minister’s fault, and that officials who write such explanatory memorandums must use the house style, but there is a difference between no impact and no significant impact. When looking at the impact of any SI, it is unhelpful to have those blurred together.
My final question is about the quite helpful expansion of what a “family member” means in the SI. As someone who believes that families should be at the heart of our community but that we should not specify what a family is because each of our families is different and each is loved by the people within them, I was interested to see how the Government have laid out what a family is and what a relation is. When a service person has a foster child, or when there is one in a defence family, I think that would be included within the broader remit, but I would be grateful if the Minister confirmed it for the record.
May I politely challenge the use of the language
“of the full blood or of the half blood or by marriage”
in the Bill? There is language that, as parliamentarians, we should encourage movement away from. When we talk about the “full blood” or the “half blood”, it suggests that some children have a legitimacy that is different from that of adopted children, for instance. I encourage the Minister to look at whether in future SIs that type of language can be retired.
Edward Timpson (Eddisbury) (Con)
I am pleased that the hon. Member has raised the issue of family make-up, especially when fostering is involved, as well as adoption. Of course, there is also special guardianship. That is another area that we need some clarity on, to ensure that it is not missed out in the definition.
Luke Pollard
I am grateful for that intervention. We want the rules around service life to better reflect the way the world is. Having come from a service family myself—my old man was a Royal Navy officer—I recognise that the family that I grew up in was very different from the families that were on the marry estate on either side of us. The regulations must adopt the full range. That speaks to the need for us to develop a better understanding of what defence families are like. Parliamentarians and the Ministry of Defence have a good understanding of service personnel and an increasing understanding of veterans, though there is more work to be done there, but defence families are often a bit of an afterthought.
I mean that in a constructive way, to encourage the Minister to challenge the Ministry of Defence further about whether that language could be updated—even if it is strictly defined by primary legislation elsewhere—and replaced with more inclusive language that reflects how service families are structured in real life. I know that she feels passionately about this and takes such concerns seriously.
I wish the Minister the best of luck in her role. We need people with experience and expertise in the Ministry of Defence at this difficult time, and I hope that she stays there for quite some time to come—until she is replaced by a Labour Member in due course.
Sarah Atherton
I will get back on track, Ms Bardell, and return to the armed forces parliamentary scheme. I would like to see more women on the court martial, but we have only 12% women at the moment. There is a raft of measures that have gone in to try and help recruitment and retention of women in the armed forces, not only with regard to what I have said about when things go wrong but with terms and conditions for uniform and body armour. The culture issue will be addressed, but it will take time. We will see more women in the military—I am confident of that—and as a consequence we will see more women in the court martial system.
Luke Pollard
Is it possible for the Minister to publish the data, on an annual basis, of how many men versus women are on the boards? It would be useful to be able to see the change. The stats that the Minister gave earlier were useful, but seeing the direction of travel on an annual basis as part of normal MOD reporting could be helpful. Is that something she would consider?
Sarah Atherton
Yes. One thing I did not mention is that the intention is to review this after a year to look at its success, and to ensure that women are on the boards. If there are operational requirements as to why someone has to be withdrawn, that is something we need to keep an eye on. I will write to the hon. Member to see if we can do it on an annual basis, rather than just at the 12-month mark; hopefully we will see more women on the court martial board.
Duty of due regard will be reviewed. It is a starting block; when it was introduced, it was always a starting block. It will be reviewed with regard to the devolved administration involvement and the central Government. If the requirement is there to include these statutory agencies and if there is a requirement to extend the scope to other fields outside health education, we will do so, but we need evidence to say that that is necessary first.
Let me turn to Gibraltar. The Gibraltarian regiment is a civilian-raised regiment, and does not come under the definition of the UK regular forces. It falls outside the Armed Forces Act, but if it wants to be included it can write to the MOD and request that; that is not a problem.
Luke Pollard
May I press the Minister on that point? She is right about the Gibraltar regiment, but for non-Gibraltar regiment personnel stationed in Gibraltar—there are UK service personnel outwith that regiment—this legislation, according to the territorial extent, would not apply. Is that her understanding? That regiment and the additional personnel we have there seem to be dealt with differently.
