Armed Forces Bill

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 8th November 2021 Grand Committee

[Baroness Smith of Newnham (LD)]

My Lords, we on these Benches did not add our names to these two amendments, both of which seem to be small but important. In particular, as the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, said, Amendment 56 essentially asks the Government to go back to a prior commitment. Can the Minister commit to 100 champions in jobcentres? As the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, pointed out, the Minister’s noble friend, the noble Baroness, Lady Stedman-Scott, could not answer all the questions the other day in the Chamber. If it were possible for either DWP or the MoD to come forward with some statistics, that would be helpful. Normally, asking for annual reports on this, that and the other can be a little time-consuming and bureaucratic but, on this occasion, if the information is not available it is time to suggest that we ask the Government to make sure that it is available. Unless the Government can make a commitment, the amendment seems wholly appropriate.

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

This amendment, which I do not particularly support or otherwise, would be an awful lot better placed if better evidence were available. There does not appear to be the relevant data. Personally, I am convinced that if that data were made available, it would re-establish in people’s minds and in society at large that the Armed Forces are one of the nation’s most successful organisations for social improvement among the people who join.

I fear that amendments such as this convey the impression that people enter the Armed Forces and then leave, at some later stage, damaged by the experience. That is far from the reality of the situation. Yes, some unfortunate people will struggle to find employment—some people struggle with second careers—but, by and large, people leave the Armed Forces both socially and professionally improved and go on to have highly successful second careers. So the publication of the evidence base would be hugely helpful in determining whether this sort of amendment was, in truth, required.

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

My Lords, this may have been a short debate, but it was interesting. Once again, I have no doubt about the commitment of the noble Lords, Lord Coaker and Lord Tunnicliffe, in taking an interest in these matters. Amendments 52 and 56 engage with the subject of, first, the number of veterans claiming universal credit, and secondly, Armed Forces champions.

I will deal with Amendment 52 first. The Government are delighted that the universal credit system has now been enhanced to allow the Department for Work and Pensions to collect information on how many universal credit claimants are veterans. The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Houghton, put his finger on the point: the all-important issue here is the data, which is not yet complete. It is still early days. The DWP is still building up its data base and working out what the data is telling them and how to make best use of it, including producing reports and making information public. This may well include making information available through the covenant annual report, as well as more routine data releases.

I understand that, as soon as decisions have been made, the DWP will write to the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, setting out its plans. I expect it to be able to do this early in the new year. Further, the MoD will keep a close eye on this area as well. We are also interested in the data being collected, so I, too, look forward to the DWP’s response on this matter. With that assurance, I hope that the noble Lord will feel able to withdraw his amendment.

I will now address Amendment 56, again in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, which seeks to put into the Bill a specific number of Armed Forces champions who would be in place at all times. The number of Armed Forces champions, their specific roles and how and where they are deployed are detailed day-to-day operational matters for the DWP.

The DWP’s long-standing, undoubted and profound commitment to and support for the Armed Forces covenant is clear. Like the rest of this Government, my colleagues there do everything that they can to provide members of the Armed Forces community with the help and support that they deserve. I thought that the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Houghton, made an important point about the impressions that we wish to create and what the perceptions might be. Armed Forces champions are key in supporting and enabling the DWP to provide that help and support, but setting out a specific number in the Bill will limit the DWP’s flexibility to adjust the support to meet levels of need and will do nothing to enhance the current support provided by the DWP to veterans and others.

The DWP works very closely with the MoD and the Office for Veterans’ Affairs to help ensure that those using its services get the help and support that they need. Earlier this year it introduced a new model. Once again, it is important to put all this into shape so that there is context. It introduced the new model to transform the support that the DWP provides to members of the Armed Forces. This change of approach by the DWP was not subjective; it reflected feedback that the department had received, including from formal research and from those representing members of the Armed Forces community.

The new model was designed to ensure that veterans and others are served in a more intelligent and effective way. It enables the department to better match available resources with the demand for its services. The new model has built on the successful network of Armed Forces champions, which had been in place within the DWP for a number of years.

