Armed Forces Covenant Annual Report

Debate between James Gray and Tom Tugendhat

Thursday 7th January 2016 Westminster Hall

[Tom Tugendhat (Tonbridge and Malling) (Con)]

I am grateful to serve under your chairmanship today, Mr Hanson. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire (Mr Gray) for his kind words on my paper, “The Fog of Law”, which was published a couple of years ago. That paper is only more relevant, sadly, given that various trials—we warned of them several years ago—are coming to fruition. Young men who took decisions on our behalf are being unfairly pressured into answering for actions that were fundamentally of the Government and therefore of this House, rather than their own. When considering the covenant, it is important that we consider the individuals—they are carrying out requests not on their behalf, but on ours.

I should immediately declare an interest, as I am still serving in Her Majesty’s armed forces as a reserve officer. I have many friends who continue to serve in uniform, and I am proud to say that they do. The points I was going to make on the military covenant have already been made, so I will limit my comments a little more than others may have needed to.

The fundamental point of the covenant is that it is not just something that we give to those in the armed forces: the possibly 1 to 4 million people that my hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire referred to; it is actually how we ensure our own future. All relationships and human interactions are fundamentally reciprocal. In the give and take of the armed forces covenant is the extension of the commitment we make to our troops. It is the extension of buying a proper uniform, of making sure the troops are properly armed, trained, paid and motivated. Part of that is the covenant. If we get that wrong, we not only fail to look after those who served us with great honour and courage, but we weaken ourselves, because we discourage the best and the brightest of every generation who have served with great fortitude in our armed forces. Indeed, everyone from the grandson of the monarch to the grandson of anybody else has served in our armed forces.

We discourage people from serving, and in doing so we weaken ourselves. I therefore argue that the military covenant is not an act of generosity or normalisation, but of self-defence. We must look at it very clearly as such, because self-interest in this area is sometimes the way to get the best result out of the Exchequer. The Chancellor has already been generous, as my hon. Friend the Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Mrs Trevelyan) identified, but it is important that we do not see the stories, which we occasionally see, about servicemen having to sell homes to fund the purchase of prosthetic limbs, and it is important that other veterans are not forced out of the family home in search of medical help. We need to make sure that such duties are taken on by society, not only because it is the right, moral and honourable thing to do, but because it is the best, safest and most sensible thing to do.

I look forward very much to our covenant coming to fruition and the reports building one upon another, so that we get to a state where what we are really arguing about is tweaks and turns and not substance, because, as we build up that covenant, we build up our own defence. That covenant is not only about the individuals, but about the families. When I speak to serving members of the armed forces today, I know that part of that covenant is also about the way in which we treat the serving families. I am particularly struck time and again when people—my friends in the armed forces—talk to me about things such as continuity of education. Some people have seen it as a luxury; some have said it is a way to support various families to continue a form of education that has long gone from most people in society. It is not. It is a way of ensuring that families who move around—men and women who serve overseas at the drop of a hat, who leave home and family and go away—can continue to ensure that their children are properly cared for; that they enjoy the opportunities that they rightly deserve; and that, where the family is staying at home in one location, they enjoy it.

How do I know that? If we look at any large employer or any of the large multinationals that regularly move people and take staff and say, “You were a director of X in London; you are now a director of Y in Paris, New York or Nigeria,” one of the essential parts of the package of employment is always education. No father or mother will accept to impoverish their children’s future. It is wrong that we should ask serving members of today’s armed forces to do that, which is why I strongly support the continuity of education allowance. It is essential not only in terms of recruiting and maintaining the quality of personnel—officers and other ranks; many apply for it—but to guarantee the commitment to maintain that we have the best and the brightest for the future.

I want to talk a little about the law. The hon. Member for North Wiltshire has spoken extremely eloquently about it. The law can be used in both ways. It can be used quite rightly to support the actions of our armed forces and to defend them. That is exactly what the Geneva convention is for: to control and regulate the conduct of operations in battle. However, it is also right that we use the appropriate law. Sadly, in recent years a legal doctrine has grown up in which we have started to use inappropriate legislation, and we have started to treat soldiers as policemen. Once again, this is not just a nicety and choosing which element we like or do not like; this is fundamentally about the security of the state and the liberty of the individual. If we start to view people who are not policemen but soldiers and treat them like civilians, various operations become impossible.

