Armed Forces Commissioner Bill (Second sitting)

Helen Maguire Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 10th December 2024 Public Bill Committees

[Graeme Downie (Dunfermline and Dollar) (Lab)]

Q You mentioned the issues you sometimes have with this highly mobile population. Do you see the commissioner helping or playing a role in some of those issues? In Scotland, we have recently seen how the moving of forces personnel has caused issues with healthcare and education. Is that something where you could imagine the commissioner playing a role?

Abby Dryden: I would hope so. The arrangements in the devolved nations, particularly in my experience of healthcare, are different, and it is about being conversant and fully aware of how it works in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. There is a call for a nuanced and different understanding that supports some of the issues that present when personnel move to another devolved nation or another area of the United Kingdom.

[Helen Maguire (Epsom and Ewell) (LD)]

Q I want to understand how you view the overall welfare services offered by the military? How do you see the commissioner working to improve areas where you might feel that improvement is required?

Abby Dryden: I can only speak about my organisation’s experience of working with the pre-existing welfare structures. The vast majority of the time those structures work very well, and they work well because of the people who are involved; they care about personnel. In my experience, I have only ever encountered a positive approach from military processes, structures and the chain of command side of things in terms of addressing the issues that we present to them. They are very much interested in the quality of life that personnel enjoy.

In terms of how I see the commissioner supporting that, how it could be different and where there might be gaps, there is always room for improvement. For example, younger people joining the military may have a different expectation of what that structure should represent to them, how they should be able to access services and the proximity that that institution has to their quality of life and the quality of their family’s life. I would say that the commissioner should focus on the changing expectation of new recruits and young people. That might be a positive addition.

[The Minister for the Armed Forces (Luke Pollard)]

Q I suspect I am about to be interrupted by the Division bell. However, thank you for joining us today. I understand that your organisation works not only with service personnel and veterans but with families. A key part of this legislation is enabling armed forces families to access the commissioner. Could you give us a sense of how the needs of families differ from those of armed forces personnel, who the commissioner provides for at the moment? How might the commissioner take a different perspective depending on which cohort they are looking at?

Abby Dryden: Lots of services are very much centred around the serving person. That is not a failing of those services, but I think families can sometimes, but not always, feel peripheral to proceedings. I think—[Interruption.]

--- Later in debate ---

[Terry Jermy (South West Norfolk) (Lab)]

Q My question follows nicely on from that. Colonel Doherty, I was reading your CV in the paperwork and I was struck by the range of experience and the number of different locations that you have served in. I join colleagues in thanking you for that service; I was pleased to read that report. Given your experience of active service, and now your new role—your experience on both sides—do you feel that the commissioner would be seen as sufficiently strong and independent to encourage people to come forward?

Col. Darren Doherty: The legislation is certainly strong enough to put them in that position. Again, it goes back to the type of individual selected for the role and the trust and the confidence that they build with the community. I can speak only on behalf of the Army.

It will take a period of time to educate people on what the role is. That is why it is absolutely critical that the Bill is fit for purpose and, more importantly, that the policy and framework that sit beyond it, in terms of implementation, are right as well, and that we are absolutely clear where the boundaries and responsibilities for the office lie, and also the gearing between it and other offices.

That goes back to one of the issues raised a few times in the debate, which is the scope of the role—looking predominantly at the community subject to service law and how that relates to the wider military community, going back to that continuum of service. How that all interlocks with what is currently provided by the Minister for Veterans and People and veterans commissioners, where they exist, is all very important in the messaging and communicating with the community.

It is a wide remit. It is summed up in a few small sentences, but dealing with welfare issues could be incredibly complex and wide-ranging. There are very few welfare issues that do not straddle the serving family and go into the veteran space in a sort of time continuum. Those are all important parts of the messaging of what the role is going to be about.

[Helen Maguire]

Q I have a few questions. Colonel Doherty, you have travelled throughout the world during your career. You have been to Yemen, Kuwait, Afghanistan and various other places. How do you see the commissioner reaching military personnel serving in other parts of the world?

