Armed Forces Bill

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who took part in this extremely constructive and largely non-partisan debate. We are all concerned to provide the best possible support to serving and former members of the armed services and their families. The coalition Government are conscious that we are building on work that our predecessor in office undertook and which Liberal Democrats and Conservatives in opposition supported in their turn. I very much look forward to an examination of the Bill in that spirit. We are all united in wanting to get the best possible system of support for those who are serving, or who have served, and whose families have been affected by their service in the United Kingdom. The Bill covers diverse subjects, as so often service law and service welfare need updating in a range of different areas. Expectations about the quality of service justice have risen over the years—human rights considerations have happily been transformed since service punishments included flogging. My noble friend Lord Burnett raised the question of the position of other countries as to the application of the European Convention on Human Rights to their armed forces. On that specific question I will have to write in more detail, but I can assure him of the general acceptance across Europe of the European convention in relation to the treatment of members of their armed forces, including in those countries which formerly lay behind the iron curtain. My noble friend Lady Fookes regretted that the Bill contained so many amendments to earlier Bills, rather than consolidating existing law. I remind her that the 2006 Act, which many of us here took part in parliamentary scrutiny of, was itself a major consolidation of the separate service disciplinary codes. The Bill is more modest and is explicitly concerned with revising and updating an existing corpus of service law. The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig, rightly raised the question of whether we had found an appropriate peg on which to hang the current provision for the military covenant. We will certainly talk to parliamentary counsel about this and see what can be managed. My father served in the last year of the First World War; I am a late child of a late family. When he was in his 80s I heard many things about problems of discipline—problems of near-mutiny—in the armed services in the early months of 1918, so I am well aware of some of the sensitivities about that period. A wide range of issues have been raised in the debate, and I look forward to examining them in more detail in Committee. I confirm that the Government plan to calendar the Committee stage during our two-week September session. The exact dates will be announced as soon as they have been agreed through the usual channels. Clause 2, on the military covenant, has attracted most attention, and I expect that it will be the main focus of our discussions in Committee. There is a delicate balance, as a number of people have recognised, between setting out rights and weakening service discipline. Writing a code into statutory form would risk inflexibility, demand regular revision and open up the services to endless litigation. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Dannatt, that fundamentally the military covenant is a moral issue, not a legal document. Careful negotiation in the House of Commons led to an amendment. I quote a letter on this from the Royal British Legion to the Prime Minister: "““I fully anticipate that the climate which the amendments to the Bill create will further emphasise the government’s continuing commitment to ensuring that the nation, not just central government, delivers the covenant””." I think that we would all agree with that sentiment. This is not simply a government responsibility. It is a matter for all of us—local authorities, health clinics, hospitals, devolved Administrations and ordinary people across the country. On the timing of the annual report, which the noble Lord, Lord Freeman, raised, we have not yet decided on the timetable beyond the provision in Clause 2 that there should be a report in each calendar year. We will take account of his desire to have a report to scrutinise as early as possible next year. A number of noble Lords have raised the question of how this will be prepared and whether or not parliamentary scrutiny is sufficient. The Government’s intention is that it will be Parliament that will hold the Government to account on their contribution to fulfilling the military covenant. Scrutiny is a process, not just an event. We hope that the annual report will be the peg on which the continuing process of scrutiny will hang, but it will be up to the other place and to us to consider whether we wish to have an annual debate or whether from time to time there should be a more detailed committee inquiry. That is part of the process by which we fulfil our functions, with which I am sure all noble Lords here are familiar. The annual report will be a written report and a substantial document. The Armed Forces will certainly have an input through the chain of command. They will also give feedback thorough the continuous attitude surveys that have been mentioned. I also confirm that the report will also address the problems faced by our Reserve Forces. My noble friend Lady Fookes wanted to put the covenant reference group in the Bill. I recognise her concerns but, as always, one is cautious about the inflexibility provided by writing things into statute law. We recognise the importance of the covenant reference group and we have no doubt that Parliament will continue to ensure that it plays a major role, but we do not see that writing it into statute would necessarily help further. Several noble Lords have raised questions of implementation and enforcement because central government does not have the power to enforce this, and I think that most noble Lords would agree that it would be inappropriate for it to interfere in as much detail as in our local provision of health, education and other elements of welfare. This has to be a matter of dialogue and influence. The devolved Administrations, local authorities and others have to work with