As part of the new model, the department has introduced for the first time a dedicated Armed Forces role at middle management level. These roles have responsibility for building capability and sharing best practice on Armed Forces issues across the DWP network, as well as building networks with the tri-services. It is important to understand the relevance and significance of that conjunction of activity.

There is a lead role in each of the 11 Jobcentre Plus groups and, as part of its work, it oversees 50 Armed Forces champions stationed across the Jobcentre Plus network. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, was critical of that level of champions, but the work of the champions cannot be viewed in isolation, for the reasons that I have just described.

The champions have specific responsibility for supporting claimants who are members of the Armed Forces community. Under the new model of support, the champions also have a front-line role and will personally handle some claims for the first time, supporting veterans into work and helping to resolve some of the more complex cases where necessary. I can tell the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe—I think the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, also raised this point—that there is at least one Armed Forces champion in each of the 37 Jobcentre Plus districts.

The new model has been welcomed by the department’s Armed Forces stakeholders, who have been more interested, to be honest, in the structures and quality of services than in actual numbers. The DWP has listened to what stakeholders and researchers have said. Putting in place the new lead roles will help to improve the co-ordination of support activity and facilitate the sharing of best practice between the champions, and more widely across the department. The new roles also provide the opportunity for more pro-active work with the three armed services on resettlement and recruitment. Again, the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Houghton, took an interest in this issue.

In the early stages of introducing the new model, the DWP talked to a number of stakeholders, including Armed Forces charities and other groups, about the planned structures and roles. It explained how these would work in practice for stakeholders, as well as for individual claimants and their families. Now, almost six months in, the change seems to have settled in well and continues to be well received.

The DWP’s support is not limited to those with a formal Armed Forces role. For example, the new model enables the dedicated Armed Forces roles to complement the wider investment the department had already made during the pandemic in the recruitment of an additional 13,500 work coaches, bringing the total to 27,000. The Committee may be interested to know that every work coach receives specific training to support members of the Armed Forces community, and that an important part of the work of the new champions and lead roles is to build capability on Armed Forces issues across the whole department. This is not just across the Jobcentre Plus network but more widely, for example in DWP service centres.

As your Lordships will understand, there are many DWP staff, some based in individual jobcentre offices, who will be the local expert on Armed Forces issues and will work with those in the dedicated roles also to the support the Armed Forces. Many of these staff will have experienced service life themselves, either directly or through friends and family. They will use this experience in their work.

As within other parts of its business, the DWP will monitor and evaluate the new model, and will use the information gathered from this work to shape the support provided. These new arrangements come on top of other support that is already in place. For example, veterans are given early entry to the work and health programme, and if we can use service medical board evidence, a severely disabled veteran does not have to undergo additional examinations for employment and support allowance and universal credit purposes.

If the intention of this amendment is to make sure that the DWP always provides an Armed Forces champions service, it is unnecessary. The the DWP, through its words and actions, has consistently demonstrated its commitment to support veterans and members of the Armed Forces community. I accept that this is unintentional, but the amendment would constrain what are rightly day-to-day operational decisions for DWP managers. For example, holding open a post for a short while during a recruitment exercise would become unlawful. I know that is not the noble Lord’s intention, but we should let the expert delivery managers in the DWP manage their resources as they see fit.

With that reassurance of the scale of support within the DWP for Armed Forces personnel and veterans, I hope nthe noble Lord will be prepared to withdraw his amendment.

--- Later in debate ---

In the meantime, can the Minister review everything that I have said in these debates, or ask her officials to, and answer my questions?

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to speak in support of this amendment. It is one of the few elements of the Bill that seeks to get ahead of the game rather than just play catch-up. My particular perspective is that there is one element of the new security challenge that I feel has escaped proper consideration, one for which there seems no comprehensive or coherent plan of action, which is the issue most commonly referred to as “lawfare”.

To my view, the law is potentially one the most powerful weapons that we have in the security context of the age. It is both a weapon of defence that we should use to protect ourselves from the malign activity of others, and a weapon of attack that we should use to liberate our own freedom of action. As had been said, a fundamental deduction from the recent integrated review was that, within what is a significantly changed strategic context, we now live in a persistent state of adversarial competition, but one in which the resort to formalised warfare at scale is, perhaps by choice, avoided. The preferred vectors of attack in this competitive world are not, therefore, active, large-scale military operations, but more subtle, more deniable and less attributable activities.