Col. Darren Doherty: The legislation is clear where access is permitted and enabled. It will be a challenge where matters of operational security come into it, but I think all those are manageable. Again, it is about the framework of how the office will operate—it will need to be right where it is needed.

My experience of operations, going back to my previous experience, but close to my heart, is that welfare is a chain-of-command business. It is what officers, senior non-commissioned officers and junior non-commissioned officers get paid to do. I am always minded that they often do that best on operations. I would hope that the commissioner’s role would be less needed in operations, but that is yet to be proved by evidence or experience. I would hope that we get on with that better there than perhaps we do in some of the quieter, peacetime locations.

[Helen Maguire]

Q Mandy, are there any particular challenges you see that naval communities face in contrast with the other services?

Mandy Harding: It is difficult to know how distinct our challenges are, because I do not know the challenges that the communities of my colleagues face. Somebody told me that the Army tend to work within family groupings and units, whereas the Navy take a village to sea. I thought that was an interesting analogy of the difference. That brings different issues. Lengths of deployment are different. Beyond that, I am not sure I can offer you more because I am not sighted on my colleagues’ areas of expertise.

[Helen Maguire]

Q Let me ask Air Commodore Harper the same question about the RAF. Do you see any particular challenges not seen in the other services?

Air Commodore Simon Harper: I would make two points. There is a community and a family around a particular RAF station, of which there are 24 or 26 in the UK and others elsewhere, but there is increasingly a diaspora of families who live elsewhere, separated from that base. You have individuals who are weekend commuting to a different location where there is not the localised support for a family. It varies.

Generally speaking, historically, the support has always been focused around a serving base for the Royal Air Force. Increasingly, we need to reach out into other areas of the UK, where families have now settled for other reasons. That diaspora is UK-wide, in the UK context. It is a different challenge and there are different needs associated with both.

[The Minister for the Armed Forces (Luke Pollard)]

Q Thank you all for all the work that you and your organisations do. One of the bits about this Bill that is a development of where we are currently is the ability for the commissioner to undertake thematic investigations into issues affecting the welfare of our people and their families.

Could you give us a flavour of the issues coming forward in the cohort that we are talking about in the Bill to your organisations and how you think shining a spotlight on some of those structural issues might be able to address some of the underlying causes? The purpose of the commissioner is, ideally, to assist in removing some of the barriers, obstacles and challenges that our service people and their families face. I would be interested to get your sense as to whether those structural issues have always been here or whether you have seen changes in recent years that need to be addressed by the commissioner.

Col. Darren Doherty: I would start by saying that much of our work is currently done and our support is currently provided to the veteran and family community. Only about 12% of our grants go to the serving community. That is because we base them on need and, thankfully, many in the serving community do not feel that need until they have left. Of that 12%, much is made up of family support in terms of bereavement and those sorts of things.

I think the situation is changing. In the future, I think we are going to look much more towards causation and prevention, which will be more within the serving community. I would highlight a project that we have recently become involved with, which is funding a training and education mechanism that will look at domestic abuse. That is not just treating or helping to support the victims of domestic abuse through a helpline, although that is part of it. The main part, through a charity called SafeLives, is looking at training and education. Much of that is aimed towards our serving community, through their own welfare officers. That initiative was prompted by the work of our trustees identifying that they thought this might be an issue. We cross-checked that with the Army and they believed it was.

That is an example where a thematic study carried out, or a report by the commissioner, could help identify other areas of need in the serving community where the third sector and in the Army’s case, the Army Benevolent Fund, could intervene and try to get at some of the root causes of these issues. That is where we intend to go in the future, while still providing the same degree of support to meet the need that we do now.

Mandy Harding: We are a commissioning charity in the sense that our grant-making uses commissioning principles based on need. We commission through grants to partners to deliver the outcomes. We do that by identifying need. We are very interested in needs, and any identified needs, because where we can identify the need, that is where we can appropriate the right resources and the right investment. From our point of view, anything that helps with that is very useful.

