LGBT Veterans Independent Review

Edward Timpson Excerpts

Wednesday 13th December 2023 Commons Chamber

[Dr Murrison]

That is why Lord Etherton has made his recommendations on financial awards. The structuring of that is yet to be determined, but I just want to manage expectations—as I suspect my Canadian counterparts managed the expectations of the Canadian community—about the quantum. I do not want people to think that all that financial loss will be restored to them—it would be unwise of us to suggest that.

The hon. Gentleman mentioned padres. I hope that he reads the Government’s response to the report in full. If he does, he will see that there is a specific section relating to chaplaincy, and contrition on the part of chaplaincy about how some of its practitioners behaved during that period, which I think did them no credit at all. I am very sorry to hear the testimony that he has just given. I encourage his constituent to engage with the front door that I am launching today.

[Edward Timpson (Eddisbury) (Con)]

I join others in thanking Lord Etherton and all those who took the brave step of sharing their experience with him to inform the review and all 49 recommendations. Although significant work clearly needs to be done to follow through on those recommendations, will my right hon. Friend consider how we can use this work to help parts of the world that are still facing up to this realisation? They may need to do a wholesale piece of work to understand how they can change the way they deal with the LGBT community among their military personnel and veterans. The change that we are seeing in the UK must not be stopped from happening elsewhere in the world.

[Dr Murrison]

None of us has a monopoly on this. We are learning from the Canadian experience, and I expect others will learn from us. Across the board, this country is looked up to as a purveyor of norms and values of the highest order. When, for example, we train people from among our allies in how to conduct themselves, as is happening right now, those norms and values are inculcated, including this material.

Oral Answers to Questions

Edward Timpson Excerpts

Monday 15th May 2023 Commons Chamber

[James Heappey]

As I have said in response to earlier questions, around £40 million is being invested in the ongoing transformation process to digitise the existing paper-based processes and records, and that will be transformative. These are hundreds of thousands of records kept largely on paper, which makes them extraordinary difficult to process and has caused all of the delays that the hon. Lady rightly mentions. Since the new online digital claims service was launched through the gov.uk website, the service has been available to service personnel and veterans. The new service has been well received and already accounts for 50% of all new injury and illness claims being made.

[Edward Timpson (Eddisbury) (Con)]

6. What steps his Department has taken to support the Government’s response to the conflict in Sudan.

[Mrs Flick Drummond (Meon Valley) (Con)]

21. What steps his Department has taken to support the Government’s response to the conflict in Sudan.

[The Secretary of State for Defence (Mr Ben Wallace)]

Defence was pivotal in the success of the wider Government effort to evacuate British passport holders and other eligible persons from Sudan. A range of UK military assets and capabilities were deployed in our response, resulting in the evacuation of more than 2,400 people—the longest and largest evacuation of any western nation from Sudan.

[Edward Timpson]

I thank my right hon. Friend for that answer. A constituent of mine was holed up in a Khartoum corridor with a French family for days, unable to receive email or WhatsApp instructions from the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office due to the power outages. My office was having to relay updates to his distressed family. Mercifully, he was airlifted out by the French armée de l’air. I recognise the complex and challenging nature of the evacuation, but what can His Majesty’s Government do to help improve awareness of and communications with stranded British citizens in potentially unstable states to enable our armed forces to mount efficient and effective airlifts in the future?

[Mr Wallace]

My hon. and learned Friend raises an important point, but not an easy issue to solve. In Sudan, we were seeing less than single digit percentage coverage of or access to the internet at any one time, in the middle of effectively a civil war, as it was then. For Defence, it is an easier thing to solve, as we bring our own communications with us. When 16 Air Assault Brigade deployed, we managed to bring a limited amount of capability so that we could try to communicate with British citizens. For the main part, the Foreign Office has primacy in this area. We will always stand by to help it with that advice, but I also advise that travellers look at advice before they travel. Indeed, we have to find a way through that challenge in a communications-denied space, but it is not straightforward or easy.

