Armed Forces Bill

I am grateful for being called to contribute to this debate. I apologise to the Secretary of State and the hon. Member for Woodspring (Dr. Fox) for missing most of their contributions as a result of parliamentary business. The two statements affected my timetable this afternoon. I welcome the Bill and the mechanism for scrutinising and eventually debating it. Several Parliaments use a similar mechanism—Select Committee scrutiny takes place first, then the people involved in that process engage in detailed clause-by-clause scrutiny. If we used that mechanism for more legislation, we would achieve more informed debate in Standing Committee than is traditionally the case. I welcome the way in which the Bill brings together the disciplinary activities of all three services. I was interested to see how the three chains of command have been brought together and to learn what will be dealt with by summary action and what by court martial. Different charges will be dovetailed together. The right hon. Member for North-East Hampshire (Mr. Arbuthnot) pointed out the effect on naval discipline of the introduction of many more courts martial and the subsequent increase in work load. In Committee, we must look in detail at individual offences and how they will be brought together across the services. I do not wish to judge at this stage whether the Bill, as a result of the consultation with the three services, has got it right. Detailed scrutiny will be required in Committee to ensure that punishments and the way in which each offence is dealt are appropriate. One of our major tasks in Committee will be to ensure that the work behind the scenes to pull the three codes together has been done correctly. The Bill, together with my eight and a half years’ experience as an MP, convinces me about the extent to which the armed forces are separate from the rest of us. We accept that they have a different code of discipline and are subject to different mechanisms in the treatment of complaints and grievances. Both concerns are at the heart of the Bill and we must consider whether we are moving from the traditional procedures of the armed forces towards what is acceptable in civvy street. I have spent two periods with the Army as part of the armed forces parliamentary scheme and I have dealt with a great deal of case work that involved the Ministry of Defence. Throughout, I found it incredibly difficult to persuade the armed forces to accept that a complaint is legitimate. My office tells me that the most difficult Department to deal with is the MOD. It is hard to secure any movement at all from it whenever we make a complaint on behalf of a constituent. That ties in with my off-the-cuff chats with service personnel in previous years, so I am worried about whether we have achieved the right balance of independence for the complaints and grievance system. It is not simply the main issues—the Deepcut inquiry, bullying and so on—that have concerned Members over the past few years, as the problem extends all the way down the line. Service personnel cannot join a trade union, so we cannot expect them to use the normal grievance procedures used by people who go to the office at 9 am and leave it at 5 pm. In civvy street, we can go and have a grumble, and there are ways of dealing with such problems. There is a chain of command for service personnel that means that we cannot expect complaints to be dealt with in the same way. Sometimes, the military go too far the other way, and it is easy for them to ignore legitimate complaints because of the sanctity of the chain of command. On the major issues, I was not a member of the Select Committee that considered the previous Armed Forces Bill, but its views on the insufficiency of the mechanism that has been put in place for the independent consideration of complaints were reaffirmed by the current Select Committee. We should seriously consider expanding and enlarging that mechanism, but we must not lose sight of the larger issue so that those young men and women who join the services and believe that they are treated unfairly have a mechanism that will ensure that their complaints, even if relatively trivial, are dealt with legitimately. I often have the impression that it is easy to ignore such complaints and hide behind the chain of command. The same problems that make it difficult to approach the civilian model when dealing with grievances and complaints apply to disciplinary and judicial procedures. It is a different world for someone who is on operations in Iraq or Afghanistan having to make split-second decisions under pressure and being scrutinised after the event for decisions made in stressful situations. Traditionally, people in the armed forces who know those pressures have made the decision about whether to prosecute and what are the appropriate procedures to use. In the past few years, however, military personnel have moved towards civilian standards regarding the acceptability of conduct. The hon. Member for Woodspring referred to that development when he asked whether we should pursue an idealistic or pragmatic approach to discipline. A couple of incidents involving my local regiment, the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment, are of concern. I am not questioning whether the right decisions were made, but in the Mackenzie case, the newspaper publication of fraudulent photographs put our armed forces at risk. The case has been dropped, but it is not clear whether or not anyone else will be pursued. At the same time, Colonel Mendonca of that regiment is being pursued, not under traditional military regulations, but under the International Criminal Court Act 2001. The case will be decided three years after the initial incident. Both cases, together with several others have affected morale in the services and whether service personnel believe that they are treated properly and are subject to a duty of care. When the Bill is enacted, we should aim to ensure that military personnel have confidence in the process whereby they are judged and in how prosecutions are conducted. Bringing the prosecution services of the three services together, perhaps with additional resources, may result in a better quality process. The morale of the armed forces has taken a knock in recent years because of the confusion about whether they should be subject to civilian or military procedure. We should be clear about which approach we are taking. If we expect discipline to reflect the fact that service personnel are members of the military their complaints and grievance procedure should run parallel to that expectation. In the Bill, we need to achieve a balance between both those tracks, so that both are accepted as being fair and reasonable and adequately reflect the fact that servicemen and women operating in a 21st-century military service may have different standards and expectations from those of a 19th or mid-20th-century military. If the Bill is supposed to update military disciplinary and grievance procedures from half a century ago, we need to reflect the modern aspirations and expectations of young men and women who serve in our military today. If we can do that, we can do a good job. That is what I hope will come out of the process. I am not an expert and do not know what that will properly involve, but I ask myself whether, at the end of the process, I will be able to sit in front of young servicemen and women and be sure that we have an updated, modern disciplinary, grievance and complaints procedure in which they can have confidence. If we can do that, the House will have done a good job. My final brief comment is about whether the legislation should be renewed annually. I remain to be convinced—nothing that I have read or heard or that has been said in the Chamber so far this evening has convinced me—that there is any case to move away from annual renewals. I look forward with interest to the debates and contributions from Ministers in the weeks ahead.