Mr Mark Francois
MP for Rayleigh and Wickford · Conservative · United Kingdom
“Secondly, what actions is he as Defence Secretary, no doubt in consultation with the Chief of the General Staff, taking to push back against these pernicious in-year funding cuts imposed by the Treasury?”
“Taking him at his word, I must press him on some extremely worrying reports—first published in The Times on 3 September, and amplified in the Defence Eye journal on Tuesday—that British Army training is being seriously curtailed in order to provide in-year efficiency savings— “cuts”, in pub English— at the Treasury’s behest.”
“I am sure that I speak for the whole House in paying tribute to the Ukrainians for their fierce and determined resistance. They are fighting for the values of freedom and democracy, which this House has represented for centuries, so when we say, “Slava Ukraini!”, we mean it.”
“On behalf of the shadow Defence team, I would like to take this opportunity to welcome the new Defence Secretary—Labour’s third in three months—to his place and to thank him for advance sight of this important statement.”
“Tragically, a number of innocent civilians were murdered in Kyiv last night. On supporting Ukraine and brave President Zelensky, there has been absolute solidarity between ourselves and the Labour party.”
“On housing numbers, there is no Reform MP present this afternoon, but Reform-led Rochford district council has just published its regulation 19 local plan.”
The complete record
Every one of 2,746 lines we hold for Mr Mark Francois, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 31 of 55.
“I thank the Minister for personally endorsing my “Can the cones” campaign and my associated Roadworks (Regulation) Bill, which has its Second Reading in November. One great frustration of modern life is spending ages crawling through a set of traffic lights at a contraflow to finally drive past a large hole in the road, immaculately coned off with no one doing any work on it. The Bill is designed to make it much more difficult for that to happen. Does the Minister have any good news at all that might help all of us in our constituencies to can the cones?”
“On Britain’s contribution, had our excellent Defence Secretary not effectively foreseen the Russian invasion and provided thousands of NLAWs—next-generation light anti-tank weapons—to the Ukrainians, with the appropriate training, to blunt the assault, Russian generals would be having lunch in Kyiv today. The British Army, relative to its size, has made a larger contribution of critical equipment—the key organs, as it were—than any other army in NATO, including the United States. We can be immensely proud of that, but those organs need to be grown back for our own security and to maintain our contribution to NATO. Will the Prime Minister do everything he can across Whitehall to promote the requisite sense of urgency to regrow those organs and, critically, to provide the resources to do it?”
“Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) right that the only way we will ultimately solve the problem is to achieve a derogation from the ECHR?”
“We all know that the Home Secretary’s instincts on this are right. However, the wider Government promised to stop the boats and clearly we have not stopped them yet, so I fully support her decision to seek leave to appeal to the Supreme Court, as I think will most people in this country. Given legal procedural issues and judicial recesses, it could take months for the case to reach the Supreme Court, let alone for a judgment to be handed down. In the meantime, the boats will keep coming, now probably all summer. May I ask the Home Secretary two questions? First, with her extensive legal experience, can anything be practicably done to expedite the Supreme Court’s decision in this case? Secondly, was my right hon.”
“I thank the Secretary of State for mentioning our great friend Sir David Amess. I am sure that, if he were still with us today, he would welcome this statement, as do I, as does his successor and, as is clear, as do all other Essex MPs. The Secretary of State has done the right thing and should be commended. EPUT has been a troubled organisation for some time, although I believe that its chief executive, Mr Paul Scott, is genuinely trying to turn it around. As we look back to find out what went wrong—some things clearly went very badly wrong—will the Secretary of State work with the chief executive, providing support and resources, not just to make sure this does not happen again, but to try to help EPUT improve in the future as well as examine the past?”
“As an Essex MP, I wish to place firmly on the record my opposition to Mayor Khan’s ULEZ scheme, but another thing that affects air quality is when people have to queue for ages to get through roadworks. One thing that I support is what is known as lane rental, which is the concept whereby utility companies have to pay per day for the privilege of digging up the road and creating inconvenience for everyone else. The Minister and I have discussed this issue before. Essex County Council now supports this idea, by the way. Does my right hon. Friend agree that a sensible measure to improve air quality would be not to bring in ULEZ but to crack down on roadworks?”