In terms of what is coming up, we have just commissioned some new work around mental health and wellbeing because of the changes we are seeing. Deployments now are to hostile areas, families have less information and the anxiety is harder for them. You cannot shield children so easily from social media and the news. Families have explained to us that they have tried to shield their children from the news in the home, but that changes the moment they go to school—I think HMS Diamond was probably a very good example of what happened, and the distress that those families felt at seeing that on the news and trying to shield their children from what was going on. There is a change and a shift.

From our charity’s position, we are currently looking at need again. We did a piece of need research of our own in 2019. Professor Walker’s work came in, which was incredibly helpful. With colleagues at Greenwich Hospital and at the Armed Forces Covenant Fund Trust, we are all looking at need. We are working with the RAF and with the RAND research project to try to see what need is there. If a commissioner came in, it follows that we would be supportive of a commissioner who might be able to pull themes together for us, and then we can make the appropriate investments.

The only thought that I would offer from our experience of working with beneficiaries and organisations—particularly when I have done research into need and talked with beneficiaries—is to manage expectations. I think managing families’ expectations of this will be a challenge.

Air Commodore Simon Harper: I just have a few points to add. From a Royal Air Force Benevolent Fund perspective, we augment what the service already provides. Much of what we see in the serving community in particular is what the air force has asked us to provide or, indeed, where we have found a specific need that is not being provided for either by the Royal Air Force locally on station or by partner charities.

I would pick up two areas in which we have seen an increase or growth over the last couple of years. The first is in emotional wellbeing support and sub-clinical mental wellbeing. We have a listening and counselling service that is accessed by over 2,000 people a year, of whom 80% are from the serving community. It was originally set up as a veterans’ programme, and it is now dominated by the serving community.

The second area is around children and young people. Increasingly, we have picked up a requirement to support children and young people, not just through after-school clubs or our youth club provision on stations, but through holiday provision as well. Increasingly, we are seeing the need to support serving children. Particularly where both parents are serving—that is increasing—we have picked that up as a requirement, and colleagues from the Royal Air Force Families Federation will be able to help with that.

As far as addressing underlying causes and needs goes, if the commissioner can be part of that solution, as I mentioned earlier, that would be fantastic. Already, it is a multifaceted response, but if the commissioner can come and say, “Here is an issue. This is what we have picked up. Is it being picked up by any other organisations?”—that includes, by the way, local authorities, the NHS and local education authorities—I think that would be of huge benefit.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Francois]

The pressure on family life, as we have already heard today, is the single biggest reason why people leave, but when we went round a number of military bases, we found it was often an amalgam of reasons. Sometimes there would be a pressure cooker effect over several years, and then one thing might become, in colloquial English, the straw that broke the camel’s back. Sometimes it is that cocktail that just becomes a bit too much. Is that a fair characterisation? [Interruption.] I can see some heads nodding, so that still holds good five years on. Thank you very much. You have been generous with your time, Mr Efford—thank you.

[Helen Maguire]

Q I will start from the left and go to the Army first. It is nice to meet you, Collette, and thank you for coming. I want to understand what challenges you see with families getting the support they need, and how you think the commissioner will help to address those challenges in their role.

Collette Musgrave: The challenges that we see with families getting the support they need can be articulated as both internal and external. Internal services and processes are the ones that Defence offers to families in order to maintain service family life, and then there are those provided by what one might characterise as external agencies—whether that is local authorities, the NHS, educational provision or whatever. The nature of the challenge can be different depending on with whom families are seeking to engage.

The challenges within the internal system can be largely about not being able to access the right information, not being given the right information when asking for it, consistency of the information and guidance that is given, and consistency of the provision. As we have spoken about, Army families in particular are very mobile, and what they are provided with in one location might be very different to what they are provided with in another, both in extent and quality of provision. We would really like to see the Armed Forces Commissioner do something on that in their role.

