Armed Forces Bill

Tom Tugendhat Excerpts

Monday 26th January 2026 Commons Chamber

[James Cartlidge (South Suffolk) (Con)]

It is a privilege to open for the Opposition on Second Reading of the Armed Forces Bill, given the global circumstances in which we find ourselves, and the sense that the ability of our armed forces to stand up to renewed threats has not been at issue to this degree for many years.

Before turning to the Bill, I want to take this opportunity to place on record my thanks, and those of the Opposition, to a particularly special group of people: those members of the British armed forces who served in Afghanistan, in the cause of freedom and in the wake of the horrific 9/11 attack on our closest ally, the United States of America. The 9/11 attack was not just an attack against the US mainland; it was also an attack on ourselves, and not only because of the 67 British lives that were lost when the twin towers were hit, but because our western way of life seemed to be under direct attack.

So I am glad that President Trump followed his wholly inaccurate and misjudged remarks about the service of our personnel in Afghanistan with praise for our military, but their contribution should never have been in doubt. Given the immense pain that his words will have caused the loved ones of those who were lost in Afghanistan, we send a message to those families today that theirs was far from a loss in vain; it was a just cause, where British soldiers played as much a part as anyone else, and one for which we will be forever grateful.

[Tom Tugendhat (Tonbridge) (Con)]

I am very grateful to my hon. Friend for those words. Will he associate himself with the Canadian, Danish, French, Australian and New Zealand armed forces, and those from many other countries around the world, who served alongside us in that NATO operation? They stood by us, even though article 5 does not apply to Australia or New Zealand, and lost troops in combat, yet I did not hear an apology for them.

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[Tom Tugendhat (Tonbridge) (Con)]

It is a great privilege to speak in this debate. Unusually, I pay tribute to the Minister for Veterans and People, the hon. Member for North East Derbyshire (Louise Sandher-Jones), who could be sporting the same colours as me. As a fellow veteran from the finest corps in the country, she will no doubt have many contributions of her own to make.

Today is Australia Day and India’s Republic Day. Given that we are talking about the armed forces, it is worth remembering that over the last 100 years it has been very unusual for us to have gone to war without very close allies by our side. In fact, the two largest volunteer armies in the world were the Indian army in the first world war and the Indian army in the second world war.

[Tom Hayes (Bournemouth East) (Lab)]

The right hon. Gentleman gives me a very good prompt, because this morning I was at the war memorial in Bournemouth, where two new plaques were unveiled for the 12 Indian soldiers who died at No. 8A Indian general hospital, which is now Bournemouth town hall. The plaques mark their contribution to Britain’s fight in world war one and honour their sacrifice. I agree with the right hon. Gentleman that the sacrifices of our allies, particularly our Indian allies, have too often been forgotten. Will he join me in commending Ramesh Lal, who has been pivotal in making those plaques happen?

[Tom Tugendhat]

I absolutely will. I am very grateful for the fact that those soldiers are remembered in Bournemouth, just as they should be remembered across the country.

I crave a personal indulgence and remember Tim Robertson from the Australian special air forces regiment, whom I fought alongside in Iraq. Sadly, he was killed a couple of years ago while fighting fires in northern Queensland. Many veterans serve in many distinguished ways after they leave the service—some even on the Government Front Bench.

We are at a moment when the world has changed. Many of us have just been watching the events in Davos, and three speeches really stood out. The first—the obvious one—is the one that the President of the United States gave, which set out a vision that led many of us to question where this world is going. There were two other speeches, however, that were rather important and, in a way, much more fundamental to the way that we should see Britain and our armed forces. The first was by the Prime Minister of Canada, who set out a very clear warning to us all that the comfort that we had got used to, and the arrangements in which we had luxuriated, are no longer valid for this era. We can talk about spending 2.5% of GDP on defence, and we can talk about spending 3% after the next election, but these are luxury beliefs. They are not realistic and do not account for a changed world.

The third speech, which in many ways was the most challenging, was from the Chancellor of Germany, who correctly pointed out that Europe—he included us in that—has simply not been prepared for the challenges that we face. The Germans have answered that by raising €100 billion, as the Secretary of State knows. We are not in a position to raise money in the same way that Germany does, because our debt has been higher, but the truth is that we are still facing the same threats as Germany—we are just facing them in a different way. We are facing them in the North sea and the Baltic. We are facing them in the Irish sea and the Atlantic, where we see Russian and Chinese vessels scraping our cables and destroying our communications, or trying to do so. We see the ways in which they are attacking our energy infrastructure. They are trying to hit our hospitals through cyber, and to undermine the security of this state in many different ways.

