Armed Forces Bill

I join the Minister in thanking those who have contributed over the last four or five months to our deliberations on these matters. It is true that the Bill team has been working even longer; I think for 18 months. I should remind the House that when the House last debated this matter in 1955, the Select Committee took two years. I hope that the Minister will acknowledge that hon. Members on both sides of the Select Committee have undertaken in four or five months that which our predecessor Committee in the 1950s took two years to undertake. That seems like a productivity enhancement to me. I should also like to pay tribute, as I have done already, to the hon. Member for Islwyn (Mr. Touhig) for all the help behind the scenes that he gave, and to the Minister I am bound to say, ““A very good opening performance,”” and I hope that he will take some confidence from that. I also hope that he will accept that he has one of the best jobs in the Government in representing and acting on behalf of some of the finest men and women in our country. You, Mr. Deputy Speaker, said that consideration has now been completed, but consideration of the Bill has not been completed. We have not been able to discuss a number of amendments. The hon. Member for Blackpool, North and Fleetwood (Mrs. Humble) had tabled a new clause about an ombudsman that we were unable to discuss, and we had some concerns over service panels and the make-up of the court martial panels. We also had a concern that the director of service prosecutions must have a military background, and there were other issues as well. So unfortunately we will bid the Bill farewell to another place not fully considered here, and I hope that some of those points will be taken up there. One of the most important points about the Bill is the way in which it has been considered. The Select Committee procedure has been hugely beneficial, and the Committee so found in its report and recommended that the Government should consider applying the technique to other Bills. I have no doubt, seeing the hon. Member for Portsmouth, North (Sarah McCarthy-Fry) in her place, having participated assiduously in our proceedings, that it was extremely beneficial to all of us, however much experience we had of the military. We all took away a huge amount from the opportunity of being able to cross-examine people before us and make the visits. The Committee was better informed as a result. We may not all have heard the same things or interpreted what we heard in quite the same way, but the fact that we made those visits and held those proceedings was beneficial. It was always difficult for the Opposition given that the service chiefs had all signed up to the legislation. It ill behoves an acting pilot officer to question the Chief of the Air Staff, let alone the Chief of the Defence Staff, about whether he has got it right or not, but I would be quite interested to know in exactly how much detail each of the defence chiefs read the legislation. As I have said, the Opposition’s approach was to look at the Bill from the point of view of how it will affect our armed forces on the front line, not so much how they will deal with discipline at home in Aldershot or Colchester. The debate about the chain of command and the power of commanding officers illustrated our genuine concerns about the administration of discipline, particularly where servicemen and women are felt to have acted outside the rules of engagement. It is good news that the Government have accepted the need for annual renewal. I thank the hon. Member for Islwyn for having acceded to that change, which is incorporated in the Bill. That welcome provision will give the House an opportunity to revisit how the changes are bedding down. The Minister has referred to the Bill’s tri-service nature, which is widely accepted as being the desirable way to go. However, one of the things that came out of our visits to Cyprus, Oman and Iraq is that each of the armed forces fights differently and has an individual ethos. Paragraph 39 on page 13 of the Committee’s report makes the important point that"““The way each Service fights is different and the Bill needs to accommodate those differences””." We want to see everything in terms of joint operations, but that is not necessarily the case, because, as an old boy has said, many sailors will never work alongside a soldier or airman throughout their whole military careers. Some of those differences came out during our visits, and I hope that the Minister will reflect on how the Bill can be made to fit the individual service ethos—the desire of the chiefs to make the default position on courts martial panels single service is a good starting point. The Opposition have also taken the view that this body of military law is essential. We agree with the Judge Advocate General that the military should be governed by completely different law from that which applies to civilians. I hope that we have managed to accommodate the changes to civilian law to the extent that they will not damage the operational effectiveness of the armed forces. As a sideswipe at the European convention on human rights, I was concerned to be told during our proceedings in Select Committee that although the Bill is compatible with the ECHR, that is no bar to further challenges. I personally take the view that the European Court of Human Rights should have nothing to do with how the United Kingdom disposes of its armed forces. The protection of the members of our armed forces and their arrangements should be exclusively a matter for this Parliament and not for some court composed of a collection of foreigners. I feel very strongly about that matter. The test which we must apply to our deliberations over the past few months is whether we have provided our armed forces with a legal framework that will do them the justice that they undoubtedly deserve. There is not an hon. Member in this House, even among those who have spoken against the war in Iraq, who does not have anything other than unbounded admiration for our armed forces, and I hope that we have fashioned a law that will help them, that will protect them and enable them to do their magnificent work on behalf of the entire nation. I shall conclude with the military covenant, which is quoted on page 6 of our report and which sets out the Army’s doctrine:"““Soldiers differ from civilian employees because success in military operations, when the price of failure may be death, requires the subordination of the rights of the individual to the needs of the task and the team, albeit within a legal framework.””" I hope that we have discharged our responsibility to the men and women of our armed forces to their satisfaction.