As the Army Families Federation, we absolutely welcome the introduction of an Armed Forces Commissioner with, as the Secretary of State said, a laser-like focus on the serving experience, which is often lost when talking about the armed forces community—those who are actually serving at the moment. We believe the Armed Forces Commissioner can play a key role in looking at the consistency of provision of both policy and processes within defence. Many of the concerns that come to us are a result of mixed information and mixed messages, and families not being able to access the provision that is there because they simply do not know how to access it or are being blocked in some way.

Externally, the issue is subtly different. There is not an unwillingness from the general UK population to support service personnel and their families. What there is sometimes is a lack of knowledge and understanding. In many of the large organisations that they are interfacing with, whether that is the NHS, a local authority or the Department for Work and Pensions, there is often a lack of understanding of the unique circumstances of service personnel and their families. It is difficult sometimes for those families in particular, who are to an extent slightly outside society—I am not articulating that well, because that is not what I want to say, particularly as a former service family and veteran myself. Often with housing, as well as sometimes healthcare and education—particularly if they are overseas or move back from overseas—their interfaces with external statutory authorities are not always straightforward and can vary hugely as they move around the country. Your experience in Scotland might be very different to your experience in England. Their ability to interface effectively with those services can sometimes be compromised.

Many of these organisations have signed up to the armed forces covenant. The people at the top are very happy to sign up to the armed forces covenant and say, “Yes, we made a great commitment.” The people on the frontline, who are actually dealing with our service personnel and their families, are often not so well-informed and do not necessarily fully understand some of the additional or different provision that has been made under the terms of the armed forces covenant. Those are the big handfuls, and to finally answer your question, those two key areas are where the Armed Forces Commissioner could help.

[Helen Maguire]

Q Sarah, a very similar question, because I know that you mentioned enabling families to thrive in communities of their choice. How do you feel the commissioner could work to support families to achieve that?

Sarah Clewes: It is about just being mindful that not all naval families live around the base port areas. You would expect that some do, and that is absolutely fine, but others choose to live wherever their support network or employment is. Actually, dispersed families are much more common than you would perhaps think, because there is that assumption that everyone lives in service family accommodation around a base port area, but they absolutely do not.

It is about trying to reach those people who are very happy and thriving in their community of choice, who may not need any support from the Navy. Actually, when they do, hopefully they have a life-changing event or do not know about the free swimming and sailing that is available to them. It is about spreading the net really wide and saying, “If you ever need that support, we are here for you, in whatever guise that may be.” Welfare is absolutely not our part of ship, but it is about actually giving that little nugget of information to take away a little bit of pain. They may be juggling a very successful career and childcare while their partner or spouse is at sea or—worse still—under the water for six months, with absolutely no contact or very limited contact.

When appreciating service life, it is all very well to think that we know what it means, but we really have to understand what it means across a huge range of issues, and family dynamics are huge. We really need to be mindful of who we are talking about when we talk about families, and let’s not just pigeonhole folk and think we know.

Therefore, it is important that the commissioner does what we do on a daily basis. They have to ask, “What does that look like for naval families? VAT on school fees, what does that look like for naval families? Have you given them the information they need to make those informed choices or will they have to half-guess and hope that a hardship fund will become available so that they can get through Christmas?” It could be really impactful, and like Colette, I am absolutely interested to see how this could develop.

[Helen Maguire]

Q Maria, the same question to you. You understand the difficulties and challenges that RAF families face. How can the commissioner help support that?

Maria Lyle: I will not replay what my colleagues have said. Collette articulated a lot of the challenges that RAF families would also face in terms of their mobility. We very much see that. The thing that sums it up for me is the line that says that part of the role is improving public awareness of the welfare issues that serving families and personnel face, which I would wholeheartedly support. My only slight qualm about that is that it works two ways. Having a role that coalesces that understanding and helps us amplify people’s voices could be really powerful.

I would like to put on the record that I think it would be helpful if it is done in a way that supports the role in general, rather than put people off joining our military. Part of the challenge the military has at the moment is the impact of gapping and poor retention. This needs to be a part of bolstering the offer and talking about some of the benefits and challenges of military life. Otherwise we run the risk of making life worse for people because retention falls even lower. I recognise that is straying into a different area, but I would not want an opportunity to become a threat.