Sarah Atherton
That is a fair point. I will get back to the hon. Member on that.
Families extend to foster children and special guardianships. I reiterate that the definition of an extended family goes outside the scope of the Armed Forces Act, because we recognise that it needs to be more encompassing. Again, we will keep an eye on that.
In response to the hon. Member for Glasgow North West, LGBT is not quite in scope, but I will say quickly that Lord Etherton is undertaking a review. We need to right some wrongs, and I will look into that. Murder, manslaughter and rape have been mentioned— again, slightly outwith. The independent pay review body will report in spring, but at the moment the armed forces have the highest salaries they have had in 20 years. A cost of living package is in place to support them going forward. I am conscious that we will also be looking at our BAME community. I will work with representatives to ensure that they are not outside what we are focusing on, and that they are included in how we go forward with the transformation and modernisation of the military.
The hon. Lady also mentioned children going into schools. Children already receive a service pupil premium, but some work is going on as to how beneficial that is and whether we can do more to help service families as they move around the country and abroad. The Army Foundation College Harrogate is an exceptional college, taking in a lot of young people from all sorts of diverse backgrounds and educating them to a higher level than when they joined. It also educates them in future military life. There have been some issues—it would be wrong to say that there had not been—and I will look into them. I think that is everything.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That the Committee has considered the draft Armed Forces (Covenant) Regulations 2022.
DRAFT ARMED FORCES (SERVICE COURT RULES) (AMENDMENT) (NO.2) RULES 2022
Resolved,
That the Committee has considered the draft Armed Forces (Service Court Rules) (Amendment) (No. 2) Rules 2022.—(Sarah Atherton.)
Ukraine Update
Luke Pollard Excerpts(1 year, 6 months ago)
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Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)
I thank the Secretary of State for advance sight of his statement. At a time of much Government chaos, I also thank him for his calmness and professionalism in the job.
The incident with the RAF Rivet Joint surveillance aircraft that the Defence Secretary described is serious. He outlines that the correct steps have been taken, the malfunction has been confirmed and the incident has now been resolved. It is welcome that RAF flights have restarted and that there has been a clear recognition from Russia that the aircraft was flying in international airspace. The RAF has this House’s full support; we are grateful to it, to other UK forces and to our NATO allies for their work protecting the alliance and protecting freedom. The incident is a serious reminder of the importance of avoiding escalation and miscalculation while continuing with the UK’s united support for Ukraine.
Almost eight months on from Russia’s criminal invasion of Ukraine, I pay tribute to the remarkable and continuing Ukrainian resolve in the face of Russian aggression. Putin has made a huge strategic miscalculation in invading Ukraine, which has resulted in Russian forces suffering heavy losses: the MOD estimates 25,000 Russian dead, tens of thousands injured, tens of thousands who have deserted and more than 4,000 armoured and protected vehicles destroyed.
At a time when Ukrainians have shown incredible resilience in defending their homeland, Britain must honour their bravery by remaining unwavering in our support for Ukraine. I am grateful that the Defence Secretary has set out the UK’s continued support under Operation Interflex for training Ukrainian forces; we thank UK members of the armed forces for their work. I would also be grateful if he confirmed when the promised action plan for continuing UK support for Ukraine will be published, outlining the type and quantity of military, economic and diplomatic support that Ukraine will receive. Putin needs to be in no doubt that our resolve will continue; whether the Defence Secretary’s party or mine is in charge, that will not change.
I think it is time the Defence Secretary made a statement about the planned drawback of troops from Estonia and about how that decision can be properly scrutinised. I would also be grateful if he set out whether orders have been placed for the replacement next-generation light anti-tank weapon missiles and when our stockpiles will be replenished.
There has been a concerning increase in Iranian drone activity. I would be grateful if the Secretary of State set out what additional support can be provided by the UK and our allies to ensure that the Shahed 136 and Mohajer 6 drones from Iran can be properly intercepted and defeated to protect Ukrainian infrastructure.
