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.”
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“They are not properly regulated by the Government, and Sanctuary is most certainly not properly regulated by its rather useless board.”
“Basically, it had promised to build 50 affordable houses a year, but it got nowhere near that. It had no clear plan or strategy to achieve the target. I am afraid the outgoing chairman of the board clearly did not take the meeting seriously. In fact, his attitude was patronising. If he had said, “I hear what you say, Mr Francois” one more time, I think I would have screamed. There is a governance issue at Sanctuary. It is badly run and badly governed. It is not properly accountable to the tenants it serves, which is why it was slated by “Dispatches” a few months ago. My plea to the Minister is that we need tighter regulation of the registered social landlords market. Some of these are very large organisations indeed.”
“In short, it is a bad neighbour in my constituency, and I think it is about time that this large, unresponsive, uncaring national house builder, run by a fat cat on £3 million a year, was held to account. My constituents deserve better than this, and these developers should put more people on the job, get the job done quicker and get off the roadway. We are tight for time, but in my last minute I want to mention Sanctuary Housing, the largest housing association in my constituency. I had an Adjournment debate on 18 July about what is wrong with it, so I shall not reiterate it all now, suffice it to say that I had a meeting with its chief executive, Mr Craig Moule, and its outgoing chairman, Mr Jonathan Lander, yesterday. It was a deeply unsatisfactory meeting.”
“It has been on site since February, and my constituents in Hullbridge are just about sick and tired of it. As the hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden has pointed out, its chief executive, Mr David Thomas, is on a nice little earner. According to its 2018 annual report, he earned a total package of just shy of £3 million—some 20 times the salary the Prime Minister earns for the responsibility of running the country. I suspect that Mr David Thomas could not find Hullbridge in my constituency with a TomTom. Barratt David Wilson has now, under pressure, contemplated extending the hours of its work to try to finish the job, but it still will not give me a firm date for when its works will be completed, Watery Lane can be reopened and it will get out of the way.”
“I have remonstrated with the county council’s highways department for granting permits to work on the highway to all these developers at the same time. It has a strategic overview of the highways network, and I think it should look at that again. I have also contacted all the developers directly and encouraged them to get this work done as fast as possible and then get out of the way, and the responses have been instructive. The smallest, Silver City, has promised that it will be finished by the end of the week and that it will be off the highway network. Countryside, an Essex-based developer, has said that it will no longer operate its contraflow in the morning and evening rush hours, thus considerably easing the congestion. Barratt David Wilson, the major national house builder, has been the least responsive of all.”
“The schools came back, so clearly the traffic increased, but it was massively exacerbated by three contraflows all in operation at the same time on three different housing developments: Barratt David Wilson at Hullbridge, where a nearby key road called Watery Lane has been closed for many weeks because of the works; Countryside at Rawreth Lane in Rayleigh, which has a contraflow in place; and Silver City, a lesser known, smaller developer which has a contraflow on the London Road in Rayleigh. The cumulative effect, made worse by a road traffic accident that morning, was that the town was in effect gridlocked, and many of my constituents were extremely frustrated as they were simply trying to get to work.”
“May I begin by congratulating the Minister on her appointment? It is good to see her in her place at the Dispatch Box. The house building market in the United Kingdom is highly oligopolistic, dominated by very few very large players, some of whom are extremely unresponsive to the needs of local communities, as the hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh) laid out so well in her speech. They can have an adverse impact on communities in the long term, but they can also have an adverse impact in the short term, while their houses are being built. We had an example of that in Rayleigh on Monday morning.”
“I suspect they will be appalled, just as I was, by what they see. It is not as if Sanctuary is a small or under-resourced organisation. I have carefully read its latest annual report. It currently has total assets under management in the order of £4 billion. It is one of the largest registered social landlords in the United Kingdom, with about 100,000 properties currently under management. It is, supposedly, a not-for-profit organisation, yet it made an operating profit of just under £200 million, as recorded in its 2017-18 accounts. The group’s previous chief executive served for some 27 years, but has recently been replaced by a new chief executive, Craig Moule, whose total annual remuneration, including pension contributions and so on, is now in the order of half a million pounds.”
