Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Debate between Earl Attlee and Baroness Jolly

Lords Hansard - part one & Committee stage
Wednesday 3rd November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Earl Attlee (Con)]

My Lords, I support this Amendment and agree with every word that noble Lords have said. My strong advice to my noble friend the Minister, bearing in mind that this is a policing Bill, is to come quietly. The alternative is to have another 45 minutes on Report, lose a Division and get into ping-pong. It is much easier to agree in due course.

[Baroness Jolly (LD)]

My Lords, I feel quite inadequate. I only have two sons, not six, and two were a handful. Clearly, I am a huge supporter of this amendment, and was completely unaware of somebody wanting to watch someone breastfeed. I am pleased that we are today trying to stop this or at least make it clear that this is beyond the pale.

Policing and Crime Bill

Debate between Earl Attlee and Baroness Jolly

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard - part one): House of Lords
Wednesday 26th October 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jolly]

I thank the Minister for her comments and my noble friend Lord Paddick, and the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, for their support. I understand that it would be a large change for the IPCC to undertake this extra work. I imagine that a certain amount of the capacity would go from one organisation to the other. One of the things I would like to understand is the timescale of all this, so perhaps when the Minister and I meet, this is the sort of area we could discuss.

[Earl Attlee]

My Lords, I am quite neutral, but obviously interested in this debate. The noble Baroness talked about a large increase in work for the IPCC or the successor organisation. In support of the noble Baroness, there are not that many service policemen and policewomen. It is not clear to me why it should generate a huge amount of extra work.

I have to say to the Minister, that she has not absolutely convinced me that there is the capacity in the service system to investigate really effectively a service police force when something goes wrong. However, I have to say I am still neutral.

[Baroness Jolly]

I have no comment on that one. I thank the noble Earl for his remarks and in the meantime beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Armed Forces Bill

Debate between Earl Attlee and Baroness Jolly

Wednesday 27th April 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jolly]

I support the amendments. As the noble Baroness has just said, what is there not to like?

Children joining the services at 16 and 17 come in all shapes and sizes: from those embarking on technical or engineering careers to those joining the infantry and, possibly, the Royal Marines. Their wish is to be physically rather than mentally active, and they are required. The first group, at the start of an apprenticeship, will continue their education and will require a high standard of literacy and numeracy. The second group will not require such high standards and will not be comfortable with reading formal documents. There needs to be awareness that currently, these recruits do not study the same GCSEs as the technical recruits, but another curriculum. There is an issue here, because young men and women who enlist under the age of 18 can leave the Army at any stage up to 18, but if they have dipped out of the standard curriculum and are not studying a GCSE curriculum, their life chances will be affected. We need to be aware of that.

If the Minister cannot answer this question perhaps he will write to me. When was the readability of the documents the amendment refers to last examined? If the required reading age is greater than 10, as is being suggested—bearing in mind that the average Sun reader has a reading age of between eight and 10, so it is nothing unusual—perhaps these documents should be revised.

[Earl Attlee]

I support the recruitment of people under the age of 18 into the Armed Forces. It provides a fabulous opportunity for them.

I have no problem with Amendment 7 but I do not expect my noble friend to accept it. It would be a seriously good news report. I would certainly like to write the section on evaluating the effects on young service people. I would be able to write lovely case studies about youngsters coming from disadvantaged circumstances with poor employment prospects. These people will obviously be young, fit, able to read and write, intelligent and have potential. They can join the Armed Forces and have a fabulous career, whereas for their contemporaries in certain areas of the country the prospects are not very good.

The education and training they will receive will, generally speaking, be far better than they get elsewhere. They may leave the Armed Forces fairly soon but, by that point, if they are not in a highly skilled trade, they will probably have a vocational driving licence. As to the financial effects, it is a win-win situation. These youngsters will have an income their contemporaries will not have, so that is a win for them. They will be on the pathway to a decent career. When they become 18, they will be fully trained members of the Armed Forces and deployable.

To be charitable, Amendment 8 is unnecessary. It suggests that a young person recruited into the Armed Forces is practically illiterate. The reality, as my noble friend will tell us, is that a guardian’s consent is needed. More importantly, a young person who is illiterate to the extent that they cannot read and understand the recruitment papers would not be able to pass the service entrance tests. Their potential would be so poor that they would be of no use to the Armed Forces and would not be able to get in on that route. Therefore Amendment 8, to be charitable, is unnecessary.

Armed Forces Bill

Debate between Earl Attlee and Baroness Jolly

Thursday 3rd March 2016 Grand Committee

[Baroness Jolly (LD)]

My Lords, I have had some experience recently in several officers’ messes of the Royal Navy, which all operate on a pay-as-you-dine basis. They are all outsourced, so they all operate on different principles. In one you might get all your vegetables including potato, while in others you might pay piecemeal—so there is no particular pattern. Were the department to do an analysis of the type suggested by the noble Earl, it might be worth looking at the issue of outsourcing. Is the same sort of thing happening across the other services? They say that an army marches on its stomach. This also highlights the issue of the quality of the food and the balance of the diet.

During recess, I was in the Arctic Circle; I am a member of the Armed Forces Parliamentary Scheme. I was taken to task by some marines who were talking to us about the quality of the ration packs that they take with them. I tried a chicken tikka masala, which had been dehydrated, and it was sort of identifiable. The serious point that they were making is that on an exercise such as that a marine should consume between 6,000 and 8,000 calories a day to be operational. There were several elements of the packs that were fairly good in terms of quality and being part of a balanced diet, giving them the nutrition that they needed, but they really resented that the calorie number was added to by putting in chocolate bars. They maintained that this was something on which they got a sugar high and then a sugar low straightaway, and that if we were really serious about them we should look again at the ration packs. Whether any dietitian has looked at them I know not, but the Minister might at some stage care to ask somebody who might know the answer to that question.