“My hon. Friend said earlier that it is one thing when Kent MPs co-operate with London MPs; it is another when Essex MPs join in too. Does he agree that TfL has effectively been bankrupt for years and is kept going only with central Government subsidy? While the Mayor pays lip service to air quality, this is a tax grab, pure and simple. It is not about air quality; it is about money.”
“A black cabbie said to me a few weeks ago, “I’ve been doing this job for over 30 years and I have never known the traffic in London to be as bad as it is now. Between all the road closures and the roadworks it is virtually impossible to get anywhere and it is about time someone raised it in Parliament.” Well, Bill—I think that was his name—now they have. Bill the cabbie was absolutely right. It is becoming incredibly difficult to drive across our capital city because there are so few arteries that we can take. If there is an accident or heavy roadworks on one of the arteries, that whole part of London an rapidly grind to a halt.”
“Such measures make London one of the worst cities in which to drive. As has already been made plain, not everyone can take public transport. If people need tools or equipment for work, they have no choice other than to drive. People in the public sector will be affected, including Met police officers and NHS workers who have to drive into London to work in hospitals. I declare an interest: my wife will be one of those affected. It will also affect people in the private sector such as tradespeople going about their work trying to get to and from their place of business. All of those people will have their lives made more difficult by Mayor Khan. Let us be honest: he does not like cars and he does not seem to like car drivers, either.”
“Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet (Theresa Villiers) made perfectly clear, the studies and detailed scientific analysis show that the effect of the ULEZ on air quality will be marginal at best. Everybody knows the truth. It is not about air quality. That is the fig leaf that Mayor Khan is using to justify it. It is about money, because TfL is effectively bankrupt and has been for some years. He is therefore trying to use the charge to fill a black hole. It is perfectly obvious what he is up to, and I think every Londoner in their heart of hearts knows that. The charge will add to the other problems that the Mayor has introduced such as the road closures and road narrowing measures in London, which serve to create more pollution on an increasingly congested number of remaining roads, because the traffic has to go somewhere.”
“I confess that I had not originally planned to speak in this debate, but as not a single Labour or Lib Dem Back Bencher has put in to speak, I will make a few points in lieu of them. The ULEZ zone affects outer London, stretching out towards the county of Essex, in some cases well past the M25. Many of my constituents and people who live in Essex will be affected by the imposition of the charge, and, because they do not live in Greater London, they cannot vote Mayor Khan out of office or vote anyone else into office. For them it really is a case of taxation without representation, which is one reason I feel strongly about it, and even more so after having heard excellent speeches on the topic by my Conservative colleagues this afternoon. The Mayor says the issue is about air quality, but it is not. As my right hon.”
“For that reason, the petitioners are right: rather than the cars, it is ULEZ that should be scrapped.”
“The reason why it is so important is that as communities have grown historically, we have tended to find that most of the utilities have been laid on a very limited number of roads, and those are the ones that get dug up again and again. They would be ideal candidates for which to bring in some form of lane rental. I thank the House for its forbearance, and I would summarise the issue as follows: ULEZ is going to be, if it is introduced—I hope the Mayor might yet relent—a tax on ordinary, hard-working men and people of this country, who will be penalised £12.50 a day for having the temerity to want to go to work to earn money and put food on their family’s plates. That is what Mayor Khan is doing. The whole bit about air quality is complete camouflage. It is not about that; it is about the money.”
“I could talk about the utility companies or Essex County Council’s highways, but there is just too much to say. I have launched a “Can the Cones” campaign, which the Minister kindly agreed to meet me about in March. One thing he was looking at was lane rental—not ULEZ—which involves making contractors pay by the day to dig up roads. In the parts of the country where that has been brought in, contractors, funnily enough, tend to get the job done much quicker. Perhaps in the Minister’s reply he could spare a moment to say where he has got to on that. Essex County Council, I am pleased to say, has come around to the idea and is working on a joint scheme with Suffolk to introduce it.”
