Armed Forces (Covenant) Regulations 2022

Lord Coaker Excerpts

Tuesday 18th October 2022 Grand Committee

My last point is to ask the Minister whether she will give some detail on the reference to “focus groups” at paragraph 10.6 of the Explanatory Memorandum. Who organises them? How many were there in each of the focus groups and was there any feedback that may be of help to the Committee?

[Lord Coaker (Lab)]

My Lords, I shall start with my noble friend Lord Jones’s remarks. He mentioned the reserves and the covenant affecting military families. My son-in-law is an active member of 4 Mercian reserve. He was recently in eastern Europe and will be away again in a couple of weeks’ time. Given that my noble friend Lord Jones mentioned the reserves, I felt I should mention that for obvious reasons.

I thank my noble friend for his remarks. The point he made about Armed Forces Day is well made and speaks for itself. I agree with everything that the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, and the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig, said, the contributions that they have made to where we are now with the covenant, and the challenging questions they have put to the Government to try to improve it.

We too welcome the regulations relating to the Armed Forces Covenant as far as they go, but before asking some questions I shall remind the Committee, as the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, and the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig, did, that there was much debate about the covenant as the Armed Forces Act 2021 passed through your Lordships’ House. Many of us called for the expansion of the covenant to all areas of public policy and for it to apply to the national Government and the devolved Administrations. Alongside that we said that having “due regard” to the covenant should include other areas of public policy as well as education, healthcare and housing, which were outlined.

The Government resisted those calls, and we therefore felt the covenant was a missed opportunity by being too narrow, particularly the failure to place a duty on the national Government in the way that they placed a duty on others. They also failed to define what “have due regard” meant, how members of the Armed Forces community can seek redress if they feel let down and how the covenant is to be enforced. The Minister knows that we welcome the regulations and the new duties they place on specified bodies and persons to have due regard to the principles of the covenant when exercising certain statutory functions in the areas of healthcare, housing and education, but it could have gone further. Having said that, these are important regulations and will make a difference.

I have some specific questions. As some of the responders to the guidance consultation asked, why does the guidance not include prescriptive actions that bodies in scope should follow to demonstrate that they are meeting the duty of having due regard? The guidance notes the value of good recording as a means of demonstrating having due regard to the covenant. However, as the Government themselves note in the guidance that they have published, it is voluntary. Why was there never a statutory requirement to record actions that show and demonstrate that a public body is having due regard to the covenant?

How, therefore, more generally—the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, in particular, alluded to this—is the covenant to be enforced? What redress is there for an individual, family or organisation if they believe that the covenant is not being properly followed or implemented? As the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig, asked—and I will come also to something else mentioned by the noble and gallant Lord—what action will the Government take to publicise their new regulations to ensure that awareness is as wide as it should be?

I completely endorse the position taken by the noble and gallant Lord, along with the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, that paragraph 14.1 in the regulations is crucial. In response to the amendments made and the ping-pong that took place on the Armed Forces Act, the Government have said—to be fair to the Minister, she will have argued this within the MoD—that they will come forward in 2023 with a report on how the covenant has operated. I say to the Minister that the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig, and I will be looking quite carefully at how paragraph 14.1 is implemented and how the Government meet their commitments. As the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig, said, it is a particularly important point.

I come to something that the Minister has explained to me before, but it is important that this is put on the record. Tucked away in regulations will often be things understood by MoD officials and so on. The regulations that we have before us cover England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man and the British Overseas Territories, except Gibraltar. Will the Minister explain why Gibraltar is excluded from these covenant regulations? Clearly, Gibraltar is extremely important to us as a base for our Armed Forces. It seems a little strange. I am sure there will be a good reason for it —some treaty or other that makes its inclusion unnecessary —but it is important to have it in the record to help those who read our deliberations to understand why that “except Gibraltar” is there.