It would be wrong to ask the police to storm a building knowing that they would take casualties of 5% or 10%, and yet we asked young men to do that on the beaches of Normandy. It would be wrong to ask the police to go into a riot situation knowing that five or 10 of them would probably be killed, but that is exactly what we did at Mount Tumbledown in the Falkland Islands. We do it again and again, because what we ask servicemen to do is not the job of a civilian. It is not the job of a policeman, a doctor or a fireman; it is something more than that. We literally ask them to put their lives on the line.

The deal is up to death, and that deal makes the covenant different, but it also means that the legal protection that is required to enable soldiers to act and to operate is also different. They must have the right to act. They must have the ability to act in a sensible and reasonable way. This does not mean that they must have the right to break the law; they do not and should not. This does not mean that the Geneva convention is irrelevant; it is not and it should not be. This does not mean that they should be allowed to commit murder, rape, looting or anything else. They are not and should not.

What it does mean is this: soldiers take split-second decisions—hard decisions—that young men and women were taking every day when I was in Afghanistan and Iraq. The 18 and 21-year-olds—junior commanders; sometimes more senior—were taking split-second decisions and then, 10 years later, in the cool of the courtroom, were being asked to justify to people who had never walked on to a beach without getting into a sweat how they could have made such a decision, evaluated the situation they saw before them, and taken a call. What was actually happening was that the serviceman or woman in question was being asked to justify the decisions of this House that sent them there, and that is wrong. That is why it is right that the appropriate law, as my hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire put it, is the law that should apply, and not the European Court of Human Rights. In this case I have argued against various articles, in the paper “The Fog of Law”.

There is another point I want to make about the covenant: it must apply as widely as we can make it. Many have served our armed forces with huge honour and distinction around the world, and I include the enormously courageous interpreters I served with in Afghanistan. I include the Iraqis who sadly lost their lives serving next to us, but in the Queen’s uniform—they were dressed as we were—as interpreters. We owe them a duty of care, too. This covenant does not cover them—I understand that—but the generosity of Her Majesty’s armed forces and Her Majesty’s Government must include them. Only by doing so will we ensure that we get the best people to serve alongside us in our time of need. Those interpreters were not extras. They were not a luxury. They were not an add-on to our fighting capability; they were integral to it. Only by getting that right will we maintain the fundamental combat power that the British armed forces deploy on operations. It is absolutely right that we extend the covenant rights, as much as is possible and is reasonable, to those who have served alongside us.

[Mr Gray]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend about the interpreters, and we are making some steps in the right direction there, but there are of course large numbers of other contractors of one sort or another, who in many cases serve right up at the frontline. To a greater or lesser degree they, too, should be covered by the terms of the military covenant.

[Tom Tugendhat]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right and I agree entirely with what he just said.

I want to bring in one other aspect: the fact that many, many young men and women from various other countries have served in Her Majesty’s uniform. Our recruitment system is blessed in having young men and women from all over the world who want to come and serve in our armed forces. My information may be out of date, but when I joined the armed forces, more men and women from the Republic of Ireland were serving in the British Army than were in the Republic’s army. Those young men and women, who serve in the Queen’s uniform, deserve as much protection as we can give them. Ireland is an independent state, and quite rightly so, but it is absolutely right that Her Majesty’s Government should recognise their service and, where appropriate, offer the same support through the covenant that British servicemen would enjoy anywhere else. The same is true of Nigeria, Nepal or South Africa. Young men and women have come from those countries, sometimes in great numbers, and served alongside us. I urge the Minister to look very closely at how, through the Foreign Office and the Department for International Development, Her Majesty’s Government can support communities that have sent young men and women to fight alongside ours.

Finally, I should say that the covenant is not always essential, because some of us have benefited disproportionately from our armed service. I have benefited massively from the camaraderie. I have benefited hugely from the education and the training. I have benefited completely from the moral ethos and the integrity that has, quite rightly, been rammed into us all. Military service is not a disadvantage. It is not a handicap. It is in no way something that should hold one back. It does not. In the vast majority of cases, military service empowers, enables and liberates people. It takes young men and women, often those who have been failed by the civilian services in our society, and gives them the leg up that they always needed, and a sense of discipline and purpose. The covenant is not a negative. It is not always about correcting a fault. It is about recognising where we can do that little bit more.