“If anybody knows about the challenges of driving across London, I would suggest that black cab drivers are well-placed to comment. One of the other great problems is roadworks, which have a great effect on air quality. One of the most frustrating things about modern life, is it not, is spending ages in a car crawling ever so slowly forward toward the lights to get through that contraflow, only to finally make it through the lights and drive past a perfectly coned-off big hole in the ground with absolutely no one in sight doing any work on it at all? How many people get wound up by that? We have had a proliferation of roadworks in my county of Essex. We are the roadworks capital of the UK. In a recently recorded 12-month period, we had 77,000 roadworks of one kind or another. I cannot blame that on Mayor Khan.”
“Yes. Perhaps it is a function of my age, but I can remember a time when the fastest way to get across London was to hop in a cab. It is certainly not that way now. We have about half the number of black cab drivers that we had prior to the pandemic, which is a fantastic drop-off, bearing in mind that it takes an average of three or four years to do the knowledge and get a green badge. Many of them have given up. From talking to them or to friends of people who have given up, we find that many have done so partly because of their age—that was an effect of the pandemic—but that many others have given up because it is so difficult to get across London. It is just too stressful a way to earn a living. That is why sometimes people can wait quite a long while to get a black cab in London. There are far fewer around than there were.”
“We have concentrated mainly on roads in this debate, but as the hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Gill Furniss) introduced the topic, does the Minister agree with the simple proposition that our rail network would run much more efficiently if the rail unions stopped going on strike?”
“If a private or a professional landlord did not properly complete these safety checks, they would be sued. It is completely unacceptable that we put armed forces personnel and their loved ones at risk for months because the Future Defence Infrastructure Services contract that is meant to do that is completely broken. If the head of the Defence Infrastructure Organisation, who is meant to oversee this, is completely out of his depth, which some of us believe he is, after this, should he not consider his position?”
“I am here this afternoon on behalf of several constituents, but particularly Mr Adam Fleming, who has been adversely affected by this issue and, understandably, feels very passionately about it. May I make a simple plea to the Minister, through my hon. Friend? This has gone on for so many years and a compassionate Government would surely do everything they could to accelerate the payment of compensation. Does he agree with me and many others that now, really, enough is enough?”
“The Ajax programme has been an absolute debacle, first initiated in 2010. Thirteen years and some £4 billion later, we still do not have a new armoured vehicle in frontline service. We will not have it until late 2025, and it will not be fully in service until 2030. This report starkly reveals in exquisite, agonising detail just how massively bureaucratic and broken the MOD’s procurement really is. With war under way in Ukraine, will the Minister assure the House that he is now genuinely personally committed to root-and-branch reform of how we buy military equipment in this country? The taxpayer and our armed forces deserve no less.”
“T6. Clive Sheldon KC, of 11 King’s Bench Walk chambers, submitted his Lessons Learned report on the AJAX programme to the Ministry of Defence some four months ago. We are told that it is still undergoing a “fact-checking” process, but there are growing rumours that some people who are adversely implicated in the report are trying to water it down or even suppress its publication. As the Secretary of State personally commissioned the report, and as it is his birthday today, and as this is, I think, my fourth time of asking, will he please give us all a birthday present and tell us when the report will actually be published?”
“Well said earlier, Mr Speaker. I have checked Hansard , and the Bill passed Second Reading in the Commons on 25 October 2022 with a Government majority of 56, and with not a single Tory MP voting against it.”
“No one voted against it, Bob. Not even you. On 18 January 2023, the Bill passed Third Reading with a Government majority of 59, and again not a single Tory MP voted against it. The Bill unified the Conservative parliamentary party on an admittedly controversial issue. It left this House without a single Tory MP opposing it. Why, after it has gone to the House of Lords, have the Government performed a massive climbdown on their own Bill, despite having such strong support from their own Back Benchers? Secretary of State, what on earth are you playing at?”
“It would be a tragedy, literally, if the counter-offensive ran out of momentum because it lacked air support.”
“We have led western Europe in supplying kit to the Ukrainians—ably administered by MOD Defence Equipment and Support, it should be noted—but we have not yet sent jets, despite the fact that we have a squadron of tranche 1 Typhoons sitting in a hangar and despite the fact that in Westminster Hall recently, President Zelensky very publicly called for us to do so. The Secretary of State knows from his own experience that when the long-awaited counter-attack begins, those Ukrainian brigades must have local air superiority over the battlefield to succeed, and what is left of the Ukrainian air force is far too small for it to do that on its own. As such, can I ask him specifically what we are doing, first to send jets, and secondly to encourage other western allies to send MiG-29s, F-16s or even A-10s to Ukraine?”
