Oral Answers to Questions
Tommy Sheppard Excerpts(2 years, 5 months ago)
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Mr Wallace
My hon. Friend refers to a scheme that is stewarded by the Foreign Office. I am happy to hold a surgery for colleagues on both sides of the House on the ARAP scheme, for which I am responsible, and I will broaden it by bringing along Ministers from other Departments so that they, too, can answer these questions and deal with individual cases brought by Members. If the House gives me leave, I would be happy to arrange it.
Tommy Sheppard (Edinburgh East) (SNP)
The Minister for the Armed Forces (James Heappey)
The Ministry of Defence did not contract private companies to undertake state-building as part of UK military operations in Afghanistan. Reconstruction activity could take many forms and could be commissioned in many ways, both from within the MOD and from elsewhere in Government. Does the hon. Gentleman have a particular company in mind?
Tommy Sheppard
The Foreign Office tells me it has spent £54 million with a company called Adam Smith International, but it will not tell me on what the money was spent. Can the Minister assure me that he will provide details of any contracts his Department has with Adam Smith International with regard to Afghanistan? There has clearly been a failure of nation-building in Afghanistan, and this Parliament needs to consider whether that failure is related to the organisations that were chosen to implement Government policy and the programmes they developed on the ground. May I ask for further assurance that the cloak of national security will not be used to withhold information?
James Heappey
As I said, the Ministry of Defence did not contract with companies to undertake state-building activity. I will clarify whether Adam Smith International had any role in anything we might count as reconstruction. The hon. Gentleman mentioned the Foreign Office, and his question might be better addressed to colleagues there.
Oral Answers to Questions
Tommy Sheppard Excerpts(3 years, 10 months ago)
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Tommy Sheppard (Edinburgh East) (SNP)
Angela Crawley (Lanark and Hamilton East) (SNP)
The Minister for the Armed Forces (James Heappey)
The MOD is supporting the Government’s campaign against covid-19 disinformation by providing specialist personnel in advisory roles. This work is led by the Cabinet Office and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. The Government are also working closely with social media platforms and academia to tackle this issue, and the Government’s focus remains on promoting factual public health advice and countering inaccurate content.
Tommy Sheppard [V]
Disinformation by active promoting of falsehoods poses a significant threat, but so too does disinformation by omission. The National Security Council’s report on Russian interference in UK politics has been ready for publication since October 2019. To have trust and confidence in our democracy, the people of the United Kingdom need openness and transparency, so if the Government have nothing to hide, why do they continue to refuse to release this report?
James Heappey
As these are Defence questions, I am somewhat outside my portfolio in answering in this question, but the Secretary of State, who sits in the Cabinet, tells me that the security committee is not yet formed, which is why the report has not yet been published.
Middle East: Security
Tommy Sheppard Excerpts(4 years, 3 months ago)
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Mr Wallace
My hon. Friend had an excellent record as a Foreign Office Minister. I will ask the Prime Minister at the NSC next.
Tommy Sheppard (Edinburgh East) (SNP)
Are there any other members or officials of the Iranian Government whose assassination the United Kingdom would find acceptable?
Mr Wallace
I do not know how to start on that question. The United Kingdom would always seek to follow international law in dealing with threats against it. Within that international law range all the options such as arrest, detention and disruption, but there are some occasions—for example, when we saw the events in Syria take place—when, unfortunately, kinetic or lethal strike has been engaged by the RAF. The British Government have been very open about that, and it followed a vote in Parliament. We will always reserve in this country the right for us to defend ourselves against threats posed to our citizens, and I do not think the First Minister of Scotland would disagree with that at all.
Armed Forces Recruitment: Under-18s
Tommy Sheppard Excerpts(7 years, 2 months ago)
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Liz Saville Roberts
It is my understanding that we are indeed the only NATO member and the only standing member of the UN Security Council to do so.
This is a well-rehearsed argument—forgive me—but it is worth reminding the House that 16-year-olds cannot buy a kitchen knife in a shop, although they can be taught to kill with a bayonet. They can enlist and train in the Army, but the law states that they cannot play “Call of Duty” on an Xbox or watch the Channel 5 documentary series “Raw Recruits: Squaddies at 16”. To watch it online, they would have to tick a box to confirm they were over 18. If it were not so serious, it would be laughable.