Draft Armed Forces (Covenant) Regulations 2022 Draft Armed Forces (Service Court Rules) (Amendment) (No. 2) Rules 2022

Edward Timpson Excerpts

Wednesday 26th October 2022 General Committees

[Luke Pollard]

I am grateful for that intervention, and I agree. It is quite refreshing to see the freedom that service personnel have to speak to parliamentarians on visits, and experiences of sexual violence within the forces, which the Minister will know about from her time on the Defence Committee, are very relevant to what we are discussing today.

I will first talk about the covenant regulations and then move on to service justice. We need to recognise that it is not just our service personnel, their families and people who have served in the past who need to have a robust armed forces covenant that is as effective as possible. Across the country, there are some locations—Plymouth is one—that do the armed forces covenant very well. There are other locations where the armed forces covenant sits gathering dust on a shelf, and the ability to make sure it is truly implemented and lived is a challenge that still has not been fully met.

I would like the Minister to consider important ways in which the covenant could be strengthened. One of those is the extension of the covenant beyond education, healthcare and housing to include other areas of central Government activity—employment, social care, pensions, compensation and benefits, to name but a few. Our service personnel, veterans and their families should not incur unfair disadvantage in any walk of life, and the importance of the armed forces covenant as a principle needs to be extended to all public bodies.

There is a second area where this SI could seek to go a little further. Despite the Minister mentioning the 2023 review of the covenant, there are still no plans for the covenant to apply to central Government, including the Ministry of Defence itself. It is worth taking a moment to consider that omission. If the armed forces covenant is to be real, and if service personnel, their families and veterans are to have confidence in it, the Ministry of Defence must lead by example. I would like to see Ministers, including the Minister here today, put more effort into making sure that happens.

A whole host of service charities, including the Royal British Legion, Help for Heroes and the Confederation of Service Charities, have expressed concern that central Government do not have a duty under the covenant. In terms of the duties under the covenant, it is fine for this place to put additional responsibilities on local government—which has a lot of responsibilities already, but not the resources to go with them—but the Government need to walk the walk if they are to talk the talk, and that means applying these duties to central Government as well. This is not a small point. National Government oversee many policy areas that service personnel experience difficulties with, so they should have clear, measurable duties under the covenant to deliver for personnel, their families and veterans.

Satisfaction with service life has dropped below 50%, according to the Government’s own figures, which should worry Members on both sides of the House. I seek not to make a party political point; we need to make sure that we increase morale among our armed forces personnel if we are to retain their skills and experience, and honour our obligations as, in effect, employers. There are still clear failings when it comes to housing, healthcare, social care and other issues.

As we approach Remembrance week, attention will naturally turn to how the covenant is implemented, and rightly so. As parliamentarians, we should not only ask questions publicly, but challenge constructively in private and ask when it will apply and whether the 2023 review of the covenant will include consideration of its greater applicability to central Government. I am afraid 2023 is already too late.

Let me turn to the draft Armed Forces (Service Court Rules) (Amendment) (No. 2) Rules 2022. The Minister will know, because she and I have spoken about this many times, that the Labour party stands four-square with our armed forces and backs the Government’s effort in Ukraine to support our NATO allies, but we do need to make sure that we get all aspects of service life right. Although the rules are a step in the right direction, I have some questions about how we can make sure that they are delivered appropriately.

It is entirely sensible to introduce the overriding objective that the Minister has set out for courts martial and to give the Director of Service Prosecutions responsibility for warning prosecution witnesses of trial dates. Those were pragmatic recommendations from the Lyons review, which we welcome.

Likewise, it is welcome that the statutory instrument will ensure that there is at least one woman on the board of each court martial in circumstances where there are lay members on the court. A normal board will have between three and seven people, so it is a step in the right direction to have one woman there, but I would like to have a greater sense that we are moving towards balance. We need to see more women in our armed forces full stop, but the explanatory memorandum could have shown a greater sense of the direction of travel that Ministers wish to take. I would be uncomfortable with the idea that it is good enough that there is a woman on the board and that some additional women may, although not necessarily, be provided by the shuffle that the Minister explained. We need a sense of the direction of travel.