In his speech last night, the Chief of the Defence Staff, Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, threw into doubt the planned rise in defence spending to 3% of GDP, referring to it as a “potential increase”. I would be grateful if the Defence Secretary spelled out the Government’s position on defence spending and whether the increase is confirmed or—as Admiral Sir Tony Radakin says—only potential.
The Opposition’s support for Ukraine is unwavering. The Defence Secretary knows that he has Labour’s full support in the provision of military aid to our friends in Ukraine. Putin must fail in his aggression. As we enter an incredibly difficult period of the war, with cold weather drawing in, we must make sure that we support not only our friends fighting in Ukraine, but those civilians who are there fighting on its behalf. I would be grateful if the Defence Secretary set out what support the UK can offer to civilian infrastructure. The protection of energy sources is particularly important, not only for Ukrainian industry but for the Ukrainian people.
Mr Wallace
I am grateful to the shadow Minister for his questions. To assure the House, I did not choose to make my statement when my counterpart on the Opposition Front Bench, the right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey), was not here; I spoke to him at length yesterday. I also assure the House that although there are some things that are of the highest sensitivity and cannot be said in public or in this House, I continue to engage with the party leaders on the most sensitive areas to ensure that they are fully apprised throughout this process.
Calibration is incredibly important to me. We are dealing with a President and with Russian forces who, as we have seen from the Rivet Joint incident, are not beyond making the wrong calculation or deciding that the rules do not apply to them. That is why I ask those constituents who are fearful that this report could lead somewhere to have faith that all of us in this Chamber are working on a detailed response to ensure that we walk what is sometimes a tightrope.
On Rivet Joint, as I said, we have made sure that the flight path is pre-declared, so that it is no surprise to the Russians and is logged in the normal manner. Indeed, I informed the Russians that they would be escorted, so there were no surprises.
The shadow Minister asked about the action plan; I think he was referring to the broader Government action plan, including foreign aid and support. I concur that the foreign aid package and helping Ukraine’s economy to survive, stand on its feet and go from strength to strength are as important as an effective military response. I will press my colleagues in other Departments to ensure that we get the shadow Minister details of the time and date, but it is a fundamental plank for Ukraine. Some of what I discussed when I was in the United States was in that area.
On the second battlegroup deployed in Estonia, hon. Members will remember that after the invasion a number of countries deployed what we called enhanced forward presence groups in Bulgaria, in Romania and around Europe. There was some talk about deployment in Hungary, but that did not materialise. Germany stepped up in Lithuania, and so did we in Estonia. The second battlegroup was always going to come back; our fixed position in Estonia is effectively a battlegroup that we vary in size and capability. To recognise the changed threat, we will keep our guided multiple launch rocket system, our longer-range deep fires and indeed our air defence capabilities, which are not always an accompaniment to that battlegroup. We have effectively beefed up the existing battlegroup, but we need to bring back the next battlegroup, which has been extended for another six months. I thank the men and women of the armed forces whose time out there has been extended. That battle- group will come back.
We should not forget that we also have a squadron of tanks in Poland, more forces, a company—a sort of small battlegroup—in Bulgaria, part of a US strike brigade, and we are now exploring having more Royal Engineers in Poland to assist with training Ukrainians and with things like combat engineers. That is why the battlegroup came back. I engage with my Estonian counterparts, whom I met only last week; indeed, I met them the week before in Poland to talk them through this, and they were given prior notification. We are very keen to continue to work strongly with them.
We have given an extra commitment on Estonia to have a brigade headquarters and a brigadier. In the same way, the German plan in Lithuania is to allocate a brigade for fast response to deploy, and that is one of the ways we seek to go. We are also helping Estonia to develop its own divisional headquarters, hand in hand, but we always keep things under review. We are all waiting for the NATO regional plans that will set out in detail how our forces should be deployed across Europe as part of a bigger comprehensive plan. It is really important for us all to be guided by that.
