Elfyn Llwyd
Main Page: Elfyn Llwyd (Plaid Cymru - Dwyfor Meirionnydd)Department Debates - View all Elfyn Llwyd's debates with the Ministry of Defence
(13 years, 9 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Dr Fox
I will come on to the issue of the devolved bodies in a moment, but the hon. Gentleman is trying to get me on to the basing debate again. The primary duty of the Government is to ensure that the armed forces are laid out across the United Kingdom in the way that is most beneficial to the defence of the country. However, if the hon. Gentleman is looking for a champion of the cause of the armed forces being tied to the whole concept of the Union, he does not have to look much further. I believe that as we have units that represent the whole of the United Kingdom, we should look, where possible, to ensure that we have basing across the whole of the United Kingdom; but, as I say, the primary responsibility of the Government is to ensure that bases are allocated in a way that makes the greatest sense in terms of the wider defence of the country.
The armed forces covenant is of such importance that it needs to be brought properly to the attention of Parliament. We propose to do this not through long and complex legislation, but through the mechanism of an annual forces covenant report. The relevant clause in the Bill will require me to lay a report before the House every year on the effects that membership of the armed forces has on service people. I have no doubt that the House will wish to take notice of that annual report and undertake whatever scrutiny it considers appropriate.
Mr Elfyn Llwyd (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)
During evidence-taking with the Howard League for Penal Reform, one ex-chief of the armed forces suggested it might be a good idea if there were a Minister within the Cabinet Office with cross-cutting responsibilities dealing with veterans, because the issues involved here are far broader than health, education and so forth. Will the Government consider that at some point?
Dr Fox
The Government are certainly considering better cross-departmental working on these issues. To be fair to the previous Government, they did begin some of this work to see how there could be better co-ordination across Whitehall. We have a number of pieces of work under way, not least from my hon. Friend the Member for South West Wiltshire (Dr Murrison), looking at how we can better co-ordinate what is happening in health and social services, for example, with what the Ministry of Defence intends to do. The hon. Gentleman is proposing the same end as that which we seek, but the means by which we achieve it may be open to some debate between us.
Mr Elfyn Llwyd (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)
It is a pleasure to follow such an informed speech from a person who is well qualified to deliver the points that he made. I am not from a military background, but am a great respecter of the military services, as we all are. I am a long-standing member of the Royal British Legion, but I do not know what that makes me.
Mr Llwyd
Yes, quite right. We all welcome the good work of the Royal British Legion.
The Bill is important for many reasons. I am pleased that the need to bolster the military covenant is recognised. For some years, I have campaigned for widespread recognition of the welfare needs of veterans of the armed forces. The Bill makes integral amendments to the way in which our armed forces function, especially in disciplinary matters. I will focus on veterans’ welfare, which is principally the concern of clause 2, and outline some suggestions on how that clause can be improved. If I have time, I shall speak briefly about clauses 9 to 11, which concentrate on preliminary testing for alcohol and drugs in the forces.
The Bill marks a significant breakthrough in the championing of veterans’ rights. For several years, I have worked to raise awareness in this place and beyond of the ordeal suffered by many vulnerable members of the armed forces after they are discharged. I published a paper in January 2010 that recommended increasing the support available to veterans of the armed forces. I currently have the privilege of sitting on an inquiry panel commissioned by the Howard League for Penal Reform, which aims to uncover why a high percentage of veterans enter the penal system. The inquiry is chaired by Sir John Nutting QC, and will make recommendations to Government later this year on how to prevent further offending and to make improvements. I chair a parliamentary group that comprises representatives of the justice trade unions, relevant third sector organisations, parliamentarians and concerned individuals, which looks into the problem of veterans in prison. That group will publish a list of recommendations on tackling this mounting problem in the first quarter of this year. I will give voice to a number of its recommendations this evening.
The reasons why veterans are over-represented in the criminal justice system are complex, but the root cause is often the social estrangement that is experienced by susceptible veterans when they lose the ready-made support network of their Army colleagues. Clause 2 unlocks the opportunity to discuss how we can improve the way in which public services are administered to veterans. As I shall argue, improving and streamlining the way in which such services are offered to veterans could drastically reduce the number who fall into difficulties later in life.
As is clear, work is being done to promote this issue. The fact that we are discussing a Bill on the Floor of the House that touches on this concern confirms the traction that it has gained over the past 12 or 18 months. I was gladdened to see that the matter had gripped the political mindset enough to become a major manifesto issue for all parties at the last general election. Although forces charities such as Help for Heroes have generated massive public support, the ordeal faced by some veterans was not widely acknowledged until relatively recently. That ordeal deserves our attention.