“Sanctuary has known there are issues with the lift and has not responded adequately.” That is but one example of the poor level of service that Sanctuary provides, but I could spend hours reading very many others into the record. The company’s record is so poor that in March this year it was the subject of an absolutely scathing Channel 4 “Dispatches” documentary entitled, “New Landlords from Hell”. To try to summarise a half-hour documentary in one sentence, I would say that the group’s record is truly shocking. In many instances, it shows a complete disregard for the welfare, or even the safety, of its tenants. Sanctuary’s so-called board of directors should watch the documentary and then hang their heads in shame. Anybody who wants to know more about this organisation should watch the programme.”
“To give just one example, a constituent contacted me a few years ago to complain about a broken lift in one of Sanctuary’s sheltered housing units. My constituent put it in an email: “I’m writing to complain about the fact that our lift has not been working for the past 10 days, effectively trapping my disabled wife in our first-floor flat. Today, I spoke with the Scheme Manager, who advised me there is no confirmed date for when this problem will be resolved. He also advised me that the service company assessed the lift a month ago and advised Sanctuary of repairs that needed to be done, and the lift broke down three weeks after it was assessed… My wife has been trapped in the lift in her wheelchair six or more times.”
“Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and Mr Speaker, for granting me this Adjournment debate and thus providing me with an important opportunity to try to hold the Sanctuary Housing Group, which I regard as a highly dysfunctional organisation, to account. As you will soon hear, Madam Deputy Speaker, my remarks have been born from over a decade of frustration in trying to deal with these people as a local MP. To put it bluntly, I have well and truly had enough. To begin with, Sanctuary has consistently provided a poor maintenance service to many of my constituents over a period of many years. I have had numerous complaints from Sanctuary tenants about shoddy workmanship, missed appointments and a generally off-hand attitude towards them when they complain.”
“I have had multiple meetings with Sanctuary down the years to try to persuade it to honour that promise, not least to alleviate the considerable pressure on Rochford’s housing list, which has sometimes, unfortunately, meant that the council has had to place families, including those with young children, in highly unsuitable bed-and-breakfast accommodation in nearby Southend.”
“Specifically, the manifesto—I have a copy here, because I saved one—said the following under the heading, “New affordable housing to meet local housing needs”: “Tenants and the Council have said they want to see new homes in the area for future generations and the Council is committed to working with Housing Associations to provide affordable housing to meet local needs. Rochford Housing Association working with Hereward Housing will aim to provide at least 50 new affordable homes each year in the Rochford District.” That was the promise to the tenants before they voted to transfer. Sanctuary took over that commitment when it absorbed Hereward and promised to honour it when that entity became part of its group, but it has come absolutely nowhere near doing so.”
“To give the Minister some idea of the history of all this, I first came across the group some years ago when Rochford District Council decided to transfer its social housing stock to a new registered social landlord established for the purpose, called Rochford Housing Association. The tenants voted in a ballot to transfer to the housing association, which was then shortly taken over by a regional housing association called Hereward, and then in turn by a national organisation, Sanctuary. So I have been dealing with RHA/Hereward/Sanctuary for over a decade as the local MP. Crucially, the original manifesto for the transfer ballot contained a commitment to build up to 50 additional units of affordable housing a year to assist the council with addressing its housing waiting list.”
“Yes. By comparison, the CEO of L&Q—London and Quadrant Housing Trust—earns about £350,000 in total, the CEO of the Peabody Trust is on about £279,000, and the CEO of Genesis Housing is on approximately £250,000. Despite previously asking Sanctuary officials for a meeting, I have not yet been offered an audience with the new chief executive, which is a shame, because the first question I would like to ask him is: “How can you justify a salary over three times greater than that paid to the Prime Minister?” I cannot countenance how someone running, essentially, a public sector organisation could be paid such a vast amount for presiding over such chaos.”
“I have known the Minister for years and, as he knows, I have high regard for him. I am sure he will take my constituents’ concerns very seriously—that would be in his nature—and I therefore look forward with considerable interest to his reply on behalf of Her Majesty’s Government.”