The Ukrainians are having success in shooting down a number of the Iranian drones, but it is a question of sheer scale. Members will not have missed the similarity with V1 rockets. I urge the Iranian Government to understand that supplying Russia so that it can indiscriminately kill civilians, including women, children and babies in prams, is surely not an activity with which Iran wants to be associated. I urge them to desist as soon as possible. We are not at all convinced by the Iranian Government’s denials that they are not supplying the drones.
We will use some of the funding that I have mentioned to invest in other novel capabilities that we can find to deploy. In the meantime, we are continuing, and will step up, our supply of low-velocity missiles to Ukraine to work with the Stormer system and ensure that we can help with detection or electronic warfare schemes. Obviously the Ukrainian conflict has flushed out counter-drone technologies that we all need. Members will recall the Gatwick airport scenario. Everyone came up with magic solutions, but, if memory serves, when we tested them almost none of them did what it said on the tin. However, we are helping rapidly, and the best of innovation is being used to help the Ukrainians.
When I was in Washington, it was made very clear from No. 10 that the commitment on 3% of GDP by 2030 would stand. I should be interested to know whether the Labour party will match that important commitment. If Labour Members are getting ready for government, as they seem to think they are, these are the questions that they will need to answer for the British public and the British armed forces as they lay out their timetable and their plan. They will have at least two years in which to do it, so I am not too worried—[Interruption.] It is when I am guessing the election will be, but that is definitely above my pay grade.
As for how we can get the Ukrainians through the winter, we are all working internationally to see what we can do. The European Union has announced a fund, and we will ensure that we do what we can to help Ukraine with critical infrastructure and energy.
Ukraine
Luke Pollard Excerpts(1 year, 7 months ago)
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Alec Shelbrooke
I am grateful for my right hon. Friend’s comments. I reiterate what I said at the start: President Putin’s comments are irresponsible. No other country is talking about nuclear use, and we do not see this as a nuclear crisis. President Putin should be clear that, for the UK and our allies, any use of nuclear weapons at all would break the taboo on nuclear use that has held since 1945 and lead to severe consequences for Russia.
President Putin has launched an illegal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. His forces continue to commit senseless atrocities. The people of Ukraine seek only to restore their sovereignty and territorial integrity, and we will continue to support Ukraine’s right to defend.
My right hon. Friend speaks of tactical nuclear missiles, but nuclear is nuclear. I reiterate what the Secretary-General of NATO said:
“President Putin’s nuclear rhetoric is dangerous. It is reckless. NATO is of course vigilant. We monitor closely what Russia does. Russia must understand that nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought. And it will have severe consequences for Russia if they use nuclear weapons. And this has been very clearly conveyed to Russia. So we will continue to support Ukraine. And we will continue to support them in their efforts to liberate even more territory, because they have the right to do so.”
It is not and never has been tactically smart to outline exactly what the response would be to any potential situation. We will continue on the lines that this Government and, indeed, the Secretary-General have outlined.
Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)
I welcome the new Minister to his place. It is because Ukraine is winning that Putin’s behaviour is becoming so volatile. The sham referenda, the irresponsible nuclear sabre-rattling, the missile attacks on civilians—these are the hallmarks of a tyrant on the ropes and a tyrant who is losing.
Labour stands with our friends in Ukraine. With our unshakeable commitment to NATO, the Minister knows that he has our full support for the actions the Government are taking to help Ukraine win. Yesterday’s missile attacks on civilians are a significant escalation. The NATO Secretary-General was right to describe the attacks as “horrific and indiscriminate”.
Ministers have Labour’s full support in countering Putin’s aggression. In that spirit, I ask the Minister when he will set out a long-term strategy of support for Ukraine, so that we can make sure that Putin’s war ends in failure. Can he confirm that the NLAW—next generation light anti-tank weapon—replacement orders have finally been placed? When does he expect to replenish our depleted weapons stockpiles? What assessment has he made of the worrying statements by Lukashenko and the continued presence of Russian troops and armour in Belarus?