Those three speeches should set the context for this debate. One warned us that our allies may no longer be there for us, the second alerted us to the fact that the comfort is over, and the third was absolutely clear that our contributions must rise. That is where we come to this Bill and these commitments.

I appreciate what the Secretary of State has said, and what my hon. Friend the Member for South Suffolk (James Cartlidge) has countered with. I do not wish to criticise the Secretary of State for the fact that the defence budget has increased—I recognise that and welcome it—but it is not enough to increase it to the level we would like. It is necessary to increase it to the level that we need, because that is one element of the Budget that we do not choose. It is chosen for us by the threats we face: it is chosen for us by the posture of the Russian and Chinese forces we face.

It is certainly true that we have seen some extraordinary news out of Beijing in the last 48 hours, with generals having disappeared, presumably down a salt mine, as they have fallen out of favour with the chairman of the Chinese Communist party’s military committee. It is also certainly true that the Russians are embedded in the most gruesome and horrific war in Ukraine, where they are murdering more of their own people than they are of the enemy, although they are doing their best to kill as many Ukrainian civilians as they can. None the less, it is true that those armies, navies and forces are attacking us, and we need to be ready to face them.

I would like to look at how this Bill provides a response to that. We have quite rightly heard about the emphasis on the reserve, and on the way in which medical teams, interpreters and others have contributed. I would like to pay tribute to the military leadership for the way in which it has looked to change how the armed forces work with reservists with careers or skills that are very hard to get through traditional military routes. In particular, I am thinking of cyber, because we are looking for something very different. I have huge respect for the Minister for the Armed Forces, a friend with whom I served on far too many adventures overseas, for the fact that he can do 30 pull-ups, but how fast can he hack into a Russian terminal? I am not sure it is in his skills set. These are different skills, and we need to look to the reserve to provide such skills.

That is where I look to our young people in this country. I do not know how many Members in the House have read the recent Centre for Social Justice report on the number of graduates claiming welfare at the moment. Apparently, it is 700,000. That is a huge number of young people who have an enormous amount to offer our community, our country and our allies, but who are being parked in a system that does not include them. To come back to what the armed forces are for, they are not just for the defence of the realm against foreign threats; they are for the cohesion of the realm at home, too. They are for bringing us together, making us understand who we are as Brits and making us proud of who we may be as Northern Irish, Welsh, English or Scottish. They are about understanding that we are stronger together and that we are part of a greater whole. Having 700,000 young people parked on welfare is a pretty big indictment of the failure not just of Government, but of our understanding of our own place in this country. I am not saying that the armed forces are the answer to all of that, but they are surely a contributory factor that we need to be looking at.

To turn to another area, over the last few years we have had long conversations about defence resources for Ukraine. We have heard about the shell shortages and the need for armour and next-generation light anti-tank weapons, but what is the real need in Ukraine? It is the need for technology that changes the game. When one talks to a Ukrainian general, or in fact to a more junior officer such as a Ukrainian colonel, one finds that the conversation is not about armour, as it so often is in the UK, or even about submarines—built so brilliantly in the constituency of the hon. Member for Barrow and Furness (Michelle Scrogham). It is about drones and the technology that powers them. I say drones and technology because they are actually separate. The plastic, the rotors and the body—the design—last about nine months on the Ukrainian frontline and the power unit lasts about four weeks, but the technology that allows a drone to defeat the armour, get through the jamming and strike the enemy lasts between seven and 14 days.

That technology is where we need to be advancing fast, but for all our talk of sovereignty, the truth is that only two nations have a sovereign artificial intelligence capability, and that does not include us. They are the United States and China. At the moment, we have only one choice, which is to use the US approach, and that is clearly the right answer for today, but is it the right answer for tomorrow? That is the question we need to be asking ourselves. We need to be asking ourselves where we can develop that technology and how we can secure—for our own defence, within our own timeframe and within our own resources—the ability to understand a battlefield, shape events and determine the technology that will actually defeat our enemies. That is a huge challenge, and I appreciate that this Bill is not meant to answer all those questions, but this surely has to be the question that the armed forces are asking now.