“If I can make a non-partisan point for a moment, the whole House knows that our late friend and colleague Sir David Amess was murdered with a bladed weapon, so I would like to pay tribute to his proactive successor, my hon. Friend the Member for Southend West (Anna Firth), for campaigning on this issue, evidently with some success. Can the Minister assure us that, on so-called zombie knives—many of which are now purchased online and some of which, I understand, we can only ban because of what is written on them, rather than what they can do—this new legislation will materially restrict the ability, and ideally end it, for people to buy those weapons online, either domestically or from abroad?”
“I fear that today we will respectfully have to agree to disagree. My right hon. Friend has described the brake on multiple occasions, including in BBC interviews, as a veto. Given that, if Stormont pulls the brake, UK Ministers may still not exercise the brake in exceptional circumstances—so it is down to ministerial fiat—and given that, even if they do, the EU can object and it will be referred to independent arbitration, where the UK could lose, that is a route to arbitration, isn’t it? That is not a veto. Will he accept that?”
“Such adverts should be completely banned from all platforms in the United Kingdom.” —[ Official Report, 2 October 2019; Vol. 664, c. 345WH.] I hope that, in this deliberately brief contribution, I have made my point. David was cruelly taken from us in absolutely tragic circumstances, but his memory lives on. He was an amazing champion for animal welfare. I hope it is not presumptuous, but I am honoured to stand here today perhaps in lieu of him, supported by his worthy successor my hon. Friend the Member for Southend West, to make the case for this vital Bill. If he were here, he would thank her and the entire House for what we are about to do, so I humbly say thank you as well.”
“It is so depressing that as soon as someone comes up with an idea to stop trophy hunters, these evil, wicked people get ahead of the game and find some way round the legislation.” I do not mean to provoke my hon. Friend the Member for North Herefordshire (Sir Bill Wiggin), because he and I came into this place on the same day in 2001, but Sir David went on to say: “I do not minimise the difficulty the Government face, but I simply cannot comprehend why anyone would pay up to $72,000 to travel across the world and shoot a beautiful animal. As I have said at business questions, I have seen numerous adverts for trophy hunting, with some companies even advertising price lists by trip length…by animal on offer and by trophy fee.”
“Friend the Member for Southend West (Anna Firth), who is in her place beside me. Among those closely watching the debate on this crucial Bill will be members of the Conservative Animal Welfare Foundation, led by its redoubtable founder Mrs Lorraine Platt, who has campaigned tirelessly on this issue and many others related to animal welfare for years. She was also a great friend of Sir David, and I know that she and her organisation will wish the Bill well. It is almost as if he was with us today. On 2 October 2019, in a Westminster Hall debate on trophy hunting imports, Sir David said: “I recognise that there is no easy solution; 200,000 endangered animals are put at risk each year, which is an awful lot to deal with.”
“I rise to support the important Bill of my hon. Friend the Member for Crawley (Henry Smith) to ban United Kingdom imports of trophy hunting trophies. I begin by declaring a personal interest: this was a particular passion of our great friend, the late Sir David Amess. I knew him for more than 20 years in Parliament, although he was elected far earlier than me, on 9 June 1983—coincidently, as I understand, the same day as my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Sir Christopher Chope). I must confess that I am not an expert on the subject, but I know that my late friend desperately wanted such legislation to pass, so I hope that the House will understand my simple motive for being here. It is good to be supported in the task by his excellent successor, my hon.”
“T8. May I, too, say that it is great to see you back in your place, Madam Deputy Speaker?I will try to keep this brief for the Secretary of State. The Clive Sheldon KC review of management information surrounding Ajax has been with the Department for over a month, I think. Given its importance, can the Minister guarantee, first, that it will be published by the Easter recess, and secondly, that it will be published fully unredacted?”
