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.