I will close by merely saying that, yes, it is of course true that the numbers are inadequate, and it is certainly striking that in the last few weeks the Iranian regime has murdered roughly the same number of people as are serving in our Royal Navy today, but it is also striking that we are still—and, sadly, increasingly—dependent on foreign technology and not able to meet our own needs, which is where the armed forces and the armed forces equipment deal need to be looking next.

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

It is a pleasure to follow my fellow Essex MP, the hon. Member for Colchester (Pam Cox), not least as she has the privilege of representing Merville barracks, which I have visited a number of times down the years and which is the home of our elite unit, the 16 Air Assault Brigade. I have to be careful in saying that, because I have a former royal marine, my right hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge (Tom Tugendhat), sitting on the Benches behind me.

I thank the Minister for the helpful briefing on the Bill that he arranged for me at the Ministry of Defence last week. I am prepared to admit to the House that there was a slight communications mix-up. When I was originally invited into the Department, I left my phone in my office, thinking I was going into a briefing about events in Iran. I was both surprised and delighted when I was ushered into one of the historical rooms at the MOD to be pleasantly confronted by the entire team of officials responsible for the Bill. I am grateful to them for their subsequent briefing, which was extremely helpful.

The Armed Forces Bill is a very necessary piece of legislation that has to be passed by Parliament at least every five years. By tradition, this quinquennial Bill is relatively non-controversial. In that spirit, as the shadow Defence Secretary, my hon. Friend the Member for South Suffolk (James Cartlidge), said, just as we did with the Armed Forces Commissioner Act 2025, the Opposition see our role as that of a critical friend to the Bill by engaging in debate with an aim to improving it where possible—although we do, of course, reserve the right to hold the Government to account on a variety of matters. I may take the liberty of returning to two such matters in particular.

Although the Bill’s 55 clauses and seven schedules cover a variety of topics, with everything from drones—a particular hot button for the Minister, and indeed for my line manager—to powers of commanding officers, the Bill mainly encompasses four principal areas: reserves in clauses 31 to 37; defence housing and other property in a lengthy clause 3; the armed forces covenant in an equally lengthy clause 2; and potential changes to the service justice system, which is covered in several clauses, but principally clauses 5 to 16 and 20 to 26. I should like to say a little about each of those areas in turn.

Before I do, though, I place on the record that in this debate on the Armed Forces Bill—a very important piece of legislation regarding the future and welfare of His Majesty’s armed forces—not a single Reform MP has been present in the Chamber, let alone made a speech. If these people want to wrap themselves in the flag, they should at least take the trouble to turn up to support those who actually defend it, both in this country and around the globe. Reform Members have been too busy today spreading misinformation about my party’s attitude to Northern Ireland veterans—another reason, I suspect, that they did not want to come into the Chamber and face the music.

[Tom Tugendhat]

The shadow Minister will remember that one of the first things I did on leaving the Army in 2013 was to write a policy paper for Policy Exchange titled “The Fog of Law” on lawfare—that legal intervention on the battlefield that causes confusion and leads so many down a terrible path, of which Northern Ireland is one example, although there are many others. He will remember that our party has been on this for years, trying to clear the obstacles that have been created by various different constructs such as the Human Rights Act 1998 and the European convention on human rights. I am sure he will now be one of the champions, along with the Leader of the Opposition, on finding a proper solution to answer that. Will he agree that this is how real government is done—by doing the hard work over many years to find the real answers that apply, and not simply by shouting at others?

[Mr Francois]

My right hon. Friend is right. There is an old saying in politics that the world is run by those who turn up. Well, Reform did not turn up.

On the reserves, I should first declare an interest. I served as a Territorial Army infantry officer in the 1980s in the 5th Battalion of the Royal Anglian Regiment, a NATO-roled battalion that formed part of the 49th Infantry Brigade, which in turn was part of the 2nd Infantry Division, whose core mission was essentially to reinforce what was then the British Army of the Rhine, or BAOR, in the event of world war three. Including service in the Officers’ Training Corps prior to joining 5 Royal Anglian, I did some seven years in total. I was on Exercise Lionheart in 1984 as an officer cadet and also exercised in Cyprus and West Berlin as a junior officer.

Nevertheless, I was at no time deployed on active service and so, unlike the Minister, I have no medals at all, because I never did anything that merited one. Despite that, I am still proud to carry the late Queen’s Commission, and I like to believe that had the balloon gone up, our battalion would have done our best to defend the bridge over the Leine river, which was our wartime task.