Our respect for the armed forces as an institution and for the individuals who represent it makes it easy to treat the institution as beyond question, but I propose strongly that that is dangerous and wrong. There has been no thorough review of the enlistment of minors since at least the time of Deepcut, and I hope today that we can restart that conversation to ensure the welfare of our soldiers and young people across the country.
On the matter of education, I am sure we agree that the educational opportunities that we afford our young people must aim to achieve a common baseline, no matter what their background. The armed forces are, however, exempt from the Department for Education’s standard minimum target for all 16 to 18-year-olds of GCSEs in English and maths at grade C or above. I hope the Minister will be able to explain why our young recruits are not provided with those qualifications, which are deemed essential by all educational employment experts.
The MOD claims that the qualifications it offers—functional skills for numeracy and literacy—are equivalent to GCSEs, but they have been labelled as suffering from major and fundamental flaws by the Department for Education’s own expert review of vocational education, the Professor Wolf report. That finding holds true for all young people, including those who are not academically inclined in any traditional sense and are pursuing vocational, rather than academic, education. I am sure my colleagues agree that young soldiers deserve, as a very minimum, the same educational opportunities as their civilian friends, and certainly nothing less.
The MOD frequently refers to the apprenticeships that young recruits undertake, but closer examination of the curriculum and the content of those courses reveals that, although those apprenticeships may be excellent training for a military career, they are of little value for future civilian employment. Let us bear it in mind that soldiers may be with the infantry until their early 30s, but those young people will need to find work until they are 67, so they need those skills for their long-term welfare.
Those courses consist of modules such as “Tactical advance across battlefield” and “Use of light weaponry”. Young veterans have repeatedly stated that those qualifications were effectively useless in finding employment after they were discharged. That has been borne out repeatedly by Royal British Legion studies on unemployment among ex-service personnel, which show that young veterans are significantly more likely to be unemployed than their civilian peers, and that the lack of qualifications and skills that are transferrable to civilian life is a major factor in that. I hope the Minister will explain how young veterans, the majority of whom are trained for combat roles, not technical ones, can use those highly specialised military skills in future civilian employment.
The MOD has frequently asserted that the Army provides a constructive alternative to young people who otherwise would not be in employment, education or training, or worse. That is an appealing argument, and it would be quite persuasive if there were robust data to support it, but researchers working on my behalf have found none. I regret to say that MOD data indicate quite the opposite.
Tommy Sheppard (Edinburgh East) (SNP)
Does the hon. Lady agree that one of the problems appears to be that if the Army recruits at 16, it does not have access to the complete pool of 16-year-olds? In fact, there is now a presumption in public policy that education and training should continue beyond 16 to 18. Therefore, the only people available for recruitment at 16 are, to put it mildly, the ones the system has left behind. That gives rise to statistics such as the fact that three quarters of 16-year-old recruits have a reading age of 11 or less. Does that concern her?
Liz Saville Roberts
It does concern me. I would like to emphasise the long-term welfare of those young men and women, who need to be equipped to leave the armed forces. If they are serving their country, it is our duty to equip them as well as we can with the skills they will need in future life. They may well be working until they are 67, so literacy and numeracy skills are particularly important to that cohort, which I have taught.
More than a third of under-18 recruits drop out of initial training, and 40% of infantry soldiers who enlisted under the age of 18 are discharged within four years as early service leavers. Having left education early to enlist and without having achieved GCSEs in the Army, those young ex-service personnel will be significantly less qualified than their civilian peers and at increased risk of long-term unemployment and social exclusion.
Such findings are again borne out not by anecdotes, but by British Legion studies. According to a major 2012 study of education in the Army by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, recruits who enlisted at a young age and who had previously been excluded from school were more likely to drop out of the Army than those with a more positive academic record. The same BIS study showed that 48% of recruits who trained at Army Foundation College Harrogate, the junior entry training site, had left the Army within four years.
Without doubt, individual positive anecdotes exist and will always inspire, but there is scant evidence that, as a rule, the Army can turn around young people who have not engaged well at school. Will the Minister provide any data to support the hypothesis that enlisting disadvantaged adolescents in the Army is an effective way to secure their long-term engagement in education and employment? Will he provide any analysis of how cost-effective that strategy is in comparison with, for example, greater investment in specialised education and social-support services for at-risk young people? We have other institutions such as further education colleges and other training centres to help those young people, who may as well be in the cadets at the same time as receiving a decent education to equip them for future life.
