Armed Forces Bill (Second sitting)

Debate between Mike Martin and Juliet Campbell

Select Committee stage
Tuesday 24th March 2026 Public Bill Committees

[Juliet Campbell (Broxtowe) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Efford. I rise to speak to new clause 6, which seeks to appoint a national veterans commissioner for England.

Although the hon. Member for South Northamptonshire has raised important issues about the needs of our veterans, it appears that the role of the national veterans commissioner for England would duplicate the role of the armed forces covenant. The covenant ensures that we acknowledge and understand that those who serve or have served in the armed forces, and their families, including the bereaved, should be treated with fairness and respect in the communities, the economy and the society that they serve with their lives. It fulfils that role, alongside Op Valour and the armed forces champions. The Government are also investing in improving awareness and understanding of the covenant across the armed forces and service providers. In combination, those things alleviate the need for a national veterans commissioner.

[Mike Martin (Tunbridge Wells) (LD)]

It is a pleasure, after lunch, to continue serving under your chairship, Mr Efford. [Laughter.] That was not meant to be funny, but I suppose the best way to be funny is to be unintentionally funny.

I rise to speak in support of new clause 2, which would legislate for the establishment of a veterans’ mental health oversight officer. I will come to some statistics later, but I think everyone in this room understands that veterans’ mental health is poor. That does not apply to all veterans, of course—many veterans, including the Minister and many Members in this room, take great agency from their service, so I do not wish to paint veterans as victims—but there are veterans who suffer with mental health challenges. Those challenges often start in service, whether they arise through the pressures of service, the vagaries of service life or the trauma experienced in combat.

Under the new clause, the veterans’ mental health oversight officer, who would be appointed by the Secretary of State, would essentially have a remit to oversee the care offered to veterans across the nation. It is doubly important that we seek, as we did this morning, not just to regularise and establish parity of care for veterans across the entire country, but to understand that people with mental health problems often find it hard to reach out. It is easier to forget people with mental health problems, which is why the establishment of the position is particularly important.

I will touch a little on my own experiences. I spent a couple of years in southern Afghanistan, including some periods in combat. I was lucky enough not to experience extreme trauma. Naturally, you do see some things in combat, but that was not my problem when I came back from Afghanistan. What I experienced was a deep sense of frustration and anger at what was effectively a failed mission. I know that some people in this room, including the Minister, served in Afghanistan. We were sent there to do the sharp end of Government policy. We do so willingly, of course—that is what we sign up for—but that policy was ill thought out and often put servicepeople in very difficult positions in which they had to make judgments in extremely grey areas. If the strategy had been slightly more clearly thought out, perhaps some of us who were there might not have experienced that moral injury.

Moral injury, which is actually a term that came out of the conflict in Afghanistan, happens where what you hear about the conflict is very different from what you experience on the ground, and the decisions that you have to make are very discordant. It is a bit separate from the “classic” trauma that we might understand as PTSD, but all these things come to the same. Personally, I wrote books, articles and pamphlets, which was my way of achieving catharsis and balance. I donated the proceeds of my first book to Combat Stress, a charity that supports the mental health of veterans and servicepeople.

I emphasise that many veterans, myself included, take great agency from their service and the qualities and skills that it taught them, but there is a significant minority of veterans who struggle with their mental health, and that journey starts when they are in service. Between 2019 and 2023, mental health diagnoses among active duty personnel increased by 40%. Anxiety and PTSD diagnoses doubled. Those are stark figures. In 2023, mental health disorders accounted for more days in hospital beds for service personnel than physical problems. There is a preponderance of mental health injuries over physical health injuries among our service personnel. Women under 30 in the military are more than twice as likely as civilians to report divorce. We can see the burden on our service personnel.