Speeches by Twigg.

“So you do not have the 2025 figures to hand now?”

“Can I ask a specific question? A key reason for maintaining the jurisdiction of the service justice system in relation to serious sexual offences was its ability to operate overseas. However, the RAF Families Federation has told us that support and safeguarding for victims and witnesses overseas has been a significant …”

“But you do not have the figure.”

“What is the current figure?”

“What were the last figures you had?”

“Minister, the MoD has made claims about building trust in the service complaints system. Can you describe to the Committee how you can prove that is the case?”

“May I ask each of the service chiefs, who have mentioned the statistics on a number of issues, how the key performance indicator of 90% of service complaints being dealt with in a certain timeframe is going? Are service complaints being dealt with in the timeframe that you have agreed to? We will start with the Air Chi…”

“You see what I am getting at. We are looking for credible evidence and data that there is confidence. Making complaints is one thing, but actually being satisfied that a complaint has been dealt with in a proper way is another, and I am not hearing any evidence that it is happening at the moment.”

“That is clearly what we are interested in. You can put all the systems in place, but we need to know whether people feel confident in using the system. What proof do you have that satisfaction is increasing, or that people are more comfortable and confident in using it, to back up the system?”

“What I am hearing is that you do not have any proof or evidence that confidence has increased in the way that service complaints are being dealt with.”

“You describe what you are doing, which is interesting, but my question was specifically about what proof you have that confidence has increased and is increasing in service complaints.”

“The RAF Families Federation suggested that we need to revisit the recommendation for an independent defence authority. Do you agree?”

“I thank the Prime Minister for all his efforts, not least over the past few days. Although many of us have a difference of opinion with President Trump about the way he talks and the actions he is taking in terms of Iran—those are obviously things that we on the Labour Benches do not agree with—I am a little concerned …”

“I was in Latvia at the weekend, where they very much know what the threat is from Putin and the Russians. I thank the Minister for his statement and the helpful way in which this has been described in public. It is clear that we need to do a lot more to explain to the British public what the threat is from the Russians…”

“It is interesting; this could just be a whole session of attacking and criticising the MoD—and that it is not something that we do very often, as you know. But we are probably all on the same page in terms of the concern and criticism about the delay. Obviously, part of it is that the longer it goes on, the more diffic…”

“Can you tell us a bit about that? We are not getting that side at the moment; we hear a lot about what the problems are, which no one is denying.”

“I have a quick question. A growing number of people feel that we need to transition to a war footing, or certainly that we must be prepared to be able to scale up much more quickly following on from the DIP. But to do that, we would have to bring a lot of people into the industry quickly to up our production rate. I wa…”

“Following on from that, does the capacity exist within the industry to do this without causing inflation? You touched on defence inflation before, in terms of the cost of minerals and so on. With its current capacity, how can the industry meet demand without seeing defence inflation, while also ensuring that the taxpay…”

“So you are already setting the scene for when the DIP is produced? We have some certainty—or some clear pathway—that it is already going to cost more than it would have last year, regardless of the other increases in energy costs and so forth, because the capacity is not there as it was. People have gone out of busines…”

“Will the capacity be there when the DIP is produced, or do you have major capacity problems?”