Speeches by Pollard.

“The armed forces parliamentary scheme is a brilliant opportunity for parliamentarians with or without defence knowledge to learn more about our platforms and, perhaps most importantly, about our people. The RAF crews that we forward-deployed to Poland to help to support our eastern flank allies did a superb job, as are…”

“I am happy to write to the right hon. Gentleman about the precise details of that deal. I politely say to him that the future is crewed, uncrewed and autonomous. That is what the strategic defence review set out, and that is why the platforms that we are looking at, such as GCAP, will start as a crewed platform but hav…”

“I beg to move, That the Bill be now read the Third time. In a world that is growing more dangerous, this Labour Government will always put Britain’s security first, and if there is one thing that Members should take away from today’s debate, it is the absolute necessity of this Bill to secure the military base on Diego…”

“It is a joint base.”

“If we are looking at the activities of the hostage search flights, that is solely with the intention of locating hostages, so all the activities of those flights are based on hostage location—to assist in search and rescue for those hostages. That is their primary and only tasking. We do not ask them to look at additio…”

“We do not routinely collect information on the activities of Israeli planes, so we do not have a lot of that information that I can share.”

“Use of that would be a matter for the FCDO to assess. Routinely, the Ministry of Defence would not assess the operational use of military assets by partner nations, but the particular use and test of that would be an FCDO-led question.”

“They are seeking to do that, yes.”

“I would need to check the total number, and I can come back to the Committee, if appropriate, to release that information. As standard practice, we do not often reveal the flights or the frequency of flights. As these are unarmed aircraft, many of them will squawk and can be picked up on open source. Even though the MO…”

“We do not give out details of operational flights, as standard practice.”

“The RAF surveillance flights from RAF Akrotiri are solely for hostage rescue. They are designed to seek to identify the hostages that are being held, and then for a test to be applied to the information, if they are able to locate any, that says we will transfer that information only when we believe that the informatio…”

“It would not be normal for me to—the flights are solely for hostage rescue. Their intention is to use the technologies and capabilities to look at that. As a result, we do not look beyond those activities, and it would be hard for me to give out further details due to operational security.”

“That is not the purpose of those flights—”

“I entirely understand the argument that you are making, and it is one that I am struck with as well. You will appreciate that I will not be able to go into the confidential conversations that we have as part of that international organisation. We maintain a regular dialogue with all the eight partner nations—seven plus…”

“I will take that away.”

“Chair, I can answer your question about withdrawing from the F-35 programme. It is possible for any nation to withdraw from the F-35 programme, but when a nation withdraws from the F-35 programme, they are unable to use any of their F-35s again. That means that our carriers would no longer be used, our F-35Bs in the RA…”

“The F-35 system is a global system. It does not operate different systems for different nations—it is a single global system, in which circumstances, any changes to how the F-35 procurement system on a global basis works requires consensus, and we do not believe that we can achieve consensus.”

“I am happy to come back to the Committee, but it would be the same as the evidence presented in the Secretary of State’s letter—”

“It would not be appropriate for me to reveal confidential conversations between the partner nations. The gisting of the element that was redacted was correct. It remains our assessment that we would be unable to achieve consensus on alterations to the way that the global F-35 programme works.”

“That goes for every F-35 on the planet, which also then has a subsequent risk for peace and security. For instance, it was an F-35 from the Netherlands that shot down one of the Russian drones over Poland, so that is an immediate use of F-35s around the world in supporting our national security requirements and those o…”