Armed Forces Commissioner Bill (Fourth sitting)

Debate between Mark Francois and Juliet Campbell

Committee stage
Thursday 12th December 2024 Public Bill Committees

[Mr Mark Francois (Rayleigh and Wickford) (Con)]

I beg to move amendment 12, in clause 4, page 2, line 35, at end insert—

“(2A) A ‘general service welfare matter’ may include issues relating to the provision of pensions and other related benefits to serving and former members of the armed forces.”

This amendment would enable the Commissioner to include matters relating to pensions and other such benefits in their investigations of general service welfare matters.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Betts. I hope we shall not inconvenience you too much with regard to your journey back.

The purpose of amendment 12 is to confirm in the Bill that pensions would be among the topics that the commissioner can investigate under the heading of “general service welfare matters”. This is obviously a matter of keen interest to service personnel and their families, and having good pension provision for serving in the armed forces has always been an aid to both recruitment and particularly retention, especially for non-commissioned officers and officers as they progress in their careers.

I have often felt—and I include the time when I served as a Minister in the Ministry of Defence—that we have not really done enough to successfully market the value of military pensions as part of the wider service offer in order to convince people to join and then remain in the armed forces. In my experience, even many armed forces personnel did not appreciate that they had one of the few pension schemes across the entire public sector that was effectively non-contributory. In other words, their employer paid a contribution into their pensions, but they did not. In comparison, the last time I checked, most serving police officers pay something like 14% of their salary into their pension, whereas serving personnel still do not have to pay anything. Historically, the pension has always been—certainly as people become more experienced, get older and think more about their pension provision, much like the rest of the population—a vital tool in keeping people in.

I would like to raise with the Minister one particularly pressing pensions matter, which provides a classic example of the sort of issue that the Armed Forces Commissioner should be empowered to investigate. In essence, it relates to the potential liability for inheritance tax, relating to death in service lump sum payments. This follows on, unfortunately, from the IHT changes announced in the Budget.

I will refer to a briefing that was recently provided to me by Major General Neil Marshall OBE, the chief executive of the Forces Pension Society, which, I hope the Minister and Committee will accept, is the absolute gold standard expert on any matter relating to forces pensions—the sort of Office for Budget Responsibility of armed forces pensions. The AFP note summarises the issue as follows:

“Death in service benefits affect those who die prematurely. While benefits pay to spouses or civil partners will be unaffected by IHT, we understand that under the Government’s proposals, death in service lump sum payments for service personnel who die in the service and are not married or in a civil partnership would be liable to IHT. This would lead to military personnel being disadvantaged compared with their civilian counterparts”,

not least because their civilian counterparts would be

“able to place such benefits in trust and therefore outside of the deceased’s estate.”

The note continues to say that the introduction of the armed forces pension scheme 2005 and subsequently the armed forces pension scheme 2015—AFPS 05 and AFPS 15, as they are colloquially known—

“saw eligible partners recognised as dependents and therefore eligible for benefits.”

Under AFPS 05 and AFPS 15, personnel do not need to be married; they need to have an established partner. The note continues:

“This was in addition to married couples and those in civil partnerships. This was a welcome reflection of societal changes over the past 30 years or so; introducing a potential inheritance tax charge on death in service benefits for those military people who are not married or in a civil partnership is at odds with the extant policy.”

To put in this in layman’s English, because in my experience anything to do with pensions does tend to be quite complicated: if Corporal Thomas Atkins of the 1st Battalion the Lone Shire Regiment were walking down his high street tomorrow—not on active service—and unfortunately dropped dead of a heart attack, even if he had a long-term partner and perhaps three children but was not married or in a civil partnership with that partner, then his family would be liable for a potential inheritance tax charge on his death in service benefit. Not only is there the risk of the financial penalty—I will come on to a case study in a moment to illustrate the dilemma—but the bureaucracy could result in payouts from the estate being delayed while the liability for IHT is being calculated. The Forces Pension Society summarise the issue in its very good briefing note as follows:

“At a time of extreme vulnerability, these lump sums need to be paid promptly, as they currently are. If death in service benefits become subject to IHT there will be a delay to the benefit being paid both while the estate is assessed for IHT and while the amount of IHT attributable to the DIS [death in service] benefit is assessed and the scheme administrator (Veterans UK) pays the tax charge.”

As the briefing note then goes on to explain:

“Many who would not previously have been caught with an IHT liability will find themselves in a very bureaucratic process that will slow down the already lengthy process of sorting out the financial affairs of an individual at what is a very difficult time.”

The Forces Pension Society gave several examples of how this could affect personnel in practice. For the sake of brevity, I will just give one, which I hope is sufficient to illustrate the point. Take the case of an OR-9 equivalent—a senior warrant officer at the top of the non-commissioned rank structure. This individual has a partner to whom they are unmarried, and on death leaves an estate worth £400,000 and death in service benefits of £248,292—four times their salary of £62,000. They would pay 40% inheritance tax on the non-pension assets, resulting in an IHT liability of £30,000, but after April 2027, if the DIS benefits were included in the estate, that would increase the estate’s value to £648,292. The IHT liability will therefore increase accordingly to £129,316. That represents an increase of around 330%.

In fairness, we on the Conservative Benches suspect that this is an example of the law of unintended consequences in action. We do not believe that the Government deliberately brought in these changes with the specific intention of targeting armed forces personnel. There is a debate about farmers and other groups in society, but I am focusing today on armed forces personnel and their families. To be clear, we are not saying that the Government did this deliberately in order to damage those people’s interests. Nevertheless, the default position is that they would suffer in the ways I have just outlined, unless something is done. Indeed, the Forces Pension Society summed up the problem as follows:

“We believe the Government has made an error and would not knowingly implement a policy that runs counter to the spirit of the armed forces covenant. The situation is recoverable should they act now.”

We on the Conservative Benches support that plea.

I hope that when the Minister replies, he will assure us that, following the consultation on these proposals—which will be overseen by His Majesty’s Treasury, not by the MOD, because it is a consultation on the IHT changes in general—he is confident that armed forces personnel and their families will be exempted from any potential inheritance tax liabilities on death in service payments, whether or not those armed forces personnel die in active service. I hope that I have managed to explain that in terms that the Committee can follow.

[Juliet Campbell (Broxtowe) (Lab)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Francois]

I will in a moment.

I hope that, as an act of good will, the Minister will be minded to accept the amendment to remove any doubt about the ability of the Armed Forces Commissioner—who, as we heard this morning, will end up being appointed in early 2026, a year before these proposed changes are due to come into effect—to look in detail at this issue. Given the rightful concerns of the Forces Pension Society, I must tell the Minister that I am minded to press the amendment to a Division if he does not do the right thing.

Having hopefully explained what is admittedly a slightly complex issue, I very much look forward to the Minister’s response, but before I sit down, I will gladly take the hon. Lady’s intervention.

[Juliet Campbell]

In addressing welfare and support for families, the shadow Minister has focused on pensions, but what are his thoughts on wider issues such as childcare and education, which we should also be thinking about?