The domains of active warfare are no longer necessarily primarily land, sea and air, but space, cyber and what is called the “cognitive domain”. Whereas traditional warfare has rules and laws and accepted norms of ethics and morality, the new character of grey-zone warfare is one in which our enemies exploit, for advantage, the absence of a legal framework within which to operate. So the new vectors of attack are activities such as disinformation, multiplied by internet bots; deniable cyber offensive activity; proxy terrorism; and political assassination, potentially using international private military companies.

More specifically in relation to this amendment, technological advancement in the areas of artificial intelligence, machine learning and autonomous weapons systems also offers scope for our adversaries to deny us their potential benefit while they exploit their unattributed use simply because no accepted legal framework for their authorised use yet exists. This context means that our principal geopolitical adversaries can employ methods that are both malign and aggressive but which we find difficult to respond to because we are unclear about what is morally, ethically and legally permissible. We risk, in effect, allowing our enemies to win without fighting.

In this House, during the passage of the overseas operations Bill, I bore witness to—forgive me—some remarkably contorted debates that appeared to present the law as either something inviolate to change or else an irremovable object that needed elegant methods of circumnavigation. I fear that our enemies will exploit our legal complexities to undermine our morale and devalue our credibility as an ally, among other things.

My view is that the only practical way to respond to the situation I have described and the one described in the integrated review is to start to use the law to our advantage: to go on the legal offensive, to reimagine our use of the law not as a time-honoured constraint on activity but as a weapon to be employed to liberate and confirm the legal boundaries of our own freedom of action while bringing much-needed constraint to the malign activities of our enemies. The Government need to give serious thought as to what aspects of this legal offensive need prioritisation. This House, consisting as it does of far more legal minds the military ones, has a significant role to play, but unless global Britain can make a meaningful contribution to the re-establishment of internationally accepted norms of morality, truth and justice, some might seriously undermine the willingness of our people to fight for them.

My strong view is that this country has all the necessary skills to embark on lawfare. I hope that, within their stated intent to help shape the future international order, the Government have the political will to do so as well. I believe the amendment is a small step in the right direction and it has my unreserved support.

[Lord Craig of Radley (CB)]

My Lords, I support this amendment and agree that there is an increasing need for clarity not just today but in the immediate future about the legality of, for example, remote aerial vehicle kinetic operations that involve loss of life, whether military, paramilitary or civilian. Many recent operations have been conducted on an asymmetric footing and not all perhaps with formal, clear-cut international approval. Of course, the right to self-defence is well understood, but how confident are we that emerging technologies in defence weapons systems and their oversight will remain invariably with a human in ultimate control? How it that to be maintained in order to comply with the present laws of conflict as new weapons systems with new technologies are deployed? Are the laws of conflict being overtaken by the possibilities of new types of lethal weapons systems?

Presumably the legality of a remote aerial vehicle operation applies to long-distance control from ships as well as to that from a land base that is remote geographically from the target. Does that base have to be on national territory? What if it is not? What if the operation of the remote vehicle is shared with an ally? How has the operation been approved? What justifications are required for an armed response or for initiating one?

What if the child of a non-combatant civilian accidentally killed by a remote kinetic strike subsequently grows up and seeks to sue the individual or individuals responsible for the control or authorisation of the attack that killed their parent? Will the loss or destruction of any official records of the attack be any sort of viable defence?

As technology moves defence capabilities forward, we will soon enter the era of loyal wingman UAVs and how they interact with their human control. Swarming mini drones are also emerging. There will soon be more, as novel digital technologies are exploited; for example, in the Tempest programme, although I do not have knowledge of secret projects.

The Armed Forces personnel—and this is the key point—involved in kinetic operations exploiting these novel technologies must have absolute clarity about the legal position in which they are required to operate. It is time to know more about how the Government are examining this issue, as I am sure they must be. It is time to be kept informed about the considerations of this complex legal issue as it evolves. Reports from the Secretary of State to Parliament are a must. A review, which should be already in hand, should be reported to Parliament.