[Luke Pollard]

Q Thank you all for coming to provide us with evidence today. As Devonport’s MP I get lots of copies of Homeport from the Naval Families Federation for my constituency office, so thank you for all those that come through the post. For me the extension to families is a key part of the legislation, because it is the first time that we have had the acknowledgement of families in the Armed Forces Act with a real focus on their welfare needs.

I am interested to get your perspective on how you think an Armed Forces Commissioner’s office would deal with and seek to build trust with the families, because it is much easier for the commissioner to visit a base. If there is accommodation on site, that might be the case. But we know that not everyone who serves and their families live on bases. We explicitly exclude the commissioner from having a right to inspect someone’s home without notice, for very good and obvious reasons. But how do you think the commissioner should access and seek to get views from and be responsive to the needs of families? I know that will change depending on service and location and the barriers to get there. It is important that we have an understanding about what they are so we can seek to overcome them. Can you expand on that kind of challenge? Shall we go to the Navy first?

Sarah Clewes: That will be the tricky bit—building the trust and giving prompt responses. Doing what the commissioner says he or she is going to do will be really important to build that trust. We know from the covenant, for example, that has been around for 12 years, that if you ask serving personnel and their families, a large percentage of them still do not know what the covenant is, what it does, or how it changes their lives, and that has been around for a long time.

That is just an example of how education is absolutely key, as is building trust and rapport and having really slick processes so that if somebody has been invited to ask a question they get a swift response in plain language. Again, that will be really important when you respond to a serving personnel. You might send them a link to a joint service publication or whatever, but that will not wash with families who probably cannot access the JSP because of the firewall. What good is that? So having those tailored responses and being mindful of the audience that will be new will be absolutely key, and that will be the tricky bit.

Collette Musgrave: I would echo Sarah’s comments. Something that we have grappled with for a long time is how you engage with families. It is really important to understand, as Sarah says, how important trust in the system is. If expectations are not met fairly swiftly, families, on past experience, will simply not engage. But there is a more practical element, which Sarah touched on: access, accessibility and understandability. Too many of the responses that come out of Defence and too much of the communication is in language that is simply not accessible to people who are not wearing uniform. As somebody who used to wear uniform and was an MOD civil servant, I would argue that at times it is not even accessible to me, so it is about making it clear and really easy to access and offering a range of access.

Yes, we are all shifting to digital, and yes, we have seen in our organisations a distinct switch to people wanting to engage with us via email or other digital means, but there is still a large section of families who are not really able or willing to engage with that process. They will need to be able to pick up the phone and speak to somebody, and to have somebody at the other end who understands what they are saying. If I may refer back to the housing issue, the roll-out of the new housing contract and the Pinnacle help desk, one of the biggest issues with that was not having somebody who picked up the phone. When someone did, they had no empathy or sympathy with the issues being raised, let alone an understanding of them. In terms of the physical process of access, that will be absolutely key in ensuring that that works for families, is consistent and delivers what they expect.

Maria Lyle: The only thing I would add is that there is an opportunity to get it right at the beginning. Yes, no one gets everything nailed on the first time—the person in that role needs to develop it—but if the offer is clear at the beginning, it makes it a lot easier. By that, I mean: is this office more strategic or tactical? That is part of the process that we are working out now. By that, I mean that if people are making a series of phone calls to that office, it will have to be staffed to deal with multiple thousands of calls a year. If that is not what the office is set up to do, and if it is more about dealing with and amplifying strategic messaging about what is going wrong, the communications could be based on that. But if families are led to believe, “This is somewhere I can ring and they will get my house sorted,” it is about managing those expectations and nailing those comms.

Therefore, upstream of that, it is about being very clear and coherent about what the office is setting out to do. Is it individual case management for any family who rings up with a problem? That is very different from an office that views the evidence and goes, “The key issues for military families are these three. Here is what my team is going to do about them.” In terms of what you communicate to families, those are quite different beasts. It is really important to get that right.