I would be grateful if the Minister addressed the concerning media reports of the withdrawal of almost 700 British troops currently deployed to our NATO ally Estonia, without any planned replacement. That risks sending the wrong message at the wrong time, and it has worried our international allies. We cannot walk away until the job is done. With that in mind, will he reassure the House that he will not withdraw any further UK troops from our allies, and that the UK will meet our NATO commitments?
Finally, as more bodies are unearthed at the sites of war crimes, we remember them and we remember those killed yesterday in Putin’s criminal missile strikes. Does the Minister agree that the best justice for those killed is victory for Ukraine, a free and sovereign nation, and war crime tribunals for those responsible?
Alec Shelbrooke
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his kind comments and I look forward to working across the Dispatch Boxes on these vital issues.
On the hon. Gentleman’s comments about the horrific war crimes we have seen unfold every time there is a Russian retreat, I think that every decent human being is appalled. I am proud that the UK Government are funding the International Criminal Court, and we will do everything we can to support Ukraine in bringing the perpetrators of these horrific crimes to justice.
I hope the hon. Gentleman will forgive me if I come back to him with a written answer on the postures from Lukashenko.
On Estonia, the overall capability of our commitment there is far more important than the number of troops alone. We have committed to strengthening that capability over the forthcoming years. I was in Estonia, and indeed Latvia and Lithuania, in my previous role in the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. I have seen at first hand the work that takes place there. All our NATO allies can be reassured that we are committed to making sure that the NATO frontline is secure. We work with colleagues and there will be variation in how that is done.
With regard to support, the hon. Gentleman will have noticed that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Defence has set up the international support fund. This country contributed £250 million to that, and I believe the total figure is now above €400 million. That is in place to help support Ukraine as this war moves forward and the conflict carries on, so that it can use that money not only in the conflict but to rebuild and, of course, ensure it has the ammunition supplies and things it needs.
With regard to NLAW and our weapons supply, we are working with industrial supply chains and are confident that we will have the ability to defend ourselves and to give support, but we do not comment on operational capability beyond that.
Ukraine
Luke Pollard Excerpts(1 year, 7 months ago)
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Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)
I start by welcoming the wonderful news of the release of British prisoners of war overnight. It is welcome that they are returning home, but we recognise the pain and hurt of all the families involved, because not everyone is returning safely.
I also welcome the Minister’s new job in the Cabinet. Before the last reshuffle, the shadow Front Bench team said to the Front Bench team that we were hoping that he and the Defence Secretary would stay in their positions, and they have. I also welcome the new Minister, the Under-Secretary of State for Defence, the hon. Member for Wrexham (Sarah Atherton), to her place.
Seven months on from Russia’s criminal invasion of Ukraine, we have reached a new and critical phase of the ongoing conflict. We should all be inspired by the remarkable resilience of the people of Ukraine, who have refused to bow to Russia’s oppression. I recognise the extraordinary Ukrainian counter-offensives that have taken place in recent weeks, which the Minister set out in such detail.
Our argument has never been with the Russian people but with the dictator in the Kremlin. Overnight, we have seen brave Russian civilians stand up to the authoritarian state that curbs their freedom, restricts their voice and keeps the people in poverty while the oligarchs count their yachts and villas. Today, possibly thousands of Russian civilians are in jail, arrested simply for exercising their human right to protest. As we have stood with the Ukrainian people against aggression, I make special mention in the House of the courage of those protesters.
The horrors of war that we have seen in the newly liberated areas remind us of the atrocities and the pain that many Ukrainians have suffered in the past weeks. I join the Minister in setting out a clear determination that those responsible must be prosecuted and brought to justice for the hideous war crimes that we are seeing unfolding.
Dr Murrison
It is welcome news that a load of generals and colonels have been sanctioned and placed in The Hague’s waiting room, as it were, but does the hon. Gentleman agree that we need to go much further down the food chain than that? Each and every one of the individuals involved in those atrocities needs to have their card marked. They have dishonoured the profession of bearing arms and need to be dealt with sooner or later.
