Armed Forces Bill

Baroness Garden of Frognal Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 7th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, I too thank the Minister and join in the tributes to our Armed Forces. I wish to raise two points in connection with this Bill. I recognise that it is a routine Bill, but it gives us an opportunity to raise issues of concern.

My first point concerns the ombudsman. I have been given evidence of a case in which the ombudsman’s ruling was apparently overturned by the very senior officers who were comrades of the object of the complaint. Can the Minister assure us that there is now a cast-iron method of totally impartial complaint in which complaints against senior officers cannot be overturned by the might of the military machine?

I raise my second point because the Bill says it is

“to make provision about war pensions”.

There is virtually nothing about war pensions in the Bill, but the noble Lord, Lord Dannatt, has raised some anomalies and I wish to raise another. I am a vice-president of the War Widows’ Association, and the Minister is well aware of—and, I think, sympathetic to—the issue I wish to raise yet again.

Time was when military widows automatically lost their widows’ pensions if they remarried—obviously this edict was made entirely by men; no women, let alone widows, were allowed anywhere near it. It was also a time when the military made no pretence at being caring: wives were tolerated as long as they were camp followers, but woe betide them if they fell out of line. Happily, those days have largely gone. Many widows would be very young; servicemen often die young. The only support and legacy they had from the men who had died in the service of their country was the pension those men had left them. I well remember when my husband—as a young RAF pilot who had seen too many of his comrades meet an early death, and who paid as much as he could into the widow’s element of his pension—told me that if he died, not to remarry and lose all the contributions he had made but to live in sin and be happy. The terminology will tell noble Lords that this was a very long time ago. Of course, for his last three years he was a Member of your Lordships’ House, so happily he did not die as a young pilot.

Then, of course, the Military Police caught up with those living in sin, who we had to then call “cohabitees”, and they too lost the meagre pensions from their dead husbands. How cruel. How mean. For many of those women, that money was the only money that they held in their own account, so what penny-pinching politicians thought this was a caring saving on the public purse? Women who had lost their men—who had died doing their duty—were targeted to lose the pensions that were the last gestures from dutiful dead husbands.

For most military widows this cruel edict has now been cancelled, but there is a small and dwindling group of ageing widows who fell between legislation and who have not had their pensions restored nor any financial recompense. We are told that it is impossible to restore pensions retrospectively, but is it really beyond the brains of the MoD and the Treasury, where we do have some very bright people, to find a way of giving some sort of financial compensation to this last, small group of deprived and elderly widows? We are left with the conclusion that the MoD is waiting for them all to die off, for the problem to go away. Is this really the face of the caring military family?

I once again appeal to the Minister, who I know to be a caring person, to go back to the MoD and the Treasury and ask again for some form of financial help for these widows who lost their men and who, when they dared to find happiness in a new relationship, lost their entitlement to pensions. The total sum would be a pittance against an eye-watering aircraft carrier and would be greeted by such enthusiasm from all military widows, and indeed all the military community that cares. I look forward to the Minister’s response. I continue to live in hope, and I assure her that the War Widows’ Association will not give up on this campaign for justice for their peers.

Armed Forces Bill

Baroness Garden of Frognal Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 23rd November 2021 Lords Chamber

[The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Garden of Frognal) (LD)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, will be taking part remotely.

Clause 8: Armed forces covenant

Amendment 3

Moved by

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Coaker (Lab)]

My Lords, it is good to be back. In moving Amendment 3 in my name, I will speak to Amendments 5, 6 and 7. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, for signing those amendments. I also thank the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, for tabling Amendment 4, which is extremely important, and the same as an amendment tabled in my name in Committee.

As I said in Committee, we support the aims of this Bill, but at present believe that there is a missed opportunity to deliver real improvements in the lives of our service personnel, veterans and their families. Like all noble Lords, we believe that the Armed Forces covenant represents a binding moral commitment between the Government and service communities, guaranteeing them and their families the respect and fair treatment their service has earned. In Committee, the Minister argued that central government in the Bill is unnecessary. She said:

“The Government are already subject to a legal obligation to report on the delivery of the covenant.” —[Official Report, 27/10/21; col. GC 194.]


But we all know that a reporting function is very different to a statutory provision ensuring that Ministers are subject to the duty of due regard. Ministers are arguing, as noble Lords will see in the Bill, that it is unnecessary for them, but necessary for local authorities, for NHS trusts, for NHS governors, and for a range of other public bodies to have a statutory duty to have due regard for the covenant. As said by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, it is not only many of your Lordships who are dismayed that the Government seem determined to stand against ensuring that the due regard principle applies to central government, but the Royal British Legion and many others. They believe that the due regard principle should apply to central government in the way it applies to others. I am very supportive of the amendment in the name of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay.

Service charities, including Help for Heroes, the Royal British Legion and the Army and Naval Families Federations are also concerned about the narrow scope of the covenant, concentrating as it does on education, housing and healthcare. Service charities have pointed out that this narrow focus could, in their view, create a two-tier Armed Forces covenant. That is why we have retabled Amendments 3, 5, 6 and 7, extending the scope of the covenant in the Bill to include employment, pensions, compensation, social care, criminal justice and immigration.

The Minister has explained that the new covenant reference group will evaluate the new duty. That is very welcome, and I thank her for that concession, but it is clear that the narrow scope of housing, healthcare and education does not go wide enough to stop all areas of potential disadvantage against members of the Armed Forces, veterans and their families. As the covenant reference group will have that new duty to evaluate how the covenant is working, how will the process of evaluation take place? For example, will it have to report to the Defence Committee on an annual basis?

Not extending the scope of the covenant is a missed opportunity by the Government, and I very much look forward to the Minister’s further justification of why they are resisting that. I also look forward to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, speaking to his Amendment 4, which I think is particularly important as it would extend the “due regard” principle to central government as well as the other public bodies mentioned in the Bill.

[The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Garden of Frognal) (LD)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, will not be taking part in these proceedings because she is double-booked in Grand Committee.

[Lord Lancaster of Kimbolton (Con)]

My Lords, I have much sympathy with these amendments. Back in 2010, when I served in the Committee on the Bill, I proposed similar amendments, so noble Lords may ask why I now express some hesitancy about extending the remit. I suppose it comes from my experience as Minister for the Armed Forces and Minister for Defence Veterans, Reserves and Personnel. When we roll back the clock, if I am entirely honest, in the early days of implementing the Armed Forces covenant we struggled to get traction. It took some time to convince all the local authorities within the United Kingdom to sign up and indeed to get employers to sign up. I am delighted that now we have close to 2,000 signatories to the Armed Forces covenant.

My concern really lies around the fact that, as we continue to extend the width, we may struggle to get buy-in into this if we create yet more of a burden for local authorities in particular. Especially after Covid, as they have had a difficult couple of years, they might not see the benefit of this if we simply overburden them with yet more categories. My suggestion in Committee was not that we should not extend the categories but that we should do it incrementally over a period of time. In many ways, had that been suggested today, I would have been happy to accept this amendment, but that is not the case, which is a shame. During that early stage of the process, we also struggled to demonstrate the benefits of this to veterans.

It is a shame that we have an Armed Forces Bill only once every five years because I do not want to have to wait another five years to slowly extend the remit of the covenant. However, I simply feel that at this stage such a step would be a bit too much too soon, for the reasons that I have tried to explain.