Richard Foord

It is an honour to serve with you in the Chair, Mr Dowd, given your insight on matters of national security. I am grateful to the hon. Member for North Down (Alex Easton) for securing the debate today. This summer, a constituent joined me in my surgery at Honiton and explained that she was the widow of one of the victims who had been killed in a helicopter crash in 1994. Her husband was one of the 29 security personnel who were killed when Chinook Zulu Delta 576, in which they were travelling, crashed over the Mull of Kintyre. In my speech, I want to focus on what has happened since: the years of uncertainty, the fragmented investigations, the unanswered questions and the decision to seal key documents away until 2094. My constituent is now a member of the Chinook Justice Campaign, led by 24 of the 29 families who are seeking answers about the crash itself, but also accountability for way that it was handled in the aftermath. They have set out a long list of unanswered questions—a stark reminder of how much remains unresolved for the families—including: “Why were our loved ones placed on an aircraft that even the Ministry of Defence and its most experienced test pilots were prohibited from flying?” and “Were the passengers on board told that the proper authority in the Ministry of Defence had determined that the aircraft was not to be relied on in any way whatsoever?” After three decades, those are modest and entirely reasonable requests. The withholding of information has denied families the answers that could have brought some closure to their grief. Across 31 years, six separate investigations have examined the Chinook crash, yet none has provided a full or coherent account of what happened. The original RAF board of inquiry in 1995 blamed the pilots without ever resolving the serious airworthiness concerns known about at the time. Later reviews, culminating in the 2011 Lord Philip review, overturned the negligence verdict but still did not address why the aircraft was allowed to fly despite being declared unairworthy by the MOD’s own testing centre in 1993. Even subsequent parliamentary scrutiny and internal MOD examinations, including through the 2000s and the 2010s, left major questions unanswered. Those include how the false declaration of airworthiness was made, why crucial information was withheld from the pilots, and what is contained in the documents now sealed until 2094.