These questions highlight once again the importance of paragraph 14.1, which basically says that the Government will assess how well the covenant operates with respect to due regard and whether there are other areas of public policy that could usefully be added to the scope of the Act as it is now. We all look to see what happens under paragraph 14.1. These regulations are an important step forward. We welcome them; we just wish they could have gone a bit further. The implementation will be everything.

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

My Lords, I thank noble Lords for what admittedly has been a fairly short debate but not in any way lacking in quality and penetrating questions, which is entirely what I would expect from the contributors. I shall deal first with the comments of the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig. I thank him for his very useful historical context of the evolution of the covenant. It is worth remembering the journey that the covenant has travelled. I accept that progress may at times have been somewhat plodding, but I feel that, in recent years, we have got to a good place. These regulations are the manifestation of the important progress that has been made.

I pay tribute to the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig, for his perseverance in drawing attention to the role of central government and whether it should be brought within the ambit of the covenant statutory duty. I remember that we had informed and interesting exchanges at the time the Armed Forces Bill went through this House. We certainly felt that this was not an issue that should be summarily dismissed as being without merit. Our concern was that we were already biting off quite a lot in terms of what we were introducing in that Bill and in what was to be further covered by delegated legislation, and we did not want to bite off more than we could chew. The provisions now to allow for a review are meant to reassure, and I shall say a little more about them.

The review will consider the roles of the UK Government and the devolved Administrations in conducting the functions already in scope of the duty. It will also consider the extent to which they currently consider the covenant principles, as well as the benefits and costs of bringing them into scope. As the noble and gallant Lord is aware, the reason why I resisted his persuasive blandishments to include the scope of central government in the Armed Forces Act was because we did not think that it was quite within the scope of the original Bill. The Government are responsible for setting the overall strategic direction and national policy but they do not directly deliver the relevant healthcare, education and housing services to citizens.

Let me give your Lordships a little more information on the review itself. Members of Parliament will have the opportunity to assess and comment on the review in the debate on the 2022 covenant report. The Government have been working with stakeholders to establish an open and transparent evaluation process by which to investigate the evidence about whether new policy areas should be added to the scope of the duty; that point was specifically raised by the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, who was naturally interested in what criteria might be deployed to assess this. Potential additional functions will be assessed against clear and robust criteria that have been established and agreed with covenant stakeholders in order to provide advice to the Secretary of State, with whom the final decision rests.

To clarify, a blanket inclusion of all UK Government and devolved Administration bodies would not be appropriate to include within the list of specified bodies to which the duty applies because the “due regard” duty applies to specified functions that are precisely defined in law. Due to the broad-ranging work of the UK Government and the devolved Administrations, it would be impractical to seek to define precisely such functions for these bodies.

One of the questions asked by, I think, the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig, during our debates on the then Armed Forces Bill concerned why the duty was not extended to central government because it has a duty of care to the Armed Forces. However, the purpose of the covenant duty is to raise awareness among providers of public services of how service life can disadvantage the Armed Forces community in accessing key public services. That is why we have focused on these three areas of health, education and housing. As the noble and gallant Lord is aware, central government is directly responsible for the Armed Forces and the MoD has always looked after the welfare of service personnel. As he knows, there are various ways in which the Government can be held to account, from the requirement for Ministers to appear at the Dispatch Box and explain what has been happening to the facility for Members to put down Questions and seek debates. There is a variety of methods available for parliamentarians to call the MoD to account for what it has been doing.

Accompanied by the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, and the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, the noble and gallant Lord raised the issue of central government. I tried to cover the points that were made in my comments addressed to him. One other point that he mentioned concerned why the guidance refers to those who are ordinarily resident in the UK. The “ordinarily resident in the UK” restriction applies only to veterans. This restriction on veterans is in the Act, which is why it is in the guidance. The guidance clearly says that serving personnel are in scope

“wherever they are located—in the UK or abroad.”

Veterans who live overseas and are having issues accessing public services due to their service career will find that those issues are best raised with the relevant authority or embassy in the area in which they live because such services fall outside the responsibility of the UK Government.