Armed Forces Bill

My Lords, the noble Lords, Lord Rosser and Lord Tunnicliffe, tabled a similar amendment to Amendment 10 in Grand Committee. In response I assured your Lordships that I regarded Armed Forces advocates as an excellent idea and outlined the tasks they carried out in central government departments. I also mentioned the variety of roles which advocates or champions can and do play at local level in local authorities, NHS trusts or jobcentres. The form this took depended on the job to be done. The issues surrounding this amendment have not changed. It is not the merits of local Armed Forces advocates that are in question but the need to legislate for their existence. Our approach is to spread good practice by demonstrating what advocates and other local initiatives are able to achieve. As the noble Lord pointed out, the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Stamford, suggested in our earlier debate that it was precisely those local bodies which decline to appoint an advocate which were most likely to need one as they had not focused on the issues. I undertook to consider this point further. Having done so, I take rather the opposite view. I suggest that a local body which appoints an advocate, simply because it ticks a box or meets a legal requirement, is very unlikely to make effective use of that individual. This is not the right approach to stimulate genuine improvements at local level, and I ask the noble Lord not to press his amendment.