Queen’s Speech

Lord Craig of Radley Excerpts

Tuesday 15th October 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Craig of Radley (CB)]

My Lords, our current front line lacks resilience, with too few fighting ships, inadequate numbers of operational aircraft and reduced army manning—a legacy of years of underfunding. Our forces have not been exposed to serious enemy capability in conflict, nor experienced significant losses in men and materiel, since the Falklands conflict nearly 40 years ago. We had resilience then: sufficient strength in depth to cope, and to fight the first Gulf conflict in 1991 with sizeable forces—now way beyond our reach. Resilience in conventional power is gone. If the credibility of our nuclear deterrent is to stand, conventional forces must have hitting power and sustainability to first resist aggression and demonstrate national resolve. Without this, the Prime Minister would face the starkest of choices: rapidly to go nuclear or to surrender. I therefore welcome the uplift in the defence budget, but it must be sustained and increased.

I turn to two issues facing forces personnel that have troubled me and many others for some years. The first I brigade as the fog of law. In the past decade, we have seen more and more examples of the impact of differences in the laws of conflict and human rights legislation for service personnel engaged in combat or peace enforcement operations. When this House considered the Bill that became the Human Rights Act 1998, I argued that its provisions and those of the services’ Armed Forces Acts were incompatible, and that it would be better to incorporate into service legislation aspects of human rights that the services must follow and, in times of conflict, have pre-prepared derogations that could and should be observed. The then Lord Chancellor, in charge of the Bill, refused to countenance the concerns that I and others expressed.

I cannot claim to have had any detailed foresight of what has brought such legal trouble to many operating in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in Northern Ireland during Operation Banner. Those problems have been exacerbated by the way the courts, in particular the European Court of Human Rights, have chosen to extend the reach, both temporally and territorially, of the Human Rights Act 1998 well beyond what was envisaged to retain human rights legislation in national courts.

Only recently have the Government shown determination to tackle this problem. I welcome the consultation, just completed, on whether to introduce a statute of limitation. I welcome the setting up of an office and two Ministers for veteran affairs. I welcome the various statements by successive Defence Ministers in recent months and the Conservative Party 2017 manifesto commitment to protect our Armed Forces personnel from persistent legal claims, stating that our troops will be subject to the laws of armed conflict, not the European Court of Human Rights.

These are all welcome signs of intent, but there is regrettably no mention of them in this gracious Speech. I hope that this time the Government’s determination and resolve will be sustained, but if new legislation is required—I suspect that it will be—I strongly plead that it form part of the next revision of the Armed Forces Act and not be a stand-alone one which, like the Human Rights Act, may end up lacking compatibility with the Armed Forces Act.

The second personnel issue is the complex and indefensible treatment of Armed Forces pensions. By 2010 a common new pension scheme for all public servants, introduced by the Finance Act 2004, had a lifetime allowance—an individual’s pension pot—of £1.8 million and an annual pension input allowance of £255,000. The Treasury has since drastically reduced these sums to around £1 million and just £40,000 respectively. Breaching the annual allowance incurs a significant—for some a multithousand pound—tax charge. This must be paid forthwith, unless, by using irrevocable scheme pays, it is off-set by a pension reduction for the rest of life. Last year almost 4,000 people, including some 400 non-commissioned ranks, breached their annual allowance.

Of further concern for Armed Forces medics working alongside NHS colleagues, as many do, is that the Department of Health is seeking flexibility to adjust the annual allowance taper for NHS clinicians who have opted to work less to abate their tax liability. It would be unacceptable to have differing tapers for service and civilian personnel. Pay review bodies have also been critical of these pension arrangements.

Treasury vacillations over allowances and tax clawback arrangements smack of serious mismanagement in setting up the scheme. It cannot be defensible morally, let alone fair under the military covenant, to seek to recoup large sums either through a tax related to pensions yet to be paid or by a lifetime reduction in pension. Heads the Treasury wins, tails the pensioner loses.

There will be great pushback from the Treasury, but it should be held accountable for a botched scheme that is having adverse stress effects on some and a premature loss of experienced others in undermanned public services. The Chancellor of the Exchequer must review this nonsense—or, to use a now Oxford English Dictionary-approved word, this omnishambles.