Armed Forces (Flexible Working) Bill [HL]

Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 11th July 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome the Bill. I do not bring a great deal of experience of the military to the debate but I bring a degree of experience in negotiating. In my former life as a general secretary of the Civil Service trade union, I negotiated on part-time and flexible working. I was seen as quite progressive in the 1970s when I pressed for a move from full-time employment in the public services towards more flexible arrangements. The employer was opposed to it; the Inland Revenue, now HMRC, where I worked, opposed it in the first instance; and, within my union, the hard left—I would not associate Don, my noble friend Lord Touhig, with this—similarly opposed the change from having people on a full-time to a part-time basis. They felt perhaps that they would not quite be able to control them in the way that they had previously. So I was in the middle of the debate, but I believed that it was the right way forward as we started to see more of a welcome feminisation of public service.

Without any doubt, once we had reached an agreement, the employers changed their mind and started to welcome part-time working because, after they had put it into practice, they saw clearly that it was of great assistance to them in recruitment and retention. Without doubt, if we had not had part-time working in the Civil Service and many other parts of public service during the 1980s, employers would not have been able to maintain the complement required to keep the public service working. So it was most certainly a move in the right direction.

Today, I support what is being proposed for the Armed Forces in a number of areas and for very obvious reasons: they have to move at a different pace and sometimes in a marginally different direction from the rest of the working community. Underlying that, when we have to recruit and retain, we have to be cognisant of what is happening elsewhere and endeavour to match it where possible—or at least to amend arrangements to fit the circumstances in which the forces find themselves. Knowing who the Minister is, I am reasonably confident that he will ensure that we have a set of terms that are applicable to the forces and that fundamentally meet the requirements and move towards more flexibility and more part-time working, and I will give him full support on that.

Of course, there are problems. Based on experience, I share the view that there will be resentment among full-timers when they see people moving to part-time working. The noble Lord, Lord Dannatt, made the point that that must be taken into account and handled very carefully to make sure that such resentments are avoided as far as possible. However, it is a flexible working world and arrangements have to apply in every area within our domain of employment. Therefore, they have to apply, appropriately adjusted, within the Armed Forces, and I hope that this change will move forward quickly.

Picking up on the endeavours of the noble Lord, Lord Dannatt, to extend this afternoon’s debate a little beyond the terms of the remit, I shall take the liberty—I have given the Minister notice of this—of seeing whether he is prepared to be flexible in his approach to the Bill.

Tomorrow I have the pleasure of moving a Private Member’s Bill on the misuse of honours. This was first promoted 12 months ago by Gareth Johnson in the House of Commons, where it was given a close examination by a Select Committee and the Defence Committee. They came back with a very strong recommendation that the change introduced by my Government in 2006, before which the wearing of medals for the intent of deceit was a criminal offence, needs to be readjusted to bring us back into line with the practice in other countries, where, if people do that, they are liable to criminal sanctions. I will be moving a private Member’s Bill to that effect, very similar to that of Gareth Johnson, who has given his agreement.

The Bill was substantially filleted in Committee in the Commons and reduced in size to a fairly small focus. But, happily, it was given the support of the Government—they were prepared to find time for it. Unfortunately, a number of MPs talked it out, regrettably on the Tory side. But it is a very worthy Bill that should come here. It did not make it, so tomorrow I will present it to this House. It seems highly unlikely that we will find time for the Bill to be taken in the Lords—I was 53 out of 64 in the ballot, so there is not much chance. However, knowing how open-minded and flexible the Minister is, and how anxious he is to try to meet the needs of those who have been in the Armed Forces and who have been honoured for their valour and courageous past, I hope he will be prepared to look at it.

I come to this subject primarily on the basis of my close association with the family of Peter Fontaine. He served in the Royal Signals for seven years, where he was picked up very quickly, commissioned and became a captain. He was out in the Far East, and was awarded the Burma Star in Lord Slim’s “Forgotten Army”. He was a great man who, having served in World War II, came back and made a career as an actor. He lived until he was 95 and continued to be alert and interested in making a contribution to society. As recently as 2015, he walked and participated in the VJ Day celebrations. He died in 2016.

To our regret, a man posing as a wing commander—he wore the wings and seven medals as if he had been in Afghanistan and many other places—inveigled himself into the family and became their close and intimate friend. When Peter died, this man ended up carrying the coffin. It subsequently emerged that he was a total imposter. The nearest he had been to the Armed Forces was doing some work with Air Cadets—and yet in this country he is permitted to deceive and hurt people in this way. For a widow who had supported her husband for so many years to discover that this had happened, it was absolutely devastating. It is totally wrong that that is permitted to happen in this country in a way that it cannot elsewhere. It could not happen in this country until 2006, and that must change, with a marginal extension of the Bill—either the Minister could move an amendment or I would be happy to. I am sure that the House would fully support such a change, which should not cause too much trouble for the Government.

I have done much business in the past with the noble Earl. He has often wanted to meet me as best he could but has been inhibited by factors such as European Union regulations. In this instance there will be no inhibitions whatever because the Government have said previously that they would find time for this to be accommodated. So I hope that, now that it has been left with him, he can persuade his colleagues this time around that the Government will take the time to add this to the Bill. I hope that he is willing to consider that.