It is a delight, Mr Hollobone, to serve under your chairmanship today.
I will certainly not take up eight minutes; I look forward to hearing what the Minister will say on this issue and I think that almost everything that can be said on this subject has been said. Nevertheless, I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Barnsley Central (Dan Jarvis) for his work on this issue over many years. It is one of the intricacies of this place that if one is not in government, such work can be pretty hard going at times, but he has striven over many years and through many debates on this issue, and I pay tribute to his relentless focus on it, not for himself but for the foreign and Commonwealth service personnel he served with, whom he has identified as suffering a serious injustice.
I will address just a couple of points before giving the floor to other people. The first is about the Government’s current position on this matter. For the life of me, I cannot understand why the Government do not do what we are asking them to do. It would not cost a lot of money, as the hon. Gentleman has identified. In the Committee considering the Armed Forces Act 2021, we worked with the Home Office to establish what the cost would be—the cost, not the profit—of taking this action for everyone who left the military in 2020. The cost was £30,000. When we consider what the Government and individual Ministers will spend on their own policies or whatever it may be, I cannot for the life of me understand why they do not do this.
Some of the reasons that Conservative colleagues gave in writing after that campaign to justify their vote against it—because this action was supported by everybody in this country, less the Conservative party, which breaks my heart a bit, considering how the Conservative party dresses itself up as the party of the armed forces—were just insane. They treated the hon. Gentleman and I as if we had just sailed up the Thames in a mess tin and had no idea what we were talking about. Clearly, if this action was in train and was about to happen, we would not waste our time conducting a campaign on it, including in Parliament, or finding out what can and cannot be done. But clearly it is not happening.
There was a consultation. Everybody in government knows that people have 12 weeks to respond to a consultation, but that has been missed as the consultation period finished 24 weeks ago and nothing has come out.
So please do not tell me that there is a consultation and this will all be all right. The consultation itself was an absolute dog’s dinner.
I know how the figure of 12 years before people can settle came about; it was because one of the Secretaries of State went on a visit and met a Fijian chef, who said, “Yes, 12 years. Don’t let them come in under 12 years.” No work went into it at all. The figure should be around the same as the indefinite leave to remain requirements of four or five years, depending on status, which is in keeping with our peer nations.
The idea of splitting up families is atrocious. The idea is that at the end of a person’s service, they send their family back, like a sailor from Trinidad I met last year who was sending his wife and two kids back, so that he could work here and earn the money. We do not do that; we do not split families up. That is not the way we treat people in this country.
I urge Ministers and colleagues to get over the personalities involved here. I know that when some of us get campaigning on an issue it can be quite brutal and people do not want to be seen to go with it. I totally get that, but I urge hon. Members to be as professional as they can be, to park all that stuff and to think about individuals such as Pa, who was mentioned by the hon. Member for Barnsley Central, who lost two legs in Afghanistan. He is still in court fighting visa fees to stay in this country. That is appalling and shames each and every one of us in this place, not just those of us with military connections.
I cannot understand how veterans in this House, who broke bread with foreign and Commonwealth service personnel on operations, can come here and vote for the Government making an 80% profit out of service personnel who want a visa to stay in the UK. I cannot reconcile how they could possibly do that. There will be another chance to get this right, because the hon. Member for Barnsley Central and I will work with all the groups again to introduce a similar amendment. We have to right this wrong.
There is no point waiting further for consultations or excuses. The time is now, it does not cost a lot of money and it is a moral purpose that is not about politics. It is about the morality of how we treat people who serve in this nation’s military. We say that we want this to be the best country in the world to be a veteran, which is a noble ambition that I admire and that nobody would want more than me—I would love it because I could stop banging on about this stuff—but we are a million miles away from that.
If we were to ask individuals who have these problems, such as Pa, “Does this feel like the best country in the world in which to be a veteran?”, what would they say? That is how we will judge this, not by what we do here—announcing wonderful policies, having a consultation and saying further action is unnecessary because we have it all in hand. Go and ask Pa, or the foreign and Commonwealth soldier mentioned earlier who was given a £30,000 bill after using the NHS, “Does this feel like the best country in the world to be a veteran?”, and hon. Members might wake up and realise how much we have to do.
I look forward to the response from my hon. Friend the Minister, and he is a friend. I will not be indiscrete, but I know people’s views on this matter. Others have
come up to me after debates—not this Minister—and said, “Johnny, I’m with you. This is the right thing do, but I want something for my town or city.” What does that do for the individual service personnel we have mentioned? Nothing. It is a coward’s way to do politics. We know the right thing to do. We need to get on and do it, and move on to other issues.
1.48 pm