Armed Forces Commissioner Bill

Lord Bishop of Norwich Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 5th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Norwich]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for his introduction. I saw it as a very positive step that the Labour Party pledged in its 2024 general election manifesto to establish an independent Armed Forces commissioner to improve service life.

I declare an interest as the father of a soldier. While my own son is enjoying his Army career and gaining much from it, previous speeches in your Lordships’ House and in the other place have cited record lows in morale and a crisis in recruitment and retention as driving this need for a strong, independent voice to represent the needs of service personnel and their families. So I see it as a very positive step forward that the Bill will enable any personnel or their families to raise a service welfare matter with the proposed commissioner, wherever in the world that matter may have taken place.

Service personnel and their families give much to this nation, as has already been said in your Lordships’ House. Much of that is unseen and can impact on extended family members, who often give unstinting support to loved ones during deployments and at other times. Personnel and their families never know what is around the corner or what might be expected of them, as we know all too well at present.

One restriction of the present system with the independent Service Complaints Ombudsman is that families of personnel are currently unable to submit a complaint. I am therefore pleased to see, in the Explanatory Notes, that His Majesty’s Government are speaking of the commissioner as a new, direct and independent contact point for serving personnel and their families, all outside the chain of command, to raise issues that impact them. The new commissioner, rightly, needs to champion our Armed Forces and, for the first time, to be a champion for Armed Forces families.

I am interested to discover how the role of the commissioner will be different from that of the Service Complaints Ombudsman as far as families are concerned, especially where there may well be a culture of not wishing to report or to raise concerns as it might impact negatively on a career, as mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, and the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup.

What will be key is that the Bill results in a culture change, whereby reporting or raising concerns becomes recognised as a positive and constructive step, essential to the continuous improvement of the service and the continuous improvement of the welfare and well-being of personnel. As the Royal British Legion has said:

“Absolute clarity is required from the outset of this new role, so that the remit is fully understood by Armed Forces personnel and their families, and expectations are set at the correct level”.


I welcome that the Minister has already spoken about independence, and I very much align with the comments made by the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, on that independent role. I will also be looking, in the person specification for this new role, for someone who has good experience and is well-qualified in handling disputes and working around mediation. The commissioner must be resourced sufficiently to be reactive and responsive. The commissioner also needs to work with compassion; it is from compassion that things will change on the ground. That will involve the commissioner working alongside a number of others, including not only those within the chain of command but welfare groups and chaplains.

I will offer a brief comment on the invaluable work of Armed Forces chaplains, who are embedded with their flock on deployment and often live alongside them, perhaps with their families on the naval base, at the Army camp or at the Air Force station. A week last Monday, I had the immense privilege of spending the third anniversary of the terrible invasion of Ukraine with the chaplain of the Irish Guards, alongside Australian and Ukrainian chaplains, for a service with a significant number of Ukrainians, who were training in deepest Norfolk on a five-week course to prepare them to go back to Ukraine. It was one of the most poignant and moving services that I have attended: Ukrainians and their allies together remembering the immense sacrifices that have already been made.

This is the bread-and-butter stuff of Armed Forces chaplains. They accompany an officer who has bad news for a family. They listen to a young recruit working out if this career is for them. They quietly let the commanding officer know that the person she is about to see has something going on in their private life. They sit consoling personnel who have just lost a comrade and need to go back on patrol. They anoint the injured and pray for the dead. They ensure that families have someone to turn to when the clay beneath their feet begins to wobble. On this Ash Wednesday, Christian chaplains will be marking the beginning of Lent. I hope that the Minister agrees with me that the work of chaplains, of all faiths, is a crucial investment in the well-being of His Majesty’s Armed Forces and their families.

I have three questions. First, how does he expect the proposed commissioner to work with chaplains as part of their brief? Secondly, how does he expect the proposed commissioner to align their work with the UK Armed Forces Families Strategy 2022 to 2032? Finally, as the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, said, the Bill does not give an exact definition of family members, so what does the Minister think about that? For example, might it be appropriate to include the bereaved siblings of service members? Overall, though, I support and thank the Minister for bringing forward the Bill.

Armed Forces Commissioner Bill

Lord Bishop of Norwich Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 19th March 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Shinkwin (Con)]

My Lords, I speak in support of Amendments 8 and 9 in this group, in the name of my noble friends Lord Minto and Lady Goldie and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Norwich. I am really grateful, as I am sure a lot of members of the Committee are, to the Royal British Legion for its briefing on this. I speak as someone who was privileged to lead the legion’s public affairs team when we persuaded the noble Lord, Lord Cameron—David Cameron as he then was, the Prime Minister—to enshrine the covenant’s principles in law. I am particularly proud to have played a small part in that. I also very much welcome the consensus that now exists, both in this Committee and, I believe, across the House, on the commitment to ensuring that the principles of the covenant are honoured.

