Armed Forces Bill

Lord Boyce Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 2nd November 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, I will get back to where I was. The problem is real. On the basis, nature, extent and clear effect it has on military personnel, questions need to be answered. The issue is not whether we have sufficient data, but how we get the data that answers these questions. Why are soldiers more vulnerable to gambling? Why do military veterans have such a heightened prevalence to problem gambling, as opposed to the general population? Much more importantly, what are we—and in particular the MoD—doing to understand what lies behind that prevalence and all the other findings of this research? How can it be tackled before the vulnerability forms?

These are the right questions, and they totally justify a requirement for proper research, such as that laid out in this amendment. I have a great deal of respect for the Minister. If she believes that this is not the right approach, I ask her to tell us what the right approach is to gather the data that will protect these people from the development of those dreadful conditions. If she cannot propose an alternative, I suggest that we would have no difficulty getting the Committee to support the amendment, were it given the opportunity so to do.

[Lord Boyce (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 66A. I will not cover all the ground covered on the overseas Bill; I merely want to say that I look forward to what the Minister has to say about delivering what she said at the time. Aspects of the welfare of our people should be looked at and some implementation of policy achieved.

[Lord Robertson of Port Ellen (Lab)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 48 and will follow what the noble Lord, Lord Dannatt, and the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Houghton, said. I will say why the amendment and more care for mental illness are required.

I live in a town in Scotland called Dunblane. In 1996, a gunman used a private armoury to kill schoolchildren and their teacher. At that time I was shadow Secretary of State for Scotland and lived in the town. The Secretary of State for Scotland, Michael Forsyth, was the local Member of Parliament. We came together that day. It was by any standard a traumatic day. We did everything together after that to handle the issues that came up in the media. The following day, the Prime Minister and the leader of the Opposition came to the town.

Within days I was back at work, which you do: it is traumatic, but you get through these things. I thought, “Well, I’m tough enough”—I had been a politician in Scotland for long enough, after all. You think you can take it all. But gradually I came to realise that I was not coping with it at all. I remembered that the Secretary of State for Scotland had offered counselling to those who had been affected. We were also made the same offer as individuals. I went to see the counsellor because I found I could not mention the events of that day without breaking up, and this was not something that was convenient or natural when you were in the bearpit of Scottish politics. I took up the offer and went to the counsellor. I spent a morning with an experienced counsellor and I was fixed. It took only a morning, but that lady was quite remarkable in the way she treated me.

Fast forward two years and I am Secretary of State for Defence. The Omagh bomb exploded in that small town in Northern Ireland. I went across as Defence Secretary with the Chief of the General Staff, Sir Roger Wheeler, and spoke to the troops that day. The troops based there who had helped in the aftermath were pretty hardened infantry soldiers—as tough and as hard as you can get, and they had been in Northern Ireland for some time—but they were deeply affected by what they had seen that day. They could cope with most things, but the sight of a baby torn in pieces was something they were deeply traumatised by.

I told them my story that day to say that they had been injured by what they had seen and that they needed to take the counselling that was going to be on offer. Although they were tough and hard, if they had been told after being shot in the shoulder to put a sticking plaster on it and it would go away, it would not have seemed sufficient even for them, yet they had been injured in another way, and there were ways in which they could be treated. I hope that had an effect that day and persuaded some of them to take that treatment, which they probably felt was not something they would ever really need.

Since then, of course, the traumas of Afghanistan and Iraq have come along and many more of our Armed Forces have been severely affected. Therefore, this amendment, which, as the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Houghton, said, maybe does not go far enough, alerts the Ministry of Defence to the necessity that is there to make sure that more attention is paid to that aspect of medical welfare.