My Lords, I am very happy to add my support to my noble friend Lord Dannatt’s Amendment 48 regarding mental health support. I came to today’s debate thinking that it struck me as a very modest but effective way of keeping the Ministry of Defence’s feet to the fire on an issue patently requiring action. However, having listened today, I begin to worry that it may not be enough.
I think it is now more generally accepted in society that in human beings mental health is every bit as prevalent as physical health. The fact that mental health can suffer as a result of traumatic experience is also widely accepted. Mental health should nowadays carry no stigma and should be proactively monitored in the same way that physical and dental health are. This is where I improvise and part company with my prepared thoughts, as I reflect on my own experience of the mismatch in the approach to mental as opposed to physical health.
In September 1973, as an 18 year-old, I attended Sandhurst. On day one, I was weighed. Sandhurst had an idea that an officer had to weigh 12 stone 8 pounds. If you weighed more than that, you were put in a queue for extra PT. If you weighed less, you were put in a queue for extra milk.
In virtually every week, if not every day, of my life in the Army in the following 43 years, something to do with my physical health was assessed or tested, with a basic fitness test every other day, a battle fitness test probably once a month, the Army physical training assessment, the Army physical fitness assessment, annual medicals, hearing tests, foot inspections and dental tests. This mismatch between checks on my physical and mental well-being is remarkable. I was never once in 43 years asked by anybody how I felt mentally. I know from my own children that sports physiotherapists are everywhere. People, including my son, think nothing of taking a couple of sessions with a therapist to make them feel a bit better—he knows he will get better, but he just feels a bit down.
If the Minister will forgive me, the appearance of the annual online platform and £2.7 million in funding does not seem a sufficient amount of effort. It smacks of tokenism to meet something that actually needs a cultural shift in the whole approach to mental health from the Armed Forces and the Ministry of Defence. Whatever happens to this amendment, which I fully support, I hope that this sense of a need for a cultural shift is taken back to the ministry and the Armed Forces.