Armed Forces Bill

My Lords, on behalf of the Bill team, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, for his very generous words at the start of his speech. In putting forward Amendment 23, the noble Lords, Lord Tunnicliffe and Lord Rosser, bring personal experience of the operation of the Railways and Transport Safety Act 2003 in the civilian environment, which is helpful to the Committee in considering the provisions for the Armed Forces set out in the Bill. First, I will say something about our general approach when looking at whether to apply to the Armed Forces legislation that is aimed primarily at civilians and civilian institutions. In some areas of law, we follow closely—and in some cases apply directly—the general law that applies to civilians. As the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, said, this is most notable in the application of the criminal law and many aspects of criminal procedure and evidence. However, noble Lords will accept that the circumstances of Armed Forces life, and the need to ensure the highest standards of operational effectiveness, mean that we have to look very carefully at whether we need different provisions and solutions for the Armed Forces. The Railways and Transport Safety Act applied the sensible principle of giving powers to test on the basis of a reasonable ground to suspect that someone carrying out navigational and other transport-related activities has taken drugs or alcohol. The Bill adopts this basic approach. However, in deciding what to put in place, we have also considered two special aspects of service life and defence needs. First, members of the Regular Forces, and members of the reserves when they are with the Armed Forces, are on duty or on call for duty 24 hours a day. Secondly, the range of their safety-critical duties is extremely wide. On operations and in training, members of the Armed Forces are constantly dealing with danger and with dangerous equipment and activity. The approach we decided on includes a number of special aspects in response to these factors. It allows a commanding officer, with reasonable cause, to consider the testing of anyone under his command to establish whether they are unfit through drink or drugs to carry out any duty which they may be expected to carry out and which the commanding officer considers is safety-critical. In addition, it allows specific limits to be set by regulations for any safety-critical duty. This will allow us to develop a comprehensive regime for drugs and alcohol safety over the whole range of military functions. There is another important difference from the civilian provisions. As I have mentioned, members of the Armed Forces are always subject to be called on to carry out duties. Many of them are living permanently on base and there is no easy way of saying whether, at any one moment, they are on duty or off duty. Moreover, the likelihood of their being called on to carry out dangerous tasks varies greatly in practice between locations—between Afghanistan and places of rest and recreation. We considered carefully how to avoid a necessarily wide power to test from becoming oppressive. To deal with this, we have provided that it is the commanding officer who will decide, for example, when and whether those under his command are likely to be called on to carry out dangerous tasks. This will allow the chain of command to apply reasonably flexible policies on testing between different theatres and locations. By taking this approach we have tailored the scope and application of drug and alcohol testing to fit service life and needs. I hope that the noble Lord will feel able to withdraw his amendment.