It is perhaps easy for us to disregard how difficult the transition must be from life in a combat zone to civvy street. Although the training received by personnel during military service allows the majority to readjust to life after discharge, a growing but unspecified number drop out of the welfare system altogether, and become homeless, disfranchised from mainstream services and socially isolated. Education, further training and employment are difficult to access, and such opportunities are not automatically advertised to personnel on leaving the forces.
Veterans are over-represented in NHS emergency waiting rooms and in road traffic accidents. I do not know whether hon. Members are aware that veterans who have returned recently from a theatre of conflict are 50% more likely to be killed in a road traffic accident than ordinary members of the public. That point bolsters the need for a careful examination of this matter.
As a result of what can be an acute social rupture, an alarming number of such young men and women fall foul of the criminal justice system. That is often prompted by substance misuse and mental health problems. I was first alerted to this problem when I appeared as a barrister in the Crown courts of north Wales, Cheshire and beyond. In the space of about a fortnight, I saw a huge number of young people newly returned from Afghanistan who had committed very serious offences, for which there was no reasonable explanation. That made me think that something was wrong in the system, because those people were as rational as any of us, but my God, the things that they had been through recently would have rocked any of us.
On 5 March 2008, I tabled a written question to the then Minister of State at the Ministry of Justice, asking what percentage of the inmates in prison in England and Wales had served in either of the Gulf conflicts. I was informed that such information was “not collected centrally”. I have since found out that at no point is it compulsory to ask someone who is accused of a crime whether they have a service history. That practice must surely be rectified, and some police forces are collecting that information.
Bob Russell
With the hon. Gentleman’s legal experience, is he really asking that one question be added when somebody is charged and the charge form is filled out?
Mr Llwyd
Yes, I am. I know that the hon. Gentleman is very concerned about this matter. Kent police, Cheshire police, North Wales police and several other police forces have started to do that over the past 12 months, simply to scope the size of the problem and, hopefully, to come up with reasonable answers.
Ian Paisley (North Antrim) (DUP)
Does the hon. Gentleman accept that no prejudice should be drawn to the person who is accused because of that information and that it should be used purely for analytical reasons? It should not be used later in a judgment and nobody should be punished more because of their service background.
Mr Llwyd
I agree entirely with those comments, because we are all equal before the law. However, if taking that information helps to address what is a massive problem, it should be done. The probation service in Cheshire and north Wales is also doing that, and that is being led by ex-service people. No prejudice is intended at any stage.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Defence (Mr Andrew Robathan)
The hon. Gentleman raises an extremely important topic, and one that should not be taken lightly. I wonder whether he has read the analysis in the Defence Analytical Services and Advice report of the number of former service personnel who are in prison. It suggests not that they are over-represented, but the contrary.
Mr Robathan
DASA’s initial finding was that the figure was about 3%, but after it analysed everybody in prison who had said that they were formerly in the armed forces, it came up with a figure of approximately 3.5% of the prison population who were ex-services. In contrast, more than 7% of the general population have been in the services.
Mr Llwyd
Yes, but if I remember rightly, the methodology of that particular report was somewhat questionable. [Interruption.] May I finish my point? The reservists were not included, nor were people under 18 or women who had served in the Army. I believe that one other category of people was excluded—there were four such categories.
Mr Kevan Jones
In support of the Minister, I wish to say that as the Minister who commissioned that research, I know that it was the most comprehensive ever done on the matter. It cross-referenced all the service records in all three services, in some cases going back to the late 1960s, with the records of the Ministry of Justice. Trying to rubbish it by making points about reservists, for example, is not helpful. It was a thorough piece of work, and I stand by what the Minister said about it.
Mr Llwyd
I take on board what the hon. Gentleman says, and he knows that I have been discussing the matter with him for a long while. I am not rubbishing the report. All I am saying is that four distinct categories of service people were exempted from its scope. The first thing that the people conducting the report did was to ring Harry Fletcher of the National Association of Probation Officers and ask him about his methodology. They were very much working in the dark.
Mr Jones
I cannot accept what the hon. Gentleman is saying. It is not helpful to rubbish the most thorough report on the facts of the matter. I have met Mr Fletcher on a number of occasions and know that he is a great self-publicist. He came up with the figure of 10% of the prison population being ex-armed forces, or at one time even 15%, on no evidence at all. That was not very helpful as part of the debate into which the hon. Gentleman has rightly put a lot of hard work.
Mr Llwyd
The way in which Mr Fletcher went about the matter was to e-mail every member of the probation service who was connected with prisons and ask them how many people on their books had been in the services. That was how he came up with his figures, but even within the latest Government figures of 3.5% or 4%, we see that in Dartmoor, for example, the figure was 17.5% in 2007.
