Armed Forces Bill

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time. The Bill results from a comprehensive review of service law, the first comprehensive review since, I believe, the 1950s—about half a century. I served on the Select Committee on the Armed Forces Bill in both 1991 and 1996, so long ago that there was a Conservative Government—[Interruption.] At that time, they were the future. We identified the need for a comprehensive review of the Service Discipline Acts, but nothing happened. In the 1998 strategic defence review, over which I had the pleasure of presiding under the tutelage of the then Secretary of State, George Robertson—now Lord Robertson—the Government recognised that a single system of service law would better serve today’s armed forces, which increasingly train and operate together on both the practical and the theoretical sides of combat and warfare, and in many other tasks. I believe that the Bill will deliver just that. It represents four years’ work, at the centre of which have been the armed forces themselves. I commend the work that has been done since his appointment by my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State, who has had to master the detail of a four-year summary of half a century of consideration of laws, some of which date back to centuries ago. It is a Bill that has at its centre the armed forces themselves. In that sense, it is a Bill for the armed forces and it has their full support, primarily because it meets their needs in a way that has been absent for decades.