I wonder whether we can simply consider these amendments to be, as I think they are, self-explanatory and logical. The issues they relate to are the provision and operation of the continuity of education allowance and tuition for children with SEND, which, as my noble friend Lord Minto mentioned, is so important and is related to an issue on which your Lordships’ House voted so overwhelmingly to ask the Government to think again—specifically in relation to non-domestic rating and private schools—only yesterday. These are important and crucial welfare issues, and they should be explicitly included within the provisions of the Bill, as should provisions for pensions and death-in-service benefits to serving and former members of the Armed Forces and their dependants.

I hope very much that the Minister will listen to the Committee—and also to the legion, as the voice of the Armed Forces family—and accept Amendments 8 and 9 in this group.

[The Lord Bishop of Norwich]

My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Shinkwin, and the reflections that he has offered the Committee. I rise to support Amendments 8 and 9. I am grateful to the noble Earl, Lord Minto, and the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, for outlining their thinking around this issue because it goes to the heart of how we as a nation care for and see the well-being of our Armed Forces and their families, as part of the whole package that we offer to them.

As I think noble Lords know, I speak as the father of a member of the Armed Forces. It is often said that a parent is only as happy as their least happy child. On one level, I can imagine that it is also true that a member of His Majesty’s Armed Forces is only as happy as their least happy family member. So there is a pastoral duty here—one that is supported by many in the Armed Forces, including welfare organisations and our military chaplains—but both these amendments would help us really state the pastoral support that we as a nation feel is important for not only our Armed Forces personnel but their children, their families and their dependants.

As has already been said by other noble Lords, continuity of education is vital for a family that may often move around a lot during the career of service personnel, when one or both of the parents may be on deployment. We must not forget the small number of wonderful state boarding schools that offer important support for service families.

Moving on to tied accommodation, as somebody who has lived in tied accommodation all my professional life—most of it much more modest than what I live in at the moment—I know that the maintenance of tied accommodation and responsiveness to its condition and repairs has an impact on the state of morale of a family, and I am pleased to see that that is also mentioned, as are special education needs. Such needs are an issue not only when forces families move between different places and between different local authorities; this is also about CAMHS—child and adolescent mental health services. Often, the waiting list is two to three years. Moving out of an area has a profound impact on families in terms of getting crucial support for young people who are often in a very difficult state and who need support as soon as possible.

On Amendment 9, the reality is that many Armed Forces families live with, right at the back of their minds, an ongoing sense of, “Will I get a knock in the middle of the night?” The noble Earl, Lord Minto, has already spoken about the injustice of what is being built in here. We significantly need the Minister to look at this—I urge him to do so—so that that injustice is removed. If you go to the National Memorial Arboretum, there is an incredible memorial right in the centre where the names of those who have lost their lives are carved into the Portland stone, and then there is a part of the wall that is totally flat and bare; it is very moving to move your hand along it and on to that flat stone awaiting, God forbid, future names.

We owe to the Armed Forces and their families a sense of care if there is a need for a death in duty payment. So I am really grateful for the way in which the Minister has engaged around the Bill and engaged us in a really thoughtful discussion and debate about it. I look forward to hearing his comments.

[Baroness Carberry of Muswell Hill (Lab)]

I will speak to Amendments 11 and 12. It would be impossible to argue that the commissioner should not support the interests of women and minority groups, but I am not sure that this level of prescription, particularly in Amendment 11, serves the Bill well. We heard earlier from the noble Lord, Lord Beamish, about the volume of work that the commissioner will already inherit from the ombudsman, and there will be a lot of work on top of that.

I am a founder member of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, so I obviously would want every public office to bear in mind and have due regard to the interests of those who have protected characteristics, as defined by the Equality Act 2010. The Minister can correct me if I am wrong, but I assume that the Armed Forces commissioner will be subject to the public sector equality duty, so that takes care of that aspect of their work. I accept that the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, may come back to me and say that that does not necessarily guarantee that the level of focus that she would rightly like to see paid to the problems that some minority groups experience in their armed service life will be fully taken care of in the way that she would want from this amendment.

But my general point in arguing that the amendment may not sit well in the Bill is that one of the perennial themes of debate on the Bill, both here and in the other place, has been the much-welcomed independence of the Armed Forces commissioner. Independence implies a degree of freedom, discretion and flexibility. Therefore, it does not fit well with that level of independence to prescribe how that particular function would be carried out in such detail, in the way that this amendment does.

I have seen a lot of equality and diversity programmes that specify a lot of detail. The end result has been that, when it comes to the end of the year and the prescribed annual report is published, it is little more than a tick-box exercise, and we would not want that to be the consequence of an amendment like this. For that reason, I reluctantly find myself unable to support these two amendments.