Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between John Glen and Mark Francois

Monday 2nd September 2013 Commons Chamber

[John Glen (Salisbury) (Con)]

12. What steps his Department is taking to strengthen the military covenant.

[The Minister of State, Ministry of Defence (Mr Mark Francois)]

As my hon. Friend knows, the armed forces covenant is important for this Government and it is a personal priority of mine. We are taking a number of steps to strengthen it. These include the continued promotion of the community covenant scheme, with more than 370 local authorities now signed up—that is more than 80% of all the local authorities in the UK; the recent announcement by the Chancellor of the Exchequer of £10 million per year to support the covenant; and the launch of the corporate covenant, which allows businesses and charitable organisations to demonstrate their public support for the armed forces community.

[John Glen]

Over the next few years, a considerable number of pupils from military families will be educated in south Wiltshire and around Salisbury. Will the Minister confirm that the MOD will work proactively with local authorities, including Wiltshire, to ensure that pupil premium funding is spent in an optimal way and that best practice is shared?

[Mr Francois]

Yes, I believe I can. The service pupil premium was increased in April this year from £250 to £300. I can assure my hon. Friend that as units move under re-basing, whether from Germany or within the United Kingdom, we continue to work with the Department for Education, providing specialist information, advice and support through our own directorate for children and young people to local authorities and schools to secure maximum benefit from the service pupil premium for service children. In my hon. Friend’s particular case, we will of course ensure that we involve the military-civil integration partnership in Wiltshire, which does very good work in this area.

Military Covenant

Debate between John Glen and Mark Francois

Wednesday 21st November 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Francois]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his kind words. I have to report to the House that there has been a leak, because my speech says, “This has been an excellent example of practical co-operation between the Ministry of Defence, the national museum of the Royal Navy and the Northern Ireland Executive.” He also rightly mentioned the friends group. In all seriousness, this is one where everybody got it right. It is proper and appropriate that HMS Caroline remains in Belfast, and I hope to be able to visit her at some point in the near future. So I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his kind words and the spirit in which they are offered.

In more recent times, the contribution of those who served alongside the Army in the former Royal Ulster Constabulary has also been remembered, most notably through the awarding of the George Cross to the RUC. I also pay tribute today to the work of the Royal Ulster Constabulary George Cross Foundation and the Northern Ireland Police Fund, which look after former members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary and current members of the Police Service of Northern Ireland so well. In the same vein, I should like to pay tribute to the veterans of the Royal Irish Regiment and its home service battalions and the Ulster Defence Regiment. It is for them that the bespoke Royal Irish aftercare service, to which the right hon. Member for Lagan Valley (Mr Donaldson) rightly paid tribute, is in operation. Funded by the Ministry of Defence, that important organisation has supported a client population of up to 63,000 veterans in the delivery of psychiatry, physiotherapy and welfare casework. I will undertake to look at his suggestion as to whether that service could be extended to other members of the armed forces in Northern Ireland, but I must enter the obvious caveat that that is subject to resource constraints. So we will look at that, but standing at the Dispatch Box this evening I cannot guarantee a positive outcome.

Such proud traditions of service continue right up to the present generation. I, too, should mention the sad death of Corporal Channing Day, who grew up in Northern Ireland and joined the Army in 2005. Corporal Day, who served with 3 Medical Regiment, died alongside Corporal David O’Connor, of 40 Commando, after being injured on patrol in Helmand province on Wednesday 24 October. The Minister of State, Northern Ireland Office, my hon. Friend the Member for Hemel Hempstead (Mike Penning) had the privilege of attending her funeral service, which was said to have been the largest that the small church had seen in some 400 years. I pay tribute to Corporal Day and Corporal O’Connor this evening, and in doing so I echo a number of the tributes that have been paid by the right hon. Gentleman and his colleagues tonight.

In terms of current operations, I should also like to mention the personnel of 204 field hospital, who are shortly about to deploy from Northern Ireland to Afghanistan to serve as part of the role 3 hospital at Camp Bastion and to provide other medical services to troops in theatre. I recently had the privilege of visiting Camp Bastion and the hospital, and I laid a wreath to commemorate those who had fallen in operations in Afghanistan.

I should now like to turn directly to the armed forces covenant. As the House knows, its key principles are enshrined in law in the Armed Forces Act 2011. I am proud to say that the Government published the covenant in May 2011. In essence, its principles are: that those who serve in the armed forces, whether regular or reserve, and those who have served in the past, and their families should face no disadvantage compared with other citizens in the provision of public and commercial services; and that special consideration is appropriate in some cases, especially for those who have given most, such as the injured and the bereaved. The covenant extends to the armed forces community, which is defined as serving personnel, including members of the reserve forces; veterans; and their families. I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his generous tribute to the reserves as well as to the regulars.