Luke Pollard
I agree with the right hon. Gentleman. Anyone who perpetrates war crimes against civilians must know that, in the 21st century, they will be prosecuted and followed in the pursuit of justice from the day they commit that atrocity to the day they die. We must not leave any space, justification or excuse for war crimes— at all, anywhere, ever. That is a message that will be sent from hon. Members on both sides of the House to those people, regardless of rank, who have persecuted civilians and committed war crimes against them.
Alicia Kearns
One of my grave concerns is the prosecution of sexual violence in conflict. The issue is that, often, we cannot get the evidence, because by the time the prosecution has come—once the shame has been allowed to pass and there has been discussion—it is too late to collect that evidence. I would welcome the hon. Gentleman’s thoughts on a special tribunal formed to collect evidence and prosecute sexual crimes to ensure that, in all conflicts, evidence is collected at the start to ensure prosecutions at a later stage.
Luke Pollard
I am grateful for that intervention. The shadow Minister for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and International Development, my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Stephen Doughty), and I were in Kosovo only a few months ago, where we witnessed the effects of the horrible sexual violence that was used as a weapon of war. The determination of the international community then was that it would never be repeated, but it has been in conflicts ever since. We need to make sure that not only is the evidence collected, but the victims are given the support that they will need, in many cases, for the rest of their lives. As we made it clear that killing civilians will not be countenanced, so we make it clear that using rape and sexual assault as a weapon of war will not be countenanced. We will come after those people as well.
Bob Seely
In the Syrian war, the Russians and their Syrian allies targeted hospitals as primary targets. Does the hon. Member agree it is regrettable that at the time we did not say and do more and that the international community did not say and do more to hold responsible those senior army officers who were responsible for the deliberate targeting of hospitals, which is one of the most basic breaches of the Geneva conventions?
Luke Pollard
I am grateful for the hon. Member’s intervention, and I do tend to agree with him. As a country, we need to take stock of the freedom that Putin has been given over many years—not just in Syria or parts of the countries bordering his country, but in Crimea—because the tactics the Russians are using in Ukraine now have been perfected over many years and the space the international community has given him to do that has encouraged the use of many of those tactics. We need to look carefully at how we stand up for such individuals in the future, but we will do that by standing firmly with the people of Ukraine at this time. I will make some progress before I give way again.
It is clear that Vladimir Putin is a bully. His partial mobilisation announcements along with his sham referendums to illegally annex large swathes of Ukraine are shameless. They are a cynical attempt to justify a war that has gone badly wrong for Russia. We should view partial mobilisation as weakness—an attempt to hide the fact that, so far, Russian strategy has failed, weapons have failed, command and control has failed, and none of Russia’s war objectives has been met. Putin’s latest miscalculation will lead to more Russian families losing their sons, more Ukrainians being killed and more suffering. The mobilised forces sent to Ukraine will be on the receiving end of high-end western weaponry, and a determined and morally just Ukrainian military defending every inch of its country. In these circumstances, with the poorly equipped Russian conscripts facing cold weather, it is perhaps not surprising that we are seeing so many reports of desertion and troops being unwilling to fight. That means Putin will, I regret, resort to more and more fear to try to achieve his objectives.
Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)
I think the cross-party support we are hearing today for Ukraine and for the victims of murder and sexual violence sends a very powerful message. Does the hon. Member agree that the next challenge, even though it feels early to be thinking this yet, is to be preparing to win the peace? Quite often in the past, when we have left military successes—Iraq would be the outstanding example—we have not laid strong foundations to win the peace. Does he agree that we could use our soft power and places such as Wilton Park to hold conferences with the Ukrainians about what sort of democracy and peace we can help them create after this is all over.
Luke Pollard
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, and I agree with him that our commitment to the people of Ukraine has to be long term—ensuring not only that they win and Putin fails, but that they can rebuild a nation that is proudly sovereign, proudly independent, safe and secure, and able to stand tall on the international stage, which is precisely what Vladimir Putin would fear the most. That is what our commitment must be, and I share the hon. Gentleman’s view that that commitment and determination is cross-party—from every single party in this place.