I encourage the Minister, in the implementation of the SI, to look at how the language can be tweaked to make sure we have greater representation, which is particularly important when the board considers cases that include servicewomen or situations in which a servicewoman has been affected as a victim. The lived experience of the people who are judging someone and making decisions on their career and on prosecution should have an element of familiarity with the experiences of either the person on trial or the witnesses and victims.

Some Government statements on upholding military justice are still more rhetoric than reality. I wish to put on the record the Government’s rejection of the headline recommendation of the Lyons review that murder, manslaughter and rape should be prosecuted in civilian rather than military courts when the offences are committed in the UK, with the Attorney General able to rule otherwise in exceptional cases.

It is a shame that the Government have chosen not to adopt fully the proposal—the headline recommendation—but it is more than disappointing, because the Minister may not have listened to her own recommendations. I do not wish to embarrass her, but last year she co-authored a Defence Committee report on women in the armed forces that argued that the Government should remove court martial jurisdiction over cases of rape and cases of sexual assault with penetration, as well as for cases of domestic violence and child abuse. I know the Minister has been in post for only a short time, but I encourage her to continue to provide challenge within the Ministry of Defence in respect of why the full recommendation was not included in the statutory instruments before us and on how quickly the change will come. Will she set out whether any work on that is in train in the Ministry of Defence?

There is a litany of reasons why this issue is important, including serious backlogs, investigators missing obvious lines of inquiry and the unnecessary retraumatisation of victims. Let me give the Committee two examples taken from the written evidence submitted by the Centre for Military Justice to the Defence Committee inquiry on women in the armed forces. In one case in which a servicewoman reported an alleged sexual assault, the Service Prosecuting Authority accidentally revealed the victim’s home address to the alleged assailant by sending to the alleged perpetrator a letter intended for the victim. That is clearly unacceptable. In another case, where a servicewoman reported sexual assault, court martial transcripts show that a judge advocate remarked of the

“quite appallingly bad police investigation…how stupid was it not to interview the people who were at the scene”.

There is still work to be done, and I encourage the Minister to look at whether that recommendation can be brought back.

It is unsurprising that the recent service justice system policing review said:

“The Service Police do not investigate enough serious crime to be considered proficient”.

That makes a clear distinction between service policing and the civilian role. We must understand the particular demands, stresses and secrecy that may apply in a military environment, and have examples of where that should not apply and where the expertise and familiarity of civilian policing could produce better results for victims and greater confidence in the justice system. The numbers speak for themselves. Ministry of Defence figures show that from 2015 to 2020, the conviction rate for rape cases tried under courts martial was just 9%. Recent data shows that the conviction rate was 59% for similar cases that reached a civilian court. We know that prosecution rates for rape are far too low in civilian courts, but that comparison shows a problem.

I would be grateful if the Minister answered a number of questions. First, my hon. Friend the Member for Blaenau Gwent made a point about the explanatory memorandum. I am afraid that if the Minister is to serve on Delegated Legislation Committees with me, she will need to know that I, too, read the explanatory memorandums quite closely. I am interested in why the territorial extent of the regulations includes United Kingdom overseas territories but not Gibraltar. Considering the large UK military presence in Gibraltar, why is that particular overseas territory excluded from the regulations? Are the provisions replicated elsewhere, or is a separate statutory instrument needed to deal with Gibraltar’s specific legal jurisdiction?

I am not a fan in impact assessments of the phrase

“no, or no significant, impact”

because I believe that those are two very different things. I know that it is not the Minister’s fault, and that officials who write such explanatory memorandums must use the house style, but there is a difference between no impact and no significant impact. When looking at the impact of any SI, it is unhelpful to have those blurred together.

My final question is about the quite helpful expansion of what a “family member” means in the SI. As someone who believes that families should be at the heart of our community but that we should not specify what a family is because each of our families is different and each is loved by the people within them, I was interested to see how the Government have laid out what a family is and what a relation is. When a service person has a foster child, or when there is one in a defence family, I think that would be included within the broader remit, but I would be grateful if the Minister confirmed it for the record.