Another issue that has come up is with the Navy in particular. Clearly, ships need to carry chefs. With outsourcing, so that all bases at home are run by outside catering organisations, when a chef’s time for leave or a shore-based job comes up, there is nowhere for them to work because none of those opportunities is available. I know that the Navy is looking at that.

Those are short reflections for a very interesting topic, but perhaps not for legislation.

[Earl Attlee]

My Lords, before the Minister and the Opposition Front Bench reply, the noble Baroness made a very important point about the ration packs, which was slightly outside the scope of my amendment, but I have spoken slightly outside the scope of other noble Lords’ amendments. One of the challenges of manufacturing the ration packs is the exact point that the noble Baroness made about packing enough calories into them. It makes it very difficult to find suppliers that can pack that many calories into the packs.

--- Later in debate ---

[Earl Attlee]

My Lords, this is a short probing amendment to explore where the Government are on the issue of allowing women to serve on the front line. I do not intend to return to it at a later stage.

There is a wide variety of important roles for women in our Armed Forces and they make a significant contribution. In many cases, they stand in harm’s way and take the same risks as their male counterparts. Furthermore, they can increase operational effectiveness. My only concern is that perhaps the range of roles was increased merely to plug a recruiting gap that should have been dealt with by improving pay, terms and conditions of service, and accommodation. There are many roles in which women can perform better than men, including traditional male roles. However, they are excluded from roles that are primarily to close with the enemy and kill him.

The intention of my amendment is broadly to allow women to serve in the Royal Armoured Corps but not infantry regiments, but I accept that it may not actually achieve that. Subsection (3) is merely an exemption, a get-out provision, to allow posting and recruitment for very special roles including but not limited to Special Forces. I do not see any need for the Committee to debate this provision as it is merely to avoid any undesirable effects of the amendment.

My concern is that the roles that I seek to exclude require a very high level of strength as a prerequisite. My first question for the Minister is: what proportion of females does he think can meet the current fitness and strength requirements for the infantry? I ask because very few women are as strong as the average male soldier. Secondly, do the Government have a target for the percentage of our Armed Forces that should be female? I would be very interested to hear the views of the Committee on this issue. I beg to move.

[Baroness Jolly]

My Lords, I am sure the noble Earl, Lord Howe, will correct me if I have this wrong when he sums up but I understand that a Statement on this issue is expected in the near future, and that both the PM and the Secretary of State expect to lift this ban within a year.

Perhaps the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, could help me. I want to make sure that I understand what his amendment is trying to do, taking the three subsections together and weaving them into an argument. I understand the noble Earl to be saying that a female member of the Armed Forces can engage or destroy the enemy in close combat only if they are specially selected for being extraordinarily fit and having exceptional mental and other capacities. Is that right?

[Earl Attlee]

My Lords, I did touch on subsection (3), the purpose of which is to ensure that we do not prohibit females from being posted to Special Forces units. Perhaps that would not be suitable for the SAS or SBS but perhaps other roles could be caught by my amendment as drafted. It is merely to make sure that the Minister does not criticise me for causing unnecessary problems. I suggest to the Committee that females can serve in the Royal Armoured Corps, operating an armoured fighting vehicle, but they should not be able to be in the infantry, sticking the bayonet into the enemy.

[Baroness Jolly]

I thank the noble Earl for that clarification. I rather suspected that that was what he was going to say. I was wondering about the words “extraordinarily fit” and,

“exceptional mental and other capacities”.

I wondered how these would be determined, defined and measured. The noble Earl has helped me out to a certain extent there.

We know that women already serve as medics, intelligence officers, fighter pilots and submariners. They have been awarded medals for their bravery in battlefield situations. Should these criteria not be applied to anybody, men or women? They sound gender-neutral. I see what the noble Earl is trying to achieve but I am not sure he has achieved it. It seems that it could apply to either men or women. Whatever happens, whoever we send into battle, we need the people engaging for us to do so based on their abilities, not their gender.

[Earl Attlee]

My Lords, my worry is that, if the Government decide that, yes, we can have females serve in the infantry, the fitness and strength standards for a combat infantryman would have to be lowered. That would mean that we lower the capability of the infantry—they would not be as fit and strong—in order to have a unisex standard.

[Baroness Jolly]

I understand what the noble Earl is trying to get at. Conversations I have had about this suggest that the number of women who are likely to fit the category will be very small indeed. I am sure that they will ensure that they have all the other characteristics that the noble Earl suggests they should have in order to engage.

Mid Staffordshire Foundation Trust Inquiry

Debate between Earl Attlee and Baroness Jolly

Wednesday 6th February 2013 Lords Chamber

[Earl Attlee]

My Lords, I remind the House of the benefit of short questions in order that my noble friend the Leader of the House can answer as many questions as possible, which I am sure he is very keen to do. If necessary, I can help.

[Baroness Jolly]

My Lords, we, too, welcome the Francis report, and the many recommendations that we believe will strengthen the whole NHS. In particular, we welcome Francis’s recommendation of a statutory duty of candour: the duty of a clinician to explain and apologise when things go wrong. When and how does my noble friend see this being implemented?