“That would be a shame, because many RSLs do very good work to provide decent, affordable homes for our constituents to live in, and it is important to put that on the record. I very much hope therefore that when the board members of Sanctuary read this debate, as I suspect they may, they will take radical action to address their woeful underperformance. I hope they will sack the hopeless Mr Chris Cole and specifically agree to pay Rochford District Council the £1 million that they owe. I also hope they will redouble their efforts to build the affordable housing they promised to build all along and which my constituents so desperately need. This rolling farce, perpetrated by a failed and broken organisation, has gone on long enough and we now need action, not words.”
“For the avoidance of doubt, there are some very good registered social landlords in this country, but there are also some very bad ones, and Sanctuary is probably the worst of the entire lot. This is a sorry tale of an extremely badly run organisation, which does not keep its word, which obfuscates and delays, treats publicly elected officials with open contempt, and threatens to bring its entire sector into disrepute. Just as Persimmon Homes has given the private house building sector something of a bad name in recent years—I do not believe the sector really deserves that and I note in passing that the new chief executive of Persimmon, David Jenkinson, is attempting to do something to address it—I believe that Sanctuary threatens to give the whole housing association sector in this country a bad name.”
“Partly based on my experience with Sanctuary, I wish to raise with the Minister the serious question of the governance of the sector in general. There is a lack of an effective regulator to hold housing association boards to account and to make sure their tenants receive the kind of service for which they pay their rent. I would, therefore, like to press the Minister specifically and ask him whether the Department has any proposals to change the governance of housing associations and, in particular, whether it has any plans to bring in any form of new regulator, perhaps focusing on governance and customer service, to try to keep housing associations up to the mark.”
“If I speak as I find, I personally do not recall ever receiving a single complaint from any of my constituents who are its tenants about the management of a CHP property, although in fairness, the very good new leader of Rochford District Council, Councillor Mike Steptoe, tells me anecdotally that he has had a few complaints about CHP, which has the RSL component at the new development at Hall Road that I mentioned a few minutes ago. In any event, it is a matter of fact that housing associations, some of whose chief executives are extremely well paid—far more than the Prime Minister—are not even subject to freedom of information requests. In short, they are neither fish nor fowl—neither wholly public nor wholly private—and that leads to serious questions about who is really in charge.”
“That is just another example of it being extremely difficult to believe anything that the company now says based on bitter experience of a decade of repeatedly broken promises; it is that bad. That brings me on to my wider point about the regulation of housing associations. There are good and bad registered social landlords in this country; for instance, one of the other housing associations active in my constituency is a locally based one called Chelmer Housing Partnership or CHP.”
“In short, this is a housing association that, incredibly, seems reluctant to build houses, particularly if that will cost it any money. I read in the newspapers that we have a housing crisis in this country. With registered social housing landlords like Sanctuary, is it any wonder? Basically, these people are a joke, but one that is no longer funny, particularly for those who are living in bed-and-breakfast accommodation as a result of their absolute indolence. Let me give one further example. Sanctuary assured me that it would build up to 100 properties in a site in Rayleigh known as Timber Grove, and that it was actively acquiring the site for that purpose. When I double-checked a few days ago, it had still not bought the site, which has lain undeveloped effectively for several years.”
“He categorically denied that Rochford had been responsible for any major planning delay and absolutely insisted that it intended to pursue Sanctuary for the outstanding amount and was considering legal action. He said to me, “I will be having a meeting with our legal team on Monday morning.” Both those men cannot be right, and, to put it mildly, one of them must at least be badly mistaken, as the two positions are poles apart. Part of my purpose in initiating this debate was first to shame Sanctuary into coughing up the million quid that it owes my local council, and secondly, as well as arguing for the money, to argue that it should go on to build the affordable houses that it promised to build in the first place.”
“Time after time, it has failed to develop schemes and has given a whole litany of excuses, including desperately trying to blame Rochford District Council for not giving planning permission, suggesting that it was the council’s fault that the houses had not been built and the target—which, incidentally, was due to be met by March 2018, a year ago—had not been delivered. When I met Sanctuary representatives in May, I raised that issue and was told quite forcefully by Chris Cole that Rochford District Council had “let us off’ the payment because the council had admitted that the planning delays were its own fault. I double-checked that with Mr Shaun Scrutton, the council’s managing director, at a meeting in his office on Friday 5 July.”