The actions and rhetoric we are seeing from Vladimir Putin are not new, sadly. I agree with the Minister when he says that Putin’s words on the use of nuclear weapons is sabre rattling, and it is a weakness of his argument that he is resorting to it. These are the actions of a desperate man clinging to power at the helm of a pariah state. His threats should not only be condemned by every party in our Parliament, as they are, but by every country—every peace-loving country—on this planet. His actions show how desperate he is, how weak he is and how much he has miscalculated, and those actions show that he must fail.
We must not downplay the seriousness of the situation. People at home and abroad, having heard those words, are understandably worried about the gravity of the threats that have been made by Russia. In this House, however, we must be careful not to fan the flames of Putin’s information war of fake news. I think I speak for everyone in this place when I say that now is not the time for the UK to weaken or dilute our resolve for Ukraine, but to remember that at heart Putin is a bully and the only way of standing up to a bully is by making sure that we do so firmly and determinedly, and that such a commitment is long lasting.
Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
I completely agree with what my hon. Friend is saying about Ukraine now, but we could have been saying it back in 2014. One problem is that we did not take this issue seriously enough in 2014, because that emboldened Putin and now we see what we see. I worry that sometimes we focus exclusively on things that Putin says about nuclear weapons, and not enough on the warfare in which he has already engaged with this country through cyber, targeting many Members of the House and the political establishment. Do we need to do far more to ensure that we are protecting ourselves?
Luke Pollard
I agree with my hon. Friend. His has been a siren voice that has been warning this House and the public about Putin’s actions for a great many years, and we must ensure that those lessons are learned. Putin has been telling the international community what he wants to do for many years, and he has been engaging in economic warfare, cyber-warfare, disinformation and political interference for many years. We need to strengthen all our fronts if we are to deter that type of behaviour, not only from Russia but from other states that wish to do us harm in the future.
Alex Sobel (Leeds North West) (Lab/Co-op)
To follow on from the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant), my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard) was with me in Kosovo a couple of months ago where we heard about a Russian disinformation, misinformation, and hacking centre that employs thousands of personnel in Serbia. Do we also need to take this fight to third countries that are facilitating Russian misinformation, disinformation and hacking, including in Ukraine, the Balkans, the Baltic states and around the world?
Luke Pollard
My hon. Friend is right. The cyber-campaigns against the west and against freedom and democracy are not contained only to bot factories in St Petersburg; they are deliberately being deployed around the world through, in many cases attempts of deniable cyber-warfare. We know that is coming, and we must ensure that we strengthen our own defences—political, military, economic and cyber—against that. At this very moment there are probably enormous numbers of posts on social media feeds across Britain that are seeking to spread misinformation. We must be alive to the reasons why they are there, to why Russia is investing in that capability, to what effect they are seeking to create in our society, and we must counter that. That is a job not only for ourselves, but we must also support our allies in doing so.
We need a long-term joined-up strategy. We know that despite Putin’s strategic miscalculation, Russian aggression will continue. The Government have had Labour’s full backing to provide military support to Ukrainian troops, and they will continue to have that. We welcome the new Prime Minister’s confirmation that this year’s military funding for Ukraine will, as a minimum, be matched over the next year. However, we now need to set out a clear strategy for what military, economic and diplomatic support for Ukraine will be. In summer the Government said that they would set out a roadmap for that, and I would be grateful if, when he responds to the debate, the Minister said when he expects that to be published.
Christine Jardine (Edinburgh West) (LD)
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that one important aspect of that is that a great many other eastern European countries and former Soviet states along the Russian border have been carefully watching what happens in Ukraine with some trepidation? It is as important to have a long-term strategy for Ukraine as it is to reassure those countries of NATO’s commitment to their future.
Luke Pollard
I agree with the hon. Lady. Our commitment to our allies in eastern Europe must be concrete and long-term, and we must also consider the tactics and strategies used by Russia in Ukraine to update how we plan to defend and deter any aggression. We have seen with the development of pinpoint accuracy artillery fire and loitering munitions that some of the tactics we once thought we would deploy may need to be updated to ensure that we can deter any threat and, if a threat moves to actual military conflict, that we can win in those circumstances. I am grateful for the hon. Lady’s intervention.
