Today, in the House of Commons, Former Armed Forces Minister and Rayleigh & Wickford MP, Mark Francois, called on the Government not to cut the Defence Budget.
During a General Debate on the Reports of the Defence Committee and the Public Accounts on Armed Forces Readiness and Defence Equipment, Mark raised concerns around the retention of serving personnel, the lack of urgency within the Defence Command Paper and the “dysfunctional” outsourced recruitment system under Capita, amongst other things. In addition, Mark also made reference to his late father, Reginald Francois, who served on a minesweeper named HMS Bressay on D-Day.
In addition, Mark also said the following during his speech:
"We now have a Ministry of Defence which has become, in recent years, a gigantic, sclerotic bureaucracy; constantly hidebound by needless, self-generated red tape; obsessed with process rather than outcomes; in which some senior civil servants are now more interested in wokery than weaponry, endlessly ripped off by some of its own major contractors- such as Boeing- to name but one; and in which key elements of our fighting equipment are so old – and the procurement system for replacing them so broken - we now cannot fight a major war with Russia for more than a few weeks.”