Dr Murrison
The Minister and the shadow Minister are right, but then so is the hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Mr Llwyd). He is probably about to cite the figures for violent and sexual offenders, which show that there appears to be a greater likelihood that people with a service background will fall into that category. However, we would expect people with a service background to be less represented than others in the prison population, would we not? They are selected because they do not have a criminal record when they join up, and they are members of a disciplined service. That needs to be borne in mind when considering the figures.
Mr Llwyd
I agree, and perhaps I should move away from the figures, because I cannot profess to know them precisely any more than anybody else can. All I am trying to say is that the problem is serious. The hon. Gentleman makes the valid point that we would expect people who have been in the armed services to be more disciplined, and in most cases they are. However, there are worrying examples of people who, for almost inexplicable reasons, commit violent offences.
I know of two cases intimately. The first is that of a person in a fish and chip queue in north Wales who felt that somebody behind him was invading his space. He reacted violently, because he had been trained to look after himself. Unfortunately, by the time he had finished the skirmish two or three minutes later, there was a person on the floor very badly injured and he went away for four years for grievous bodily harm.
The second case is that of a young lad from my constituency who returned home from Helmand on a Wednesday and borrowed his father’s car to go out on the Friday night. He drank far too much and had an accident, killing two passengers. It could be argued that he had been to hell and back in Helmand and felt that he could do such things with impunity. I am not running that young man down, and I am sad to see him where he is, but that is another example of which I am aware.
Chris Bryant
I am getting slightly nervous about the hon. Gentleman’s argument, because—
Chris Bryant
The hon. Gentleman is chuntering away, but if he waits until I have made my point, he can respond afterwards.
My concern is that just because there is a correlation between two sets of statistics, that does not necessarily mean that there is a causation. In other words, just because there may be a higher or lower proportion of former members of the armed forces in prison, that does not necessarily mean that it was because they were in the armed forces that they went to prison.
Mr Llwyd
That may very well be, and we must also remember that the vast majority of those who are in prison come not from the Navy or the Air Force but from the Army, the infantry. There are socio-economic factors to be borne in mind and the equation is not simple, so the hon. Gentleman is right in that regard.
I should like to leave aside the scale of the problem and consider what we can do to assist those who return. First, we must do everything we can to prevent veterans from falling into various problems after discharge. Secondly, I want measures to be taken to ensure that help and advice are available to everybody in the services who encounters problems, whether they be about substance misuse, mental health, housing, employment, money management, violent behaviour or anything else. We spend a lot of time training our young men and women up to the highest level before they go into harm’s way. As I see it, we need to spend much more time and money on debriefing them and bringing them back into the less compressed atmosphere of civvy street. As we know, civvy street can be a hazardous environment for vulnerable returnees without assistance.
Alun Cairns
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for underlining that point about training. Does he accept that just as our armed forces are trained to the highest degree to do what they need to do in a military capacity, wherever possible training needs to be provided so that their skills are transferable? That will make them fully valued members of society in a professional capacity and as individuals.
Mr Llwyd
Absolutely right, and that is part and parcel of bringing people back into the civilian mainstream. There is no doubt that such training is useful, and we know that it often works.
Clause 2 provides a commitment for a report to be placed before Parliament each year, which will deal with health care, education and housing. That is a welcome step, because the regulation of those services is a prerequisite for improving them. Surely, however, we need to do better than that. The Bill specifies that the responsibility for laying the report should lie with the Secretary of State. I wish no offence to him, and I trust that he will take none if I say that he has many other responsibilities already bestowed on him, which mean that laying the report will not be his highest priority. However, I hope that I am wrong.
I believe, as I mentioned earlier, that we should consider appointing a Minister for veterans’ welfare with a cross-cutting responsibility, who could perhaps be situated in the Cabinet Office, because there are many facets to the problem. The report specified in clause 2 should go into far greater depth about how a background of military service might affect people in obtaining personal services. To education, housing and health care should be added welfare benefits, employment benefits and advice, reskilling, budgetary advice, debt management—SSAFA Forces Help and the Royal British Legion say that 60% of their cases concern debt management—alcohol and drug treatment and relationship skills. All personnel should have access to advice from voluntary organisations on all those issues, regardless of length of service, some months before leaving the forces. At present, when leaving the forces, the feeling among many veterans seems to be, “When you’re discharged, you’re on your own.” Regardless of whether that is the case, we need to intensify personnel’s awareness of the support that is available for those who need it. Back-up advice in person and by telephone should also be made available for the first six months following discharge.