The strategy that I hope the Minister will outline should set up long-term, politically broad support for Ukraine in the future, because only a long-term strategy will reassure the Ukrainians, and also the British people, that we will stand unwaveringly with their country. It will also send a clear, unmistakable message to the Kremlin that Britain will continue to stand with Ukraine and our NATO allies for as long as it takes to see off Russian aggression, not just in Ukraine, but in the Baltic states, in Bosnia and Kosovo, in the Mediterranean and the middle east, in the north Atlantic and the high north, and on social media as well.
That means that we need to look at the Prime Minister’s announcement in updating the integrated review. The Prime Minister’s commitment to match the funding for military assistance to Ukraine next year is welcome, but we are yet to see the action plan that will give us the detail. We need to see that in the context of the UK’s wider defence arrangements. A few weeks ago, the Leader of the Opposition and the shadow Defence Secretary visited the British Army’s outstanding training program for Ukrainian forces, meeting the brave Ukrainian troops who are by now on the frontline, fighting in the Donbas, having been armed with British skill on that training program. This is a vital training program for the Ukrainians, which should be expanded and extended throughout next year and beyond, if the Ukrainians need it, and should also include cold weather training.
This week the Prime Minister also confirmed that the Government will update the integrated review of foreign and defence policy in response to the ongoing situation in Ukraine. I welcome this U-turn, which is good news. While Labour has been arguing for months for the need to update our defence plans, 20 of our NATO allies have already rebooted their defence plans and their spending since the invasion of Ukraine started in February. The decision that has now been taken should have been based on national security, not the Conservative leadership contest, but it is a welcome U-turn. Labour is ready to contribute and happy to support the Government in making sure that the next integrated review corrects the mistakes of the current one. However, if we want to pursue the persistent global engagement that was so present in the last integrated review, we must not cut 10,000 troops from our Army, and should look again at scrapping Hercules military transport planes, the plans to cut 10% of the reserves and our failure to have a war-fighting division able to be contributed to NATO until 2030.
An updated integrated review must also make British industry and our peacetime defence procurement systems a major priority. We cannot support Ukraine in the long term or ensure our own UK security when, on day 211 of this conflict, the MOD has still not proved capable of signing the contract to produce replacement stocks for the highly valued NLAW—next generation light anti-tank weapon—missiles that the Ukrainians are using to defend against the Russians. I would be grateful if, in summing up, the Minister set out when the Government expect that contract to be signed and when those missiles will be delivered, because depleting our stockpile is not a good strategic answer.
Wayne David
I very much agree with my hon. Friend. Does he also agree that it is essential that, at this crucial time especially, the Government do not make snide remarks about our European partners? It is very important to have the maximum unity in opposing what Russia is doing in Ukraine.
Luke Pollard
Rebuilding our European relations is a key part of making any integrated foreign policy review work. Those of us on the Opposition Benches can say very clearly that our friends across the channel are our friends. They are not our foes—there is not a question mark about it—and we stand with them in the face of Russian aggression. This is not a political game to be played. When the Kremlin can find division between the allies of the west, it will exploit it. We must stand firmly with our allies against this.
It would be remiss of me not to mention the armed forces’ incredible contribution on display last week during the late Queen’s state funeral. As a Plymouth MP, I am especially proud of the contribution of forces based across the south-west of England. I would like to put on record Labour’s thanks for the armed forces’ steadfast dedication to our country. They really have shown the best of Britain, and we are incredibly grateful for the part they played and continue to play in supporting Ukraine against Russian oppression. It was an honour to meet today, on a cross-party basis, some of the pallbearers who carried the Queen’s coffin.
Finally, on the Labour Benches, we are taught, as part of the trade union movement, that unity is strength—that we stand together and we are not divided. I say to the Minister that this is now a cross-party sentiment in this place, because it is the strength of Westminster when the party that I represent, the party now in government and every other party stand together in the face of such aggression, and we will continue to do so until Ukraine is free.