--- Later in debate ---

[Pam Cox]

Q I have one brief follow-up. I note your comments about refreshing the contract between the nation and those who serve. Given that, why have you not included a duty for the MOD to respond to the commissioner’s reports?

Luke Pollard: I think I picked that up in my answer to my hon. Friend the Member for Dunfermline and Dollar. I am happy to have a look at what that could be like. It is not normal for it to be in every piece of legislation that we would respond to reports. The normal process within Government is that there would be a response. But I am happy to include my hon. Friend in the conversations I am having to try to work out whether it is a requirement to add that to primary legislation, or whether a commitment to respond, as would normally be the case, would be sufficient to address those concerns. I am happy to have a conversation.

[Helen Maguire]

Q We would all like to see a strong and independent commissioner—a real champion for the armed forces. What certainty can we gain that the Secretary of State’s powers, as set out in the Bill, will not undermine the commissioner’s independence?

Luke Pollard: We have deliberately drawn the powers to be quite limited. The Secretary of State can restrict access only on national security grounds or where there would be a danger to a person. The example that might work there is visiting the frontline during combat operations. There would clearly be a danger to our people if there were to be a formal visit, and there would probably be a danger to the commissioner in that situation. That gives a prudent safeguard power.

We have deliberately tried to separate the powers that might normally exist for the Secretary of State from this role so that there is more independence for the commissioner. By establishing a novel route to Parliament, we have also provided Parliament with greater ability to raise any concerns. If the commissioner encounters any difficulties with interactions with the Ministry of Defence or other providers of services for our people, they are able to raise that in their reports. Those are then given to Parliament to be able to independently scrutinise, separate from the MOD.

What we have tried to do is to separate those functions out. I think we have succeeded in doing that in the Bill. The style of how that will happen in practice will depend on the person appointed to the office and how that office is established. However the principle of impartiality and independence from the Ministry of Defence—and, importantly, from the single services—is at the heart of this legislation. The legislation is designed to build trust, so that people can go to the commissioner if they want to raise a concern.

[Helen Maguire]

Q We would all like the Bill’s provisions to be accessible to all service personnel. How can the Secretary of State ensure that it will be accessible to everyone, including reservists, female personnel, the LGBTQ+ community, and non-UK, black and minority ethnic personnel?

Luke Pollard: The hon. Lady is a relatively new Member in this House. If she had been here over the last seven years, she would have seen this massive gay over here—me—speaking loudly about equality matters. I feel incredibly strongly about this. From an armed forces point of view, we should value all our people. That is the intent of this Bill: to provide an opportunity for all our service people and their families—a cohort of people absolutely essential for the delivery of our national security who have often been forgotten in legislative and some MOD approaches in the past.

There is already a public sector equality duty under the Equality Act 2010 that would apply to the commissioner. When the commissioner was undertaking their reports, they would be bound by that duty to have due regard to the different minority groups that form the armed forces and families. I would expect that to be present. If looking at some of the equivalent reports we have seen, there would be an opportunity for the commissioner to look at the experience not only of the whole armed forces but groups within it—however those may be defined. There would be an opportunity for the commissioner to make that distinction in experience, not just in determining what issue to raise but also how they investigate it. I would expect that to be front and centre. If it is not included, I would expect Parliament to be able to scrutinise and ask questions of the commissioner in due course.

[Helen Maguire]

Q One final question, if I may. The chain of command has been raised quite a few times by different individuals and in questioning. How do you see the commissioner interacting with the chain of command in practice, to ensure that it is successful?

[The Chair]

Briefly, please.

Luke Pollard: I would expect them to have regular meetings with the chain of command—senior officers, base commanders, and people who form the rank and file of all our services. I think it is important the commissioner has the ability to decide who to interact with, and the ability to not only have interactions but—as set out in the legislation—to request information from the Ministry of Defence. It is not only about the ability to hold conversations, dialogue and engagement but to actually get the information required to inform their recommendations.