central government and have to be held to account informally through the media, the service charities and others. I can confirm that we support the idea of Armed Forces’ advocates at the local level, if that is the approach chosen by the local authority concerned, and we are very happy that a number of local authorities are supporting the Armed Forces by signing up to the new community covenant. A number of noble Lords have raised the question of whether the Veterans Minister should be separate from the Ministry of Defence—I might almost say the question of whether we can trust the Ministry of Defence to look after veterans properly; I think that was the subtext to all that. As someone who regularly goes into the Ministry of Defence, I have to say that it is not entirely isolated from the rest of Whitehall. It works on a continuous basis with the Department of Health, the Department for Work and Pensions and the Department for Communities and Local Government. Officials meet their colleagues. There are representatives from those other departments on the external reference group, which will become the covenant reference group. The noble Lord, Lord Touhig, I think wants to move towards an American system, with a separate veterans’ agency. I should say to the noble Lord that my sister is currently writing a history of the veterans’ agency in the United States, with particular emphasis on the long history of corruption within it—partly because she wishes to demonstrate that there has been socialised medicine in the United States since the 1920s. I think the noble Lord will recognise that there are many problems with the very odd collection of different agencies through which medical health support is provided in the United States. The noble Lord, Lord Lee of Trafford, asked about the Service Personnel and Veterans Agency, which runs Veterans-UK, designed to be the first stop for veterans. In addition, it has a website, an e-mail advice point and a telephone helpline, providing information in one place on services from a variety of organisations. The SPVA also provides the Veterans Welfare Service, a national network of caseworkers to support veterans. It is in a sense a small sort of veterans’ agency. I hope none of us would want to go into the American model and build it up into a much larger form. The noble Lord, Lord Palmer of Childs Hill, and others, mentioned housing. We all recognise that there have been tremendous problems with service housing, but that it is now improving. That improvement began under the last Government, and we are continuing to work towards it. A number of noble Lords have clearly read, and referred to, the report from the Howard League on the inquiry into former armed service personnel in prison. I read the report with great interest, and it is attracting a lot of interest in the Ministry of Defence. The Minister for Defence Personnel, Welfare and Veterans has met Sir John Nutting, the chair of the inquiry, and we will review its recommendations in full with the Ministry of Justice and the voluntary sector and community organisations with which we work on these issues. I should say that the report does not entirely confirm the idea that there is a disproportionate number of servicemen in prison. There is a degree of disproportion for some types of offence, and particularly among the over-45s. It is a very carefully researched report and shows us, among other things, how little we know about this area of offending. The evidence suggests that, from some points of view, ex-service personnel are less likely to commit crimes than civilians. The noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, asked about the US veterans’ courts. I shall read from the executive summary of the Howard League report on this: "““While we have nothing but admiration for the Buffalo court and its remarkable achievement of preventing further offending, we do not suggest that such a court could or should be replicated in the United Kingdom. The lessons we have learned from our experience of the Buffalo court are twofold: firstly, the advantage of maximising the help available to assist in solving whatever problem the veteran has which may have contributed to his offending; and second, the advantage of veteran to veteran contact””." Noble Lords who have read the report will be familiar with some of the experiments in prisons, including getting prison officers with service experience to advise prisoners who have been in the services. We are attempting to do the same in the probation service. The question of mental health arose. It is not entirely clear whether there are much higher levels of mental illness among ex-servicemen than in the rest of the population. We should all remember that one in six of our adult civilian population have mental problems at some stage in their lives. The question of whether post-traumatic stress disorder breaks out later in life, and should therefore be watched for, clearly needs further study. I am aware that ex-servicepeople suffer from flashbacks. In his 80s, my father started to talk about some of his most horrifying experiences, which he had refused to talk about until then. On a lighter note, on the day I was introduced to the House of Lords, my mother-in-law—formerly Lieutenant Robinson, attached to Bletchley Park from 1942 to 1945—realised that the leader of my party in the Lords was the former Sub-Lieutenant Jenkins who had arrived later at Bletchley Park, and proceeded to tear a few strips off him for his behaviour in 1944. Other Members have raised questions about transition, leaving the services and whether the training provided is adequate. The noble Lord, Lord Kakkar, in particular, talked about tracking veterans when they leave. The real problem is to make sure that we do not lose sight of those who have been severely injured in one way or another. That is certainly something that we need to look at much more actively as a new generation of injured servicemen comes back, first from Iraq and now from Afghanistan. The noble Baroness, Lady Drake, made an extremely interesting and well judged speech on young soldiers and the under-18s. We see that as a covenant issue. From time to time, it will certainly be one of