[John Glen (Salisbury) (Con)]

Will the Minister take time to consider the interaction between the MOD and the Department for Work and Pensions on benefit payments and armed forces compensation scheme payments? The compensation scheme payments invalidate claimants’ eligibility for some DWP payments, which seems very wrong. Special consideration should be given in such circumstances.

[Mr Francois]

I am aware of the issue and pay tribute to my hon. Friend for his persistence on these and related matters. We had an Adjournment debate recently on a parallel issue, although not exactly the same one. I believe that we are doing what we can to try to solve the problem, but as it is quite technical, as he knows, if he wants to write to me on the specific points I would be happy to look into them and get back to him.

In common with other legislation, the provisions of the 2011 Act extend to Northern Ireland in the same way as they apply to all other parts of the United Kingdom. Those principles are important because they influence the formation of policy, but there are other sides to the covenant, too. One of those is the community covenant, which seeks to bring together local authorities and other local organisations with members of the armed forces community who live and serve in the area for which they are responsible. To date, more than 200 local authorities across the United Kingdom have signed a community covenant. I am proud to say that in Essex the other day, I signed that covenant on behalf of the Government in my own county, and some 13 local authorities signed one after the other.

We are clear that by forging such relationships the community covenant is starting to have a positive impact on the lives of the armed forces community and on the wider community. For example, in Gateshead the council is making arrangements, among many other measures, to explore opportunities for serving personnel and veterans to access leisure facilities to support their overall health and well-being needs, including their mental health needs.

In Oxfordshire, the county council, by working with the NHS and 145 (South) Brigade, has been able to help resolve problems of access to GPs and dentists for the families of serving personnel. Dental services have also been extended in some areas to address a shortfall and the referral process for primary care services has been made easier.

Also in Oxfordshire, the local authority has arranged for school places to be allocated to service families in advance of the family’s actual move, based on a letter from the relevant unit. That has been a long-standing problem when military units move from one location to another, but I understand that the Department for Education is now encouraging other local authorities to take a similar approach to try to alleviate the difficulty.

In the past, members of the armed forces could also be pushed towards the bottom of local housing waiting lists, as the need to move from base to base often meant they could not prove a local connection to the area in which they wanted to live, but, thanks again to the armed forces covenant, many local councils will now ensure that due consideration is given to service families so that they are not at a disadvantage when applying for a council home. That extends to serving people, families and, importantly, veterans.

One of the chief benefits of the community covenant is quite simply that people are now talking to one another in a way that they never did before. To some degree, we are doing that in the House this evening. Local authorities, which deliver many of the vital services at ground level, are being made aware of the needs of the armed forces community, which they might not have considered fully in the past. At the same time, it is fair to say that service personnel and their families are becoming increasingly aware of what life is like beyond the wire and how they can help their local communities.

As the House knows, the 2011 Act also places an obligation on the Secretary of State for Defence to report annually to Parliament on the state of the armed forces covenant. The first of these statutory reports will be published before Christmas and will set out in more detail what the Government are doing to deliver in the key areas that the covenant covers.

I now want to speak about extending the armed forces covenant to Northern Ireland. Hon. and right hon. Members from Northern Ireland will be aware that many of the main areas covered by the covenant, such as housing, health and education, all lie within the devolved field and that these services are provided by Northern Ireland Departments, which are answerable to Northern Ireland Ministers in the Executive, not all of whom currently support this agenda, as the right hon. Member for Lagan Valley intimated.

Northern Ireland Departments and other public authorities also need to give due regard to the statutory obligations placed on them by section 75 of the Northern Ireland Act to promote equality of opportunity in respect of all the functions they perform and the services they provide. Herein, as it were, lies the dilemma. It is not for Westminster to tell Stormont what it must do in respect of the covenant—it is for Northern Ireland Executive Ministers to debate and negotiate and agree how the armed forces covenant should apply in Northern Ireland to the extent permitted by law.

There are some who say that section 75 is a hindrance and should be amended to somehow allow the covenant to be applied. Of course we want to see the armed forces covenant principles applied right across the United Kingdom. However, if the Northern Ireland Executive decide not to proceed with the covenant, that does not justify amending section 75, which is one of the cornerstones in the architecture of the Belfast agreement that was endorsed in referendums in both Northern Ireland and the Republic.

I think it is fair to say that Northern Ireland has made great progress since the dark days of the troubles. This month we saw the Taoiseach lay a wreath at the war memorial in Enniskillen following on from the historic wreath layings—both at the garden of remembrance in Dublin and at the Irish war memorial at Islandbridge—by Her Majesty the Queen during her highly successful state visit last year. That, of course, built on the historic joint unveiling in 1998 by Her Majesty and the President of Ireland of the Messines peace tower on the site of the battle of Messines Ridge, to remember the Irish dead of the first world war—also mentioned earlier this evening—and to inaugurate the Island of Ireland peace park.