“It states, clearly and unequivocally: “At the forefront of Sanctuary’s commitment is to build homes in Rochford. Part of that is a contractually binding requirement for Sanctuary to deliver the 50 homes a year referred to in the original agreement. Taken over the ten years of the agreement, this will require Sanctuary to build 363 more homes. If we fail to do so the local Council will receive £10,000 for each new home below the target figure of 363, up to a maximum payment of £1 million. This reflects our confidence that we will make good this commitment. We have a development team focused solely on this ambition with commercial resources at their disposal.” I submit to the Minister that that could not be any clearer, but Sanctuary never got anywhere near it.”
“She mentioned to me in passing that she, too, had had unsatisfactory experiences with Sanctuary, but that unfortunately, because of its constitutional status—I shall say more about that in a minute—it was not subject to the remit of the Public Accounts Committee, the most powerful Committee in Parliament. That raises all sorts of governance issues, to which I shall return shortly. Because of Sanctuary’s appalling record of not keeping to its commitments, the dispute came to a head several years ago when it agreed to sign a “deed of variation, determination and collaboration” via which it undertook to raise its game and make up the considerable backlog of houses to meet the original commitment of 50 a year. I have here a letter, dated 27 July 2016, from a lady called Emma Keegan, who was at that time Sanctuary’s local managing director.”
“Even when I told him to his face that I knew it was not, because I had been there and seen that it was not, he still tried to tell me that it was. The Minister is shaking his head. I mention this vignette deliberately, because it is absolutely typical of the dismissive way in which Sanctuary treats elected representatives. Let me say as an aside that I recently spoke to the Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier), who, for the avoidance of doubt, has not seen my speech and is not party to it.”
“Moreover, Sanctuary has acquired, or sought to acquire, a number of high-profile brownfield sites across the district, which it has been promising to build on for years. However, in the vast majority of cases, it has not laid one brick on top of another to this day. To take just one example, when I met Mr Cole on Friday 10 May in Sanctuary’s local offices in Rochford, he sought to assure me that Sanctuary was “actively on site” on the old Bullwood Hall Prison site, which was closed some years ago and is now a classic brownfield site. Sanctuary obtained planning permission to build there over a year ago. Quite by chance, and unluckily for Mr Cole, I visited the site the weekend prior to our meeting, and I was therefore amazed when Mr Cole attempted to persuade me that the company was actively building houses there.”
“Sanctuary absolutely assured me several years ago that, to make up its backlog, it would bid aggressively for the social housing component of three large developments in the Rochford District Council area known as Hall Road in Rochford, Rawreth Lane/London Road in Rayleigh, and Malyons Farm in Hullbridge. In each of those instances, despite the company’s £4 billion of assets, it underbid and did not secure the RSL element of any of those developments, which would have represented well over 100 houses in each of the three cases. Basically, Minister, these people talk a good game to your face, but then completely and utterly fail to put their money where their mouth is. That is totally unacceptable on their part.”
“My hon. Friend is absolutely right. As I will demonstrate, it is difficult, I am afraid, to believe anything that this group now says. As we have a Housing, Communities and Local Government Minister sitting on the Front Bench, I will take this opportunity to absolutely endorse my hon. Friend’s long-standing campaign for Southend to be made a city. I hope the Minister will take that back to the Department. I have had a number of meetings with Sanctuary’s head of development, Mr Chris Cole, which have taken on an almost ritualistic aspect, with him repeatedly reading out a list of major housing developments that Sanctuary is either going to be involved with or to develop itself, hardly any of which—with the exception of some very small developments and one development at Canewdon—ever come to fruition.”
“Finally, as the Minister knows, it would be unlike me not to mention my great friends “Crapita,” whose army recruitment contract is utterly hopeless. While the number of applications goes up, the number of people joining goes down. There is a way through this: whoever they may be, the next Defence Secretary and the next Chancellor—I wish our outgoing Chancellor the very best of luck in his posting in outer Mongolia—need to work together for the benefit of this country’s defence.”