the subjects that the annual report will appropriately address. We take pride in the fact that the Armed Forces provide challenging and instructive education, training and employment opportunities for young people. We are confident that the recruitment policies for under-18s are fully compliant with the optional protocol of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Defence policy clearly states that no service personnel under the age of 18—unlike the noble Viscount, Lord Slim—are knowingly deployed on operations outside the UK that would result in their becoming engaged in or exposed to hostilities. The question of the chief coroner came up in several contributions. I remind noble Lords that on 14 June the Secretary of State for Justice made a Statement to the House of Commons, which my noble friend Lord McNally repeated here. It set out the plan to include the office of chief coroner in Schedule 5 to the Public Bodies Act, which will transfer several of its functions either to the Lord Chief Justice or to the Lord Chancellor, rather than abolish them. I hope that will satisfy noble Lords, but if not we shall discuss the matter further in Committee. The noble Lord, Lord Lee, discussed atomic veteran cases. There will be a hearing in the Supreme Court on 28 July, which will determine whether the cases can go ahead, notwithstanding that they are out of time. The July hearing has been adjourned from an earlier date because the complainants are requesting formal disclosure. The noble Lords, Lord Palmer and Lord Touhig, raised the question of medals, which is always a very sensitive issue. My noble friend Lord Astor tells me that he has the Malaysia medal, to which the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, referred. I am always conscious that I have a medal, the Coronation medal, which I gained aged 12 by singing as a treble. When I was in my secondary school’s cadet force, visiting sergeant majors were furious to see a 15 year-old wearing a ribbon that he clearly did not deserve in their context. One has to be a little careful. As I am sure the noble and gallant Lords will agree, medals are intended to be deserved, rather than simply put up. We then considered a number of other issues. My noble friend Lady Miller mentioned Clause 25, to which we may return in Committee. The clause will make the handling of claims easier, in some cases for both the claimant and the sending state, because it will remove the situation in which a British citizen finds themselves directly opposite a representative of a foreign state in a court. I am, however, happy to write about this further to the noble Baroness. We then came to a number of questions on the reserves, such as the mobilisation of the reserves for natural disasters and the like. I remind noble Lords that the reserves can be mobilised for a number of natural disasters. The intention is to make the mobilisation requirement for our reserves identical to that for our regulars—no more and no less. Since 2003, we have had some 24,000 mobilisation orders for reservists to serve abroad; noble Lords who watched the lists of each six-month mobilisation to Afghanistan will be familiar with the fact that a significant proportion of those sent out each month have been reservists. We are therefore very much concerned that, when they return, reservists should benefit from the same veteran provision as regulars. I assure the noble Lord, Lord Dannatt, who talked about the future of the reserves, that the report on the future use of the Reserve Forces will be published in the early autumn. The noble Lord, Lord Rosser, asked whether we see the reserves being called out for other foreseeable events. The answer is no, but they might quite possibly be called out for a number of unforeseeable events in the future. I think the American Secretary of Defense once called this the ““unknown unknowns””, which we might come to. The noble Lord also asked whether we will use the reserves for strike breaking. No, we will not. The Ministry of Defence would not mobilise a reserve to serve in any such circumstances; we must always remember that reserves are volunteers from all parts of the British national community. Lastly, we considered a number of questions on service courts, the role of service police and service and civilian prosecutors. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, who is a great expert on all of this, that we believe that the summary jurisdiction as a whole—the commanding officers’ jurisdiction and whether it complies with the European Convention on Human Rights—is compliant with the European Convention of Human Rights because of the right to choose a court marshal, and because there is a right to a re-hearing of a commanding officer’s decision by the summary appeal court. The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig of Radley, asked about the removal of a provost marshal. That matter would have to be considered by the Defence Council and approved by Her Majesty, because that is part of how we build in the idea of independence. I was also asked about the overlap of civilian prosecutors and judge advocates. Given that the size of our Armed Forces, their service police and the judicial branch has shrunk, it seems to us that there is some advantage in allowing judge advocates to sit in civilian courts and some civilian prosecutors to serve in military courts because it improves the quality and experience of all concerned. This has been a very useful and constructive debate and we look forward to Committee. I heard an undertone of calls around the Chamber for a reversal of the defence cuts and for a sharp increase in defence spending. I would say simply that we all have to do the best we can for our service men and women, for veterans and for their families within the constraints of the budget we now have, and within the constraints of what our public are willing to pay for. I am greatly encouraged by the welcome for this Bill in your Lordships’ House today, and I look forward to coming back in September to examine the Bill in more detail in Committee and to the exchanges that that stage will undoubtedly bring. I beg to move. Bill read a second time and committed to a Grand Committee.