I have briefly mentioned the prevalence of mental health problems among veterans. Due to time constraints, I cannot dedicate as much time to it as I should like. No compulsory mental health assessment is currently undergone before leaving the forces. I hope that that practice will soon change. There is a tremendous discrepancy between the way in which US and UK forces deal with the matter. Nobody can realistically plead for a veterans agency in the UK on the same scale as that in the States. The US has had to come to terms with the fall-out from the Vietnam war and other conflicts, and it set up such facilities in more benign financial times. However, when I took evidence with the Howard League in the US, senior veterans affairs Ministers told us that there was a presumption that 33% of returnees from conflict would suffer from either post-traumatic stress disorder or traumatic brain injury.
That figure is not accepted by anyone in the UK forces. The proportion is not even a tenth of that figure, according to the evidence that we have received from people in similar positions in the UK. There must be a problem somewhere because there is a huge discrepancy. Somebody said that PTSD could take up to 14 years to develop. Yes, it could: it could take 14 minutes or 14 years. We must tackle the problem, because we may be considering the tip of a painful iceberg, and the consequences could be long drawn out.
Experts therefore demand making psychological assessment mandatory for all those leaving the forces, alongside a more general resettlement assessment and advice scheme. I hope that, if I am appointed to serve on the Select Committee, I can advocate making available more tailored support to veterans in the criminal justice system. I am a firm believer in all being equal before the law, but veterans’ specific needs, and the way in which some initiatives might prevent reoffending in that community, must be recognised. Veterans’ support officers should be appointed in every prison and probation service to ensure the streamlining of those initiatives. That has already started to happen. Statutory funding should be allocated to them as well as to veterans’ support groups, which can provide unparalleled support in communities. Such groups normally have the benefit of comprising mainly veterans, who have an unmatched ability to relate to the experiences of other veterans.
I am fast running out of time, but it remains for me to say that we must wake up to the alarming way in which personnel come to rely on alcohol and sometimes other substances as a defence mechanism. Perhaps it is perfectly understandable, but the so-called self-medication route is a huge misnomer. I have evidence to show that, regrettably, at some stages of Army life, alcohol is treated as a catalyst for unwinding. I am sure that many hon. Members have heard about the decompression in Cyprus, which comprises a weekend or week of drunkenness and brawling. It can be no coincidence that so many veterans leave active service displaying a dependence on alcohol. I need hardly say how quickly such a dependence, if left untreated, can feed into other habits, violent behaviour and crime. Henceforth, therefore, counselling on substance abuse must play a vital part in decompression and reintroducing personnel to civvy street.
If we are to retain any hope of fewer veterans running into problems after leaving the forces, we must address some aspects of Army life, such as alcohol consumption as a means of coping with stress and adversity. Clauses 9 to 11 will intensify the regulation of personnel in that field and perhaps awaken them to the dangers of over-reliance on that drug. That is a welcome step in the right direction.
Dan Byles
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that a common thread running through his speech is the problem of tracking and identifying veterans, whether by the police, the probation service or GPs? For example, many mental health issues arise because GPs do not necessarily know that someone is a veteran 10 years after that person has left the forces. [Interruption.] I am married to a GP, and I can assure the hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) that the system might work at the top, but it does not by the time things get to the bottom. [Interruption.] The point that I intended to make before the sedentary interruptions from the Opposition Front Bench is that we in this place can help because there is a lot of support out there for veterans. How many hon. Members say to someone who is homeless or has other problems and comes to their surgery, “Are you a veteran? If so, I can direct you to more places”?
Mr Llwyd
Such work is being done by, for example, Kent police, to which I referred earlier, and probation services here and there. Very good work is undertaken in some prisons. That work is done by people who have an interest in assisting veterans, and we need to roll out good practice throughout the UK.
It is wrong for anyone to hint that I am disparaging the services when I refer to alcohol or drugs. I am trying to consider matters realistically, not to insult members of the armed forces, for heaven’s sake.
Mr Kevan Jones
I agree with comments that have been made. However, when I was veterans Minister, we introduced tracking. We are obviously now waiting for the current Government to implement that.
Mr Llwyd
I agree. I give the shadow Minister credit because I have debated matters with him and he was assiduous in trying to address the problem, which is multifaceted.
Military people are often proud—proud of their regiment and their work. They are not proud of their position if they suddenly become homeless and/or involved in crime, so sometimes they will not say that they were in the services because they are ashamed. That is another problem.
We have had an opportunity to debate such matters today, and it is important to move forward to Committee, where we can explore different avenues. The Secretary of State said that he was open to, for example, extending the categories in clause 2. That is all well and good. Let us see whether we can explore that and come up with further matters that we need to examine.
If I am fortunate enough to serve on the Committee, I hope I can amplify what I have said and strengthen the Bill as best I can so that we can honestly say, as Government members and ordinary Back-Bench politicians, that we are adhering to our part of the military covenant.