“The military flying training system is a disaster, partly because of the unavailability of Hawk, and on that, BAE Systems needs to look to its laurels. The Defence Infrastructure Organisation is not the most efficient part of the Ministry of Defence—the maintenance contract with Amey is awful. The other day, the DIO told the Public Accounts Committee that there was a 64% satisfaction rate, but there is not. In the armed forces continuous attitude survey, the satisfaction rate is actually 32%, which is an appalling statistic. The A400M has been an absolute procurement disaster—it is known as “the dog” by the crews that operate it at RAF Brize Norton—at a cost of £2.6 billion for aircraft with an appalling reliability rating, bad engines and gearbox, and an inability to deliver paratroops.”
“They don’t manage it very well or control their contractors properly, and waste a vast amount of it on procurement programmes that go way over budget and come in years late. All they ever do is bleat like children for more money so that they can waste it on more procurement programmes that go wrong.” Those are the asymmetric views, and the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle. If we are to deal effectively with the defence of this country, rather than that adversarial relationship, which is how I have seen it happen for so long, we have to get those two Departments to work together positively for the benefit of our country and its defence. In fairness, the MOD does have to be better at managing its budget. Some contracts are shocking and the MOD has been deficient in holding contractors to account.”
“Having been a Defence Minister—I have great respect for the Minister, as he knows—I have always believed that there is a kind of asymmetric conversation between the Ministry of Defence and the Treasury. I will exaggerate slightly for effect, but it essentially goes as follows. The MOD view is, “Those people over the road don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t understand us. They don’t realise the relentless operational pressure that we have been under for 20 years, or the pressure on our people. They ask us to scrimp and save at every possible opportunity to make false economies that are injurious to the defence of the realm.” The Treasury view goes something like this: “Those people across the road don’t know what they’re doing. They have £36 billion a year.”
“I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Anne-Marie Trevelyan) on securing this debate and introducing it with such brio. I am delighted to see how many colleagues are present to debate these important matters. On the defence budget, I was reassured to hear from the Chair of the Defence Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis), that my right hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson), who is most likely to win the leadership election, told that Committee “I can give you an absolute commitment to fund defence fully.” In the nicest possible way, we should bank that and endeavour to hold him to it if and when he becomes our Prime Minister.”
“My hon. Friend mentioned dogs. He will recall that, seven years ago, he and I helped to co-open the Dogs Trust Rehoming Centre at Nevendon in my constituency. I visited it again last week. Will he join me in commending the superb work that it does, rehoming nearly 900 dogs a year? If he wants to talk about compassionate, loving and focused animal welfare, the Dogs Trust is about as good as it gets, and Lisa Cooper and all her staff there are a living embodiment of that.”
“I entirely endorse the remarks of my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (John Redwood) about the powerful contribution that the hon. Lady has made. I pay tribute to her powerful track record on this issue. We are often called a nation of animal lovers. Does the hon. Lady agree that love is not enough? We also need protection. This Bill will now help to protect the animals that we all love.”
“I thank my fellow member of the Defence Committee for giving way. Like him, I believe that it is a particular privilege to serve on that Committee. Can he confirm that the decision by the permanent under-secretary at the NIO not to attend the Veterans Board was discussed at our Committee only today and that, to put it mildly, we took a rather dim view of his view?”
“One group of veterans who undoubtedly deserve our respect are the veterans of Northern Ireland who served for years on Operation Banner to uphold the rule of law against the IRA, yet some of them now face subsequent investigation—even up to 50 years on, even including Chelsea Pensioners—while those in the IRA are off scot-free with letters of comfort from Tony Blair. Does the Secretary of State agree with me that, as some have recently suggested, to “treat both sides the same” is not only patently ludicrous, but a deep insult to all those veterans without whose courage there would never have been a Good Friday agreement in the first place?”
