My Lords, I rise to support Amendment 48 and to make one comment on Amendment 60. Additional mental welfare supervision and psychology work while people are in the Armed Forces is really important. The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, said words to the effect that 3% of servicepeople are recognised as having a mental illness while serving. We also know that the total is 7%. That is if they have not been on operations, when it is 17%—so there is a gap. We do not manage to close that gap unless we pay much more attention to members of the Armed Forces while they are serving.
The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Houghton, mentioned that he was never asked how he was when he was in the Army. I wonder where this has gone wrong. When I was in the home-based security forces in Northern Ireland, we were visited quite regularly by a medical psychologist in Lisnaskea. That may have come through the Royal Irish and the RUC, which recognised all this a long time before other people. The problem is that I, like the others, rather pooh-poohed
it because you are a mean, green, lean fighting machine, and a psychologist walking in and asking, “Are you all right, mate?”, somehow just does not work very well.
Another issue applying to all this is that we generally consider veterans to be older people. To a certain extent, the idea of a veteran is someone on a veterans’ parade on Remembrance Sunday in towns and villages and at home. However, quite clearly there are two age groups of veterans. There are the old and bold, some of whom—and, in our case in Northern Ireland, many of whom—have psychological problems from the many bombings and shootings, but there is also a large number of current-day servicepeople leaving in their 20s and 30s. They leave for a host of reasons, not least because, if they have been on two or three tours of Afghanistan or somewhere else, they rather feel they have done their bit. When these people, as opposed to those who are 40 or 50, become veterans, they are really a different group that it is hard to get in touch and stay in touch with.
The older ones have been serving for a long time. Therefore, they are there for people to man manage and look after. As a platoon officer or a company officer you know everything about your soldiers’ lives, so they are under some form—not psychological—of supervision. They tend to leave as families or to relatives or whatever. However, you have a very large cohort now of those in their 20s and 30s, and when they leave their first thing on getting out of the gates is to think “Yippee, we’re out”.
We talk about increased money going to current serving soldiers. We are a host to a mental welfare service charity at home. One of the major problems is that the MoD—and I can be corrected by the Minister, perhaps—is responsible for serving soldiers. The moment they walk out of that gate, they are no longer in that category. I am talking about a lot of the younger ones. “Yippee, I’m out”—they are gone. They have had a military doctor, a military dentist, a padre and the NAAFI. Their whole life has been provided for them. They go out and bang—they have no doctor; they have nothing. Incidentally, even if they do find their medical records, at no stage does it say when they go to a health centre, “Beware, this is a veteran”.
We have a total lack of joined-up service care. Therefore, anything that can contribute to greater attention being paid to servicepeople while they are in is really important, because when they are out they are so difficult to find—until they go wrong and become homeless or turn to gambling. That turns, of course, to Amendment 60.
I was interested that the Government deny the figures, or at least do not recognise here the figures from the US. I ask the Minister: why? The number of servicepeople who have not been in operations is 7% of mental health cases in this country. What is it in America? What is it in Denmark? What is it in Germany? It is 6% or 7%. The figure for those on operations who have mental welfare problems is 17%. What is it in the other countries? It is the same. What is different with gambling that the Government seem to know about but we do not? I add my support to these amendments, because any increase in this help is very important.