On combat roles and the channelling of the youngest recruits into the most dangerous roles, I intended to discuss the MOD policy to seek under-18s “particularly for the infantry”, which has the highest fatality and injury rate of any major branch of the Army. In the interests of time, however, I simply ask the Minister to explain on what basis his Department decided to restrict the choice of roles for the youngest recruits to frontline combat roles only, rather than giving them the opportunity to enlist in the full range of technical roles.
Following a damning report in October last year by medical charity Medact, I want also to touch briefly on the long-term health impacts on young people recruited under the age of 18. The report revealed such recruits to be more vulnerable to post-traumatic stress disorder, alcohol abuse, self-harm and suicide. There is a 64% increased risk of suicide among men under the age of 20 in the Army as compared with the wider population.
Many in the House and in the country are deeply proud of the armed forces and supportive of the institution as a whole. We would be failing in our duties, however, were we not to hold up their policies to scrutiny. The overwhelming majority of nations worldwide enlist from the age of 18 or above. Welbeck College in Loughborough provides an outstanding residential sixth-form college that, without the burden of formal enlistment before 18, educates young people intending to pursue a military career, with evident advantages to the students and to the institution.
I hope that the debate will open the door to a fruitful, frank and detailed discussion of how improvements can be made to policy. It is not in the interests of young people or of the Army to continue assuming that the status quo is the best possible model without a thorough examination of the evidence and consideration of alternatives.
Only 52% of the population voted to leave the European Union, but today Parliament is acting on it. In 2014, according to a nationwide Ipsos MORI poll, 77% of respondents who expressed a view supported raising the minimum enlistment age to 18 or above. Will the Minister respect the wishes of the population and the recommendations of child rights, health and education experts, and commit to a thorough independent review of policy?
Mrs Trevelyan
I am sure the Minister will be able to confirm such details, but a 16-year-old who chooses to leave school and go into employment and training elsewhere is still in charge of their own destiny. I am the mother of an about-to-be-16-year-old and an 18-year-old, and if they choose to step into the workplace, that would be their commitment to take on the responsibilities of adult life. Having supported them to make whatever their choice was, I would be very comfortable with them continuing with their choice. That is what growing up and taking adult decisions is all about.
Those under 18 cannot go out and serve in frontline roles, as was mentioned earlier, but they can participate in what we call national resilience activities. Over the past few years when we have had flooding problems in the north-east, on a number of occasions I have met some really energised and enthusiastic young men and women helping out with the flood defence crises, both in Morpeth in my patch and over in Cumbria. That highlights the many good qualities that joining the armed forces can give to young people—that sense of belonging and of learning to work in a team, which they so often have not had in their own lives.
The report highlights the statistical imbalance in post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental health problems for those who have joined young and come out the other side, but that is a chicken-and-egg argument.
Tommy Sheppard
The hon. Lady makes quite a compelling case about the benefits of early recruitment for 16 and 17-year-olds themselves, some of whom, as I said, may well have been let down by the system elsewhere. I do not choose to dispute any of her examples of those benefits, but I worry about whether that is the Army’s proper role or, in fact, a distraction from providing a good and efficient security service. If the Army waited until those individuals were 18 and other agencies had had the opportunity to try to improve their lot, it might recruit much better and more able people.
Mrs Trevelyan
The hon. Gentleman suggests that because some people might join at 16, others would not join at 18. One does not negate the other. The Army in particular offers young men and women who do not want to be in the education system any more because they found that it failed them—perhaps because they had poor teachers or they have dyslexia, or perhaps due to other issues—a framework within which they can really develop and thrive. I absolutely agree with the hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd that we need to ensure the welfare of those young people and that the covenant supports them as they develop skills in what can be a demanding and stretching environment, but that is part of the challenge, and so many of them really take that up.
I turn to the mental health issues of people who come out of the Army, who so often joined up early. There is a lot of work going on in that field, which I am involved with. Those young people would probably have been unable to find secure long-term employment had they fallen out of school and become NEET; they would have struggled through the system. They had the opportunity to take up an extraordinary career. I have the most enormous respect for anyone who joins the armed forces. It is a choice. To defend our nation and be part of a team of people who will put themselves in harm’s way to protect us and our families is an extraordinary thing to do. We must always bear that in mind.