“Thank you, Mr Speaker. The A400M is an emerging procurement disaster. We have paid £2.6 billion for an aircraft with appalling reliability, bad engines, a virtually broken gearbox, problem propellers, massive vibration problems and an inability to deliver paratroops. There was recently a NATO ministerial meeting of the partner nations to decide what to do about the disaster. What was the outcome of that meeting?”
“This is an extremely serious leak of not just one highly sensitive diplomatic cable, but a number of them over a relatively long period. I endorse the request from the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Tom Tugendhat), and several other hon. Members that the police be called in and that a criminal investigation take place. However, until that happens, will the Minister confirm that the Cabinet Office inquiry, which he has announced today, will be led by the Cabinet Secretary personally, who, of course, has had experience of heading up sensitive inquiries in recent months?”
“I am grateful to my fellow Defence Committee member for giving way. On behalf of the whole House, I wish the hon. Lady a happy 29th birthday, seasonally adjusted. I absolutely commend the initiative that she mentioned. I want to mention another D-day veteran—Reginald Francois, my father—and I am immensely proud of that. She is right that we owe all these men a debt. My father taught me never to take living in a free country for granted. That is why I think “Vets and Cadets” is wonderful, because those who served can teach those who follow them the importance of freedom, and the fact that freedom is not free.”
“The IRA have ‘letters of comfort’—we don’t. Why, Prime Minister, are you pandering to Sinn Féin-IRA, while throwing veterans like me to the wolves?” What is your answer, Prime Minister, to this Chelsea pensioner and all the veterans he represents?”
“I have a question to the Prime Minister from a Northern Ireland veteran. He is Royal Marine David Griffin, a Dublin-born Irish Catholic who joined the British Army and transferred to the Royal Marines. In 1972, in Belfast, he killed an IRA gunman who was about to assassinate one of his comrades at a guard post. Forty-seven years later, he is now being investigated by the Police Service of Northern Ireland. He is watching these proceedings now, Prime Minister, from his home, at the Royal Hospital Chelsea. He asked me to ask you this: “I served my Queen and country in uniform for over 20 years and I was commended for my service in Northern Ireland. Acting under the lawful orders of my officer commanding, I killed a terrorist who was about to murder one of my comrades, yet I am being investigated as if I were a criminal.”
“10, the Northern Ireland Office and the MOD about who is in charge of veterans policy. Could you try to overcome this chaos in Whitehall and use your best offices to find out when today—if, indeed, at all—we will be given the written statement on this critical issue that we have been promised all day?”
“On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. I apologise profusely to my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), but I hope he will understand. Yesterday at Defence questions, Mr Speaker made it very plain that, because of all the speculation in the media about changes to the legal protection of veterans, he expected the Ministry of Defence to make an oral statement in the House today. It elected not to do so and instead put a written statement on the Order Paper this morning. I have just treble-checked in the Library, and that statement has still not been made available at almost 4 o’clock. In all the years I have been in this House, I have never known a written statement not to turn up by 4 pm. This is symptomatic of a three-way war between No.”
“Further to that point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. I apologise to the House and to you, but because I had come hot-foot from the Library, when I first rose I had not noticed that the Leader of the House was in her place. I do not know whether she could rise briefly to explain to the House the inexcusable delay of this critical WMS that affects veterans across the United Kingdom. Can she perhaps assist us?”
“On John Downey, the alleged Hyde Park bomber, is it not correct that when he produced his so-called “comfort letter”, the judge abandoned the trial? The Government continue to maintain the fantasy that such letters have no legal power or strength, yet a judge in charge of a murder trial abandoned it when one was presented. Does that not drive a coach and horses through the Government’s case?”
“David Griffin, aged 78, is a Chelsea pensioner. In 1972, he killed an IRA gunman who was about to assassinate one of his comrades. He was investigated at the time and exonerated. Forty-six or 47 years later, he is being investigated again by the PSNI, who will not tell him his fate. He was an Irish Catholic born in Dublin—”
“It is not sub judice. I am sorry, Mr Bone: I completely understand your intervention, but this is not before a court and the case is in the public domain. Very quickly, David Griffin has no comfort letter—he has no comfort of any kind and is in utter limbo, although he is a Chelsea pensioner. He is very worried. Why do our Government allow this to happen?”