“I welcome the Foreign Secretary’s crystal-clear commitment that from 2025 we will spend 2.5% of our GDP on defence. I will be interested to know whether Labour will match that. Part of that spending, referred to in the document, is the AUKUS programme, which will be a world-class collaboration between the United States, Australia and us. Does he agree that that not only will help deter Chinese expansionism in the Pacific, but is a perfect example of global Britain?”
“I warmly welcome the principle of the Bill, not least because the whole House knows that the people traffickers are immoral and utterly heartless, but the elephant in the room, as has already been alluded to, is the ECHR. Unless we can somehow face it down, we will remain tied up in legal knots in our own domestic courts and ultimately in Strasbourg. Can the Home Secretary assure the House that when we see the Bill, it will contain specific measures to do that, so that the Bill will achieve its purpose?”
“I thank the Prime Minister for his statement and for publishing both the White Paper and the legal text on the same day, which will materially assist the whole House. As a former Chancellor, he knows well that, on Budget day, the Government put a good gloss on whatever they are putting to the public. We then have to read through the Red Book to check on the fine detail. He has worked very hard on this agreement, so can he assure me and the whole House that when we go through the Red Book—or, in this instance, the detailed legal text—we will not find any nasty surprises that will materially undermine the position of Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom?”
“The fast-jet training programme that the hon. Gentleman is referring to, which is known as the military flying training system, is broken and everyone involved in aviation knows it. But we also have some tranche 1 Typhoons that have a lot of time left in their airframes and are sitting in a warehouse having been taken out of RAF service. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that, if given to the Ukrainians, a squadron of those could do a lot more to defend freedom, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson) suggested a few moments ago, than it could sitting in a warehouse gathering dust?”
“We gave 14 Challenger 2 tanks to Ukraine. Those are very capable tanks, but in and of themselves they will not change the whole course of the war. What they did do, however, was help unlock the delivery of hundreds of Leopards. What the Ukrainians really want are MiGs, which they are familiar with using, and F-16s. By the same argument, if we gave one squadron of older Typhoons that then unlocked hundreds of MiGs and F-16s, that would be worth doing, would it not?”
“The Ajax programme has been so controversial that the Secretary of State personally commissioned an independent review by Clive Sheldon KC into the flow of information surrounding it. Has he yet received that report? When does he intend to publish it? Can he promise the House that he will do so in full and unredacted?”
“On my hon. Friend’s point about doing as opposed to just saying, with which I entirely agree, does he agree with me that part of this is that the German Government should now release their legal hold over the export of Leopard tanks from European allies to the Ukrainians to allow them a chance to counter-attack?”
“The hon. Gentleman is right because logistically that would make it far easier for the Ukrainians. Leopard is the obvious choice because it is used by so many other allied countries, but German export law currently prevents that unless the Germans waive it. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that they should do that to allow the Ukrainians the Leopards they need?”
“Frankly, we will not deter a man like Vladimir Putin with £4 billion tank programmes that do not work, submarines that are years late, frigates that are even later, destroyers and aircraft carriers that keep breaking down, or airborne early warning systems that are years overdue and do not even work properly when they turn up. The Romans, who knew a thing or two about armed conflict, had a saying: si vis pacem, parra bellum—he who desires peace should prepare for war. That could almost be NATO’s unofficial motto today. If we genuinely desire peace in Europe, which we all do, we had better start realistically, not just theoretically, and urgently preparing to fight for it—just in case.”
“All this is just in case Trotsky was right when he famously warned: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” In summary, if we are to deter a wider war, rather than have to fight it, which I am sure is what the whole House and indeed the country would prefer, that means having armed forces that are highly trained, brilliantly equipped and backed up with clear political intent to use them, if required. That means increasing not just our defence spending, though we must, but our preparedness to fight with minimum further strategic or even operational warning. It also means ruthlessly examining our broken procurement system and asking how many long-delayed key programmes can now be rapidly accelerated as urgent operational requirements.”
“We made a similar conceptual mistake with the 10-year rule of the 1920s and early 1930s and we cannot afford to repeat that error. As time is short today—in more ways than one—suffice it to say that we now need to rethink our whole approach to a shooting war with Russia, potentially even some time this year and not in 10 years’ time. That means new thinking conceptually, strategically, militarily and industrially, coupled with a genuine sense of urgency—we need to get on with it—to examine how prepared we really are to fight a possibly protracted conflict with Russia.”
