Armed Forces Commissioner Bill

Debate between Baroness Carberry of Muswell Hill and Lord Wrottesley

Committee stage
Wednesday 19th March 2025 Grand Committee

[Baroness Carberry of Muswell Hill (Lab)]

I will speak to Amendments 11 and 12. It would be impossible to argue that the commissioner should not support the interests of women and minority groups, but I am not sure that this level of prescription, particularly in Amendment 11, serves the Bill well. We heard earlier from the noble Lord, Lord Beamish, about the volume of work that the commissioner will already inherit from the ombudsman, and there will be a lot of work on top of that.

I am a founder member of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, so I obviously would want every public office to bear in mind and have due regard to the interests of those who have protected characteristics, as defined by the Equality Act 2010. The Minister can correct me if I am wrong, but I assume that the Armed Forces commissioner will be subject to the public sector equality duty, so that takes care of that aspect of their work. I accept that the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, may come back to me and say that that does not necessarily guarantee that the level of focus that she would rightly like to see paid to the problems that some minority groups experience in their armed service life will be fully taken care of in the way that she would want from this amendment.

But my general point in arguing that the amendment may not sit well in the Bill is that one of the perennial themes of debate on the Bill, both here and in the other place, has been the much-welcomed independence of the Armed Forces commissioner. Independence implies a degree of freedom, discretion and flexibility. Therefore, it does not fit well with that level of independence to prescribe how that particular function would be carried out in such detail, in the way that this amendment does.

I have seen a lot of equality and diversity programmes that specify a lot of detail. The end result has been that, when it comes to the end of the year and the prescribed annual report is published, it is little more than a tick-box exercise, and we would not want that to be the consequence of an amendment like this. For that reason, I reluctantly find myself unable to support these two amendments.

[Lord Wrottesley (Con)]

My Lords, I rise briefly to support Amendment 8 in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, the noble Earl, Lord Minto, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Norwich. The express intention of the Bill is to support those serving in His Majesty’s Armed Forces. There is no doubt that VAT on school fees will have an adverse impact on services families, who will more than likely find themselves serving overseas at some point in their careers, sometimes on multiple occasions, maybe as they start a family. A 20% increase in the cost of educating their children is absolutely a welfare issue, but it is equally a recruitment and retention issue.

As we have heard from the noble Lords tabling these amendments, families serving abroad rely on the stability that boarding schools provide—largely independent and private schools, but also schools from the state sector. The decision of a family, or in this case an individual, to start or continue to serve in His Majesty’s Armed Forces—after all, they are likely to be not particularly well paid, compared to their equivalents in other areas of public service, let alone in the private sector—will often rely on the add-ons and the benefits offered as a result of their serving as a member of His Majesty’s Armed Forces. As with SEND children, given that there are concerns that any proposed top-ups may not fully compensate the additional costs of VAT on school fees, why are we not going to exempt members of His Majesty’s Armed Forces from this additional financial burden? It may—I suggest that it will—dissuade people from starting or even going on to build a career in the Armed Forces.