Speeches by Carns.

“The hon. Member knows better than I the difficulties of Northern Ireland politics. My role in this is to ensure that veterans are protected. I speak to the Northern Ireland Veterans Commissioner on a weekly basis for hours on end to make sure that we are defining, refining and implementing the correct protections for o…”

“I have 100% respect for the views of anyone who has served in our armed forces, and I am willing to sit down and talk through, in detail, any of the statistics that we have in the Ministry of Defence that would show that statistics do not necessarily justify some of the comments that were made. I am happy to discuss th…”

“In my last role, I had considerable dealings with the service justice system. I have been to visit the Defence Serious Crime Command and had a look at the victim support units that it has established, and I can say that since 2021 there has been a huge amount of revamping and rebuilding of the service justice system. I…”

“There has been no impact on our special forces recruitment. The SAS is the tip of the spear, one of the best regiments in the world. It will continue to be so, and I have no doubt that it will continue to attract the very best of our armed forces to join and serve in its ranks.”

“I have worked very closely with those in the Northern Ireland Office on this issue, and I will allow them to come up with the answer, but from our perspective the legacy commission as a whole has the most powers to review the evidence that has gone through. It will get to truth, reconciliation and justice better than a…”

“No, I would join the Royal Marines.”

“This Government have an exceptional record on supporting our veterans. We put more money into veterans than any other Government in the past 10 years. We put £50 million into Valour. We have enhanced the Op Restore programme. Op Courage on mental health has now got £21 million and has rolled out. Our career transition …”

“The reality is that the last Government’s legacy Act made promises that could not be kept, and explaining why to our veterans community is exceptionally difficult, and I will not lie on that. On the same hand, we have been clear that inquests that were started by the last Government, but stopped—such as Loughgall in 20…”

“It is probably worth while talking about what we have in the UN from our perspective. We have 23 military staff officers to the UN peacekeeping abroad, which is Cyprus, Somalia, Lebanon, South Sudan and the DRC. We also hold some critical positions in those countries—for example, the UK military staff officer and gende…”

“The shorter the timelines, the more time we spend preparing the work to get evidence rather than delivering. There is maybe a discussion that we could balance this out. In particular, if we can get our methodology of measuring effect up and running, it will become far easier for you to hold us to account.”

“I can lead from my perspective. Anywhere defence goes, anything defence does, we have human security and therefore women, peace and security bedded in, inculcated into that. The point you mentioned, Chair, about the increase in violence around the world and the reversal of so much good that has been done in the last 10…”

“It should be any woman who wants to realise her ambitions or deliver change in any walk of life. That could be in the private space, all the way through to—from our perspective in defence in particular—the security and national defence architecture, usually, of the country. Also any individual that may benefit from the…”

“That is a really good question. I will have to get back if there is a specific description.”

“In the defence spending and strategic defence review, my view is that WPS and human security is already root and branch throughout defence. It might be useful just to give you a little flavour of some of the stuff that we are doing, because there is a really good story to tell here, and I genuinely mean that. In the la…”

“Women in leadership and decision making and how we enhance that and help educate and communicate the benefits of it to others is the critical component. It is quite difficult to put your finger on it, but as a small example we have trained over 400 personnel in our human security adviser courses since 2018, and about 1…”

“In UK defence. In particular, internally within UK defence, but we also have a multitude of different programmes globally, helping other countries to consider both human security and women, peace and security as a key aspect of our outputs.”

“Re-educating them to send them back, in some cases, to fight for them. It is absolutely horrifying.”

“It comes hand-in-hand. Once you remove the societal norms that a country is structured around, and the law in particular, and the likelihood of surviving a conflict is reduced, some people, groups and organisations use sexual violence as a weapon of war to enact terror. It is really unfortunate, but we see it across th…”

“Agreed, 100%.”

“We have an increase in rising one-star females in the military. We are 1% up, and there is actually quite a large proportion, and we try to make sure there is multi-gender representation whenever we engage. Sometimes that is not possible, but we try whenever we can. There is a bit about whether it is superficial, as we…”