Member

I welcome the Minister for Veterans and People, my friend the hon. Member for Leyton and Wanstead (Mr Bailey) to his post—he is not here today—and I know that he is just the man to get this over the line. I also know how much it hurt him to vote against it on 2 June. The problem is that he did not anticipate that it would come back around so quickly or that, when it did, he would find himself on the hook as the new Minister responsible for delivering it. So what should he do? He has been pushing on this issue himself since 2017, when he was a serving RAF officer. His pedigree in this area is, frankly, unmatched, and I appreciate that he is now in an invidious position. When we last debated this, he made it clear as a Back Bencher that the Home Office was the bottleneck in delivering it. The Home Office says that it is working with Defence Ministers to deliver this, so what is the hold-up?