Service Complaints Commissioner's Sixth Annual Report

(Limited Text - Ministerial Extracts only)

Thursday 26th June 2014 Written Statements

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Defence (Anna Soubry)]

I am pleased today to publish the MOD’s formal response to the Service Complaints Commissioner’s (SCC) sixth annual report on the fairness, effectiveness and efficiency of the service complaints system. A copy will be placed in the Library of the House.

The response sets out how the MOD proposes to address each of the new recommendations made by the commissioner in her latest report. We are committed to ensuring that our service personnel and their families have a complaints system in which they can have confidence, and one which is simpler and quicker. That is why we introduced the Armed Forces (Service Complaints and Financial Assistance) Bill on 5 June to make improvements to the system and to create the first service complaints ombudsman.

No servicemen or women should lack confidence in seeking redress through the complaints process, and we know that to encourage them to do so we need a system that is fairer, more effective and more efficient than at present. While the Bill is progressing, we will continue to learn from the SCC’s annual reports and implement lessons from the services’ own continuous improvement programmes.