“As he put it in an interview with Norwegian broadcaster NRK on 9 December last year: “It is a terrible war in Ukraine. It is also a war that can become a full-fledged war that spreads into a major war between NATO and Russia. If things go wrong, they can go horribly wrong.” He is right. The United Kingdom Government’s—our Government’s —own integrated review, published in the spring of 2021, correctly identified Russia as our major adversary, but it has since clearly been overtaken by events. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a total game changer in security terms, so the whole planning paradigm through which the ongoing refresh of the integrated review is being conducted has to alter accordingly. The integrated review took too much risk up front in order to strengthen our defences in a decade’s time—time that we may no longer have.”
“We should also encourage our NATO allies to significantly increase their supplies of equipment, also now including heavy armour, to the Ukrainians, who are ultimately fighting for our freedom, too. So the Germans simply must stop passing the buck, if for no other reason than that, if they carry on like this, no one will ever buy military equipment from them ever again. Put bluntly, if we do not stop the Russians in Ukraine, we will have to stop them in the Baltic states or in Poland, and that means an all-out conflict between Russia and NATO, which is far better avoided, not least by Germany itself. The respected NATO secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, has recently warned that the conflict in Ukraine could lead to NATO being dragged in.”
“So we would be naive in the extreme to believe, even if Putin were to be deposed, that we could drop our guard against a highly aggressive and militarised state—one with no compunction whatever about killing civilians or committing barbaric war crimes, and which retains thousands of nuclear weapons to this day. That prompts the question: what should our own grand strategy be in response? Obviously, unlike Ukraine, which gave up its—something it must now bitterly regret—we should maintain our own nuclear deterrent as the ultimate guarantee of our security. We should strengthen the cohesion of the NATO alliance, including welcoming in Finland and Sweden as rapidly as possible.”
“Even if President Putin were to be removed from office tomorrow, however, for whatever reason, we could not realistically expect the sudden release of Alexei Navalny and the flowering of liberal democracy in a country that simply has no such enduring political tradition throughout its entire history. For most Russians, even now, the brief easing-up under President Yeltsin was a rather chaotic aberration that lasted only a few years and was completely at variance with the historical paradigm of highly authoritarian rulers, stretching back centuries to Peter the Great or beyond. Part of Russia’s grand strategy for hundreds of years has been that of highly autocratic rule over a relatively servile population.”
“The sorts of people Lenin once described as “wise fools”—so-called intellectuals who help to make Russia’s arguments for it—are now predominantly keeping their heads firmly below the parapet, at least while Russia continues to commit the most appalling atrocities against unarmed civilians, including women and children, on an almost daily basis. Nevertheless, the invasion of Ukraine has proved a disaster for Russia and its people, if not yet for its President. Russia has become a pariah state; even China and India are softening their supportive rhetoric and would clearly like to see an end to the war.”
“The next few weeks are likely to be very telling in that respect.” —[ Official Report , 6 January 2022; Vol. 706, c. 229-30.] At the time, some commentators laughed at us or derided us at hawks, but in the phrase immortalised by Nigel Farage, “they’re not laughing now.” Barely a fortnight later, Russia invaded Ukraine. Interestingly, especially given that Ukraine abandoned its arsenal of ex-Soviet nuclear weapons after the break-up of the USSR, we hear little these days from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament or many of the others who naively argued for unilateral nuclear disarmament by the United Kingdom and our allies. Even unilateralist SNP Members, who are no longer in the Chamber—perhaps they are preoccupied by their private civil war about independence and identity politics—have recently become somewhat subdued on that point.”
“The Chair of the Committee, who spoke well again this afternoon, particularly—I am sad to have to say—about weaknesses in British Army equipment, presciently reminded the House about Russia’s actions: “All this, of course, is unacceptable to the west and to NATO members, which makes the prospect of an invasion ever more likely. That is the immediate threat to Ukraine.” —[ Official Report , 6 January 2022; Vol. 706, c. 220.] In the same debate, I said: “I fear that the European skies are now darkening, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the winter weather…Russians traditionally admire strength and despise weakness, and what they now perceive is a weakened NATO lacking in resolve to assert its democratic right to collective self-defence.”