May I politely challenge the use of the language

“of the full blood or of the half blood or by marriage”

in the Bill? There is language that, as parliamentarians, we should encourage movement away from. When we talk about the “full blood” or the “half blood”, it suggests that some children have a legitimacy that is different from that of adopted children, for instance. I encourage the Minister to look at whether in future SIs that type of language can be retired.

[Edward Timpson (Eddisbury) (Con)]

I am pleased that the hon. Member has raised the issue of family make-up, especially when fostering is involved, as well as adoption. Of course, there is also special guardianship. That is another area that we need some clarity on, to ensure that it is not missed out in the definition.

[Luke Pollard]

I am grateful for that intervention. We want the rules around service life to better reflect the way the world is. Having come from a service family myself—my old man was a Royal Navy officer—I recognise that the family that I grew up in was very different from the families that were on the marry estate on either side of us. The regulations must adopt the full range. That speaks to the need for us to develop a better understanding of what defence families are like. Parliamentarians and the Ministry of Defence have a good understanding of service personnel and an increasing understanding of veterans, though there is more work to be done there, but defence families are often a bit of an afterthought.

I mean that in a constructive way, to encourage the Minister to challenge the Ministry of Defence further about whether that language could be updated—even if it is strictly defined by primary legislation elsewhere—and replaced with more inclusive language that reflects how service families are structured in real life. I know that she feels passionately about this and takes such concerns seriously.

I wish the Minister the best of luck in her role. We need people with experience and expertise in the Ministry of Defence at this difficult time, and I hope that she stays there for quite some time to come—until she is replaced by a Labour Member in due course.

Oral Answers to Questions

Edward Timpson Excerpts

Monday 21st September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Johnny Mercer]

I can categorically guarantee and assure all service personnel that, should they operate within the law, which is very clear and well understood, this Government will move beyond the warm words of so many before them and actually legislate to ensure that they are protected from the vexatious and industrial nature of the claims of the past few years. We are very clear, however, that uniform is no hiding place for those who cannot operate within the boundaries we ask them to operate in. The Bill is proportionate and fair in that respect.

[Edward Timpson (Eddisbury) (Con)]

If he will make a statement on his departmental responsibilities.

[The Secretary of State for Defence (Mr Ben Wallace)]

I would like to make a statement to the House on recent reports regarding an approach taken by my Department with a media outlet. Managing information is challenging, particularly where hostile states use disinformation to subvert our security interests and our policymaking. As the House will be aware, all Government media and communication professionals must abide by the Government Communication Service’s propriety guidance and the civil service code. The Ministry of Defence is no different. However, I have been deeply concerned that those standards are alleged not always to have been met in the Department. I am treating the allegation with the utmost seriousness. The Ministry of Defence I lead will treat outlets with fairness and impartiality. I am today writing to Defence communicators across the MOD and all services to emphasise that point. I have therefore asked former director general and communications professional Tom Kelly to lead an independent review to look into the allegations that have been made and establish what underlies them. I will report back to the House once the review has been concluded.

[Edward Timpson]

The Rolls-Royce distributed generation systems plant in Winsford provides mission-critical power generation for our armed forces and is now expanding into other sectors, including the rail industry, to help to maintain its 50 highly skilled jobs, as well as another 100 across the supply chain. Will my right hon. Friend congratulate the Rolls-Royce workforce on their sterling support of our defence capability, as well as perhaps recommending their services to other Government Departments?

Libya

Edward Timpson Excerpts

Tuesday 24th May 2011 Commons Chamber

[Nick Harvey]

We have no grounds to think so. There are undoubtedly problems with electricity and water supplies in different parts of Libya for different reasons, but we have no grounds to believe that the actions of NATO or any of our allies have had that effect, and of course it is most certainly not our intention or objective to do anything of that kind.

[Mr Edward Timpson (Crewe and Nantwich) (Con)]

What discussions has my hon. Friend had, or does he intend to have, with Arab League countries as part of the decision whether to deploy Apache helicopters?

[Nick Harvey]

If any decision were to be taken to go down that route, that would be discussed with Arab countries through the contact group. I stress to the House that the Arab League support for what we are doing in Libya remains strong, and we will consult our allies in the Arab League as we go along.