I was interested in the report by Medact, which promotes disarmament and the abolition of nuclear weapons more broadly. I know quite a lot about that—my father was the leading journalist and specialist in the area in the 1960s, so it is a subject that I grew up with—but we cannot just wipe everything away and say, “Let’s no longer have armed forces. We want the world to be a happy and peaceful place.” I can think of nothing I would like more, but the reality is that we need robust and resilient armed forces, and we have some of the best in the world. Those young men and women, who join earlier than people who go to university and therefore come out of education at higher levels, do so because that brings them the opportunity to be part of a team that they can be proud of, and we can be proud of them.
Mark Pritchard (in the Chair)
Order. Mr Sheppard, I do not expect any backchat from you. You intervened twice in the debate; you have had your say. I said to the hon. Gentlemen that they could split the time between them. Mr Paterson chose to give a longer speech than perhaps Mr Cowan would have liked, but that was his decision and their decision. Do not question the Chair, or you might not catch my eye next time. The SNP have had their say.
Trident: Test Firing
Tommy Sheppard Excerpts(7 years, 3 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.
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Sir Michael Fallon
Absolutely. We owe it to the crews on whom a lifetime obligation of secrecy is placed that we do not break the security classification of the information surrounding the deterrent, nor treat that information in any frivolous way.
Tommy Sheppard (Edinburgh East) (SNP)
The Secretary of State has been quizzed for more than an hour, and I have not heard any Member asking for any operational details that might compromise national security. We simply want to know whether this test was successful or not. His refusal to answer that question when his counterpart across the Atlantic is answering it surely gives credence to the concerns that it was not successful and that, as well as not being a deterrent, this system simply might not work.
Sir Michael Fallon
When the hon. Gentleman reads the account of today’s proceedings, I think he will see that I have been asked for all kinds of operational details. Let me repeat to him that the demonstration and shakedown operation, of which this was one of a number of tests, was concluded satisfactorily.
Shipbuilding on the Clyde
Tommy Sheppard Excerpts(8 years ago)
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Mr Dunne
As the hon. Gentleman knows—he may well have been an expert on the subject for a long time, but he is certainly something of an expert now—steel of the specification and standards required for naval warships is not available in many of the routine runs of, for example, plate steel provided by UK suppliers. That is why there have been different proportions of UK steel content in different types of military platforms. The offshore patrol vessels, for example, have a thinner plate than that which is currently available from any of the mills in the UK, which is why no UK mills chose to bid for the steel content that has been contracted thus far. I cannot tell him whether there is capability at this stage for the Type 26 steel requirements, but I have made a commitment that we will invite steel manufacturers to understand what those capabilities are and give them an opportunity to bid.
Tommy Sheppard (Edinburgh East) (SNP)
The Minister said earlier that he is still confident that the Department’s orders will provide job security for decades to come, but that will be of little benefit to anyone who is made redundant between now and when the Department makes up its mind what it is going to do. May I ask him again the question that he has not so far answered: will he give a commitment that there will be no compulsory redundancies on the Clyde as a result of these delays?
Trident
Tommy Sheppard Excerpts(8 years, 5 months ago)
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John Woodcock
If everybody will sit down, I will explain my views. I would have been happy to have taken all these SNP interventions, but the proposer of the motion—the honourable chief robot—refused to allow me to intervene even once, so I will not take their interventions. They would be happy to throw on the unemployment scrapheap—
John Woodcock
Madam Deputy Speaker, I will not give way to any of them. I wonder if you can explain that to them. It does not matter how many times they ask, I will not give way to them.
In the remaining time that I have, let me quickly read a list of some of the constituencies in Scotland that are affected by the submarine supply chain: Argyll and Bute, which we have already mentioned; Aberdeen North; Coatbridge; Chryston and Bellshill; Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East; Dunfermline and West Fife; East Dunbartonshire; East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow; East Renfrewshire; Glasgow Central; Glasgow North West; Glasgow South; Glasgow South West; Glenrothes; Gordon; Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath; Linlithgow and East Falkirk; Livingston; Midlothian; Motherwell and Wishaw; Paisley and Renfrewshire North; West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine; and West Dunbartonshire.