Armed Forces Commissioner Bill

Debate between Lord Russell of Liverpool and Baroness Smith of Newnham

Committee stage
Wednesday 19th March 2025 Grand Committee

[Baroness Smith of Newnham (LD)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for the clarification. That is what I had assumed on reading the Bill, but I wanted to make sure that that was absolutely right.

The Minister has pre-empted Amendment 21 in some ways. It is simply a request for some clarification on the timeframe. We say in the amendment that the Secretary of State should publish an agreed timetable within one month. I suspect the Minister might find a reason why that should not be the case, but can we have a little more clarification on the timeframe? Will it depend on the individual appointed, or are His Majesty’s Government committed to the commissioner being in post on, say, 1 January 2026?

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I will briefly speak to the two amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Beamish, to which I have added my name. We spent quite a lot of time during Second Reading and—I just checked—the first part of the Minister’s response from the Front Bench on the question of what difference this will make. I think all noble Lords who took part at Second Reading agreed that that is the essence. To that extent, Amendment 3 is quite important, because it goes to the heart of the question of what difference it will make.

The reason why the German system works the way it does is that the German armed forces commissioner is very clearly the servant of the Bundestag; he or she sits in the Bundestag alongside the clerks and, indeed, if the Bundestag wishes it to happen, it can request that the armed forces commissioner can participate actively in debates around the armed forces in the Chamber. So it is a very different model, and it really does make a difference, because it is markedly different from what we are suggesting.

This is the third attempt by us to try to get a form of ombudsman or Armed Forces commissioner to be more effective. We had the first one in 2008, the second iteration in 2016, and this is the third bite of the cherry to try to get it right. Clearly, if this is the third time we are doing it, it ain’t that simple. For all sorts of excellent reasons, the Armed Forces are a very particular culture and ecosystem, which they need to be to do what they do, but the flip side of having a really effective and disciplined military is that, for all sorts of reasons that it may not completely understand itself, it may be quite resistant to attempts that it sees as coming from outside—from people who do not really understand the culture and history and the things that are so important. The things that are not said are often more important than the things that are said.

The problem is that, at the moment, some of us feel that, while this is very well intended, it is very cautious indeed. For the Secretary of State and the Ministry of Defence to retain as much ownership and control of this as will inevitably be the case is unlikely to make the sort of step change that I think a lot of us were hoping and aspiring to believe this new role could actually make. I think that this needs to be looked at—it is a probing amendment—and I ask the Minister and his colleagues to look very carefully.

As part of my research for this proposal, I asked an individual who is actively involved in teaching in Shrivenham to take a poll after talking to a few people about this Bill. The first thing that this person found was that almost everybody spoken to in Shrivenham—this was last week—was not actually aware of this Bill. I do not know how well publicised this Bill is within the Armed Forces, but you would expect and hope that the flagship or leadership organisations of the Armed Forces would be aware of it and indeed might even perhaps been talking about it a bit. However, apparently this was not the case—but this was not a professional Sir John Curtice-type opinion poll but just somebody going around and talking to other people at Shrivenham.

The other experience that this individual had, after a brief explanation of what this role was going to be, was an almost immediate response from everybody; people felt that what they described as the “rigidity”, with a small “R”, of the armed services culture would find it pretty easy to resist the type of role that is being envisaged.

The bottom line is whether this is going to make a difference. It is important to be able to step back from this Bill and perhaps to take some more soundings from within the Armed Forces just to try to understand how likely they feel this will make a real difference. One senses that the onus of this Bill is coming primarily from the Ministry of Defence itself, and there is slightly less pull, if you like, from those parts within the Armed Forces and the extended family members that we were talking about. I am not sure how clearly their voices and experiences are being heard, because what we have at the moment clearly is not working.

I shall move quickly to Amendment 5 and term of office. The German term of office is five years. It can be renewed; it usually has not been renewed. Almost every time a new commissioner is appointed in Germany, it is an ex-Member of Parliament—usually an ex-member of the defence committee that is the equivalent of our Defence Select Committee. So they come with some live experience and with a network within Parliament that they are easily able to access; they can be quite influential behind the scenes. That system works well but, again, I come back to what we asked earlier: will this measure make a difference?

The aspiration is that this new role will make a discernible difference. In order for it to do that, clearly, it needs to do a lot of things differently to the way in which things have been done to date; and to find an effective way of doing things differently that works better. One will not get it right first time every time. It will be an iterative process: there will be successes, failures, brick walls and elephant traps. All sorts of things will be happening. Building up the types of resource and knowledge that will be required to gain momentum to carry this new role forward into the term of whoever follows the first commissioner will require giving the first commissioner the leeway and resources to make a difference.

I just feel that things are a bit timid at the moment. If we focus on the complexity of the task that we are asking this new function to do—in particular, if we try to think, “What should this look like 10 years from now? What do we hope would be happening? How would this be working?”—and know both where we want to get to and where we are now, we can then gauge the complexity of the task of getting from A to B. That might result in looking at some of these aspects in a slightly different, perhaps more beneficial, way.