Armed Forces Parliamentary Scheme

Oliver Colvile Excerpts

Wednesday 11th September 2013 Westminster Hall

[Mr Gray]

I am most grateful to my hon. Friend for his support. The answer to both his questions is yes, on one condition: that he commits to take part in the scheme. We would welcome his contribution—he will be the lowest of the low, the most junior private soldier that it is possible to imagine, and we will put him through an absolute beasting, but I am happy to give him that reassurance. He has been a mild critic over the years, so it is useful and kind of him to come to the Chamber to offer his support this morning.

My hon. Friend asked who would be paying for the scheme, and it is worth expanding on that. Traditionally, it has been paid for by the defence industry, and there have been four main sponsors. One of the things that I have been doing over the summer is going round all the defence companies, and I have now secured promises from at least 10 and possibly 15 of them—all the majors, such as Rolls-Royce, BAE Systems and Babcock, as well as others of a similar nature—each paying a small amount of funding, which will be sufficient to cover our anticipated costs.

The reason why that is a better arrangement is because, with 10 or 15 sponsors, we can say that none is achieving anything. Indeed, my pitch to them has been to say, “I would like some money from you, please.” They have asked, “What do we get back?” and I have replied, “You get absolutely nothing in return whatever. This is CSR—corporate social responsibility—for the defence industry. You get no lobbying, no access nor your name on writing paper, unless we choose to do so, but you get the warm feeling, Mr Rolls-Royce”—for example—“ of knowing that you have helped with the education of Members of Parliament.” All of them accepted that.

[Oliver Colvile (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate. Does he recognise that one of the benefits that may come to the defence industry by helping the scheme is that Members of Parliament will be significantly better informed about the industry and the issues faced by our armed forces day to day?

[Mr Gray]

My hon. Friend makes an extremely good point. There have hardly been any defence debates or oral questions over the past 25 years in which hon. Members have not stood up and said, “Thanks to the armed forces parliamentary scheme, I know a little bit more about the armed forces. Therefore, the following question comes from my experience in the scheme.” My hon. Friend is absolutely right; the defence companies do not want anything directly in return, but it is good for them to know that there is a cadre of people in Parliament who understand defence, are interested in and sympathetic towards defence, and who have some kind of expertise when we consider broader defence matters in future. No lobbying is involved, but there are advantages for them in having a group of people who are more attuned to defence questions. That is how the sponsorship will work. Everything will be listed, declared and above board with minuted annual general meetings and so on. My hon. Friend can be reassured on that point.

The scheme will continue the movement started by Sir Neil Thorne over 25 years ago. We believe that the ethos he established of embedding Members of Parliament with the three armed services is right. Last week, I was happy to visit to RAF Brize Norton with other hon. Members, but we wore suits, we were VIP visitors and we did not get together with people on the ground or learn what they were doing. The whole ethos of the scheme is to be there as one of them and fully involved as an ordinary individual with people of all ranks.

It is important to maintain that ethos and to do so in a similar way, with visits of up to 20 or 22 days. The trustees are considering whether 15 days would be slightly easier, but broadly speaking the visits will remain the experience that hon. Members have enjoyed over the past 25 years or so, and they will no doubt tell us about it. I say “enjoyed” intentionally because the scheme is not only educational and helpful to our defence industry and to hon. Members in defence debates but good fun. That is key. The visits are fantastic fun, and it is important that that ethos continues.

We are continuing the movement, as the military say, rather than starting something brand new. The organisation is wonderful, but it needs a bit of change and thanks to what Mr Speaker, the Lord Speaker and the Secretary of State for Defence have asked us to do, we are continuing the movement under a new guise. The transition to the new scheme has been helped by the Minister, who has handled negotiations with great care and tact, for which I am most grateful. He had a useful group of civil servants behind him, particularly Mr Roy Brown and Ms Anna Platt in his private office, who were immensely helpful with the process. We should pay tribute to them, and we should also pay tribute to Sir Neil’s private staff, who have been much involved over the years. It is great to thank them for all that they have done.

We are close to establishing the new trust. As of yesterday, we appointed a chief executive or chief clerk, Major Johnny Longbottom, a Territorial Army officer who has had similar roles in the Ministry of Defence. He served for six months in Afghanistan and is well qualified and well suited in every way to be the new chief clerk or chief executive—we will decide on the title later. Mr Speaker has provided accommodation in Parliament; funding is on its way; our application to the Charity Commission to become a charitable incorporated organisation is in hand, and I hope that that will be done reasonably swiftly. Most of the necessary practicalities to establish the scheme in its new guise are in hand, and I very much hope that when the House returns in October the first course will be ready to go.

At a meeting last night, there were many applicants wanting to join the scheme. They can do so in any of the three services at a junior or senior level, or they can go to the Royal College of Defence Studies, although that course is full at the moment. We are ready to go as soon as the House returns in October, the first major event being a two-day course at Shrivenham from 11 to 13 November. We should be in a good position to get going swiftly.

Other hon. Members want to take part in the debate, so I will not detain the Chamber unduly, but it is worth reiterating that the scheme has done great work. During the post-war period, plenty of Members were ex-military and there was a strong military ethos in Parliament, but 25 years ago, Sir Neil Thorne correctly identified that that ethos had disappeared and that knowledge of the armed forces had declined significantly. He put that right by establishing the scheme, and the fact that we now have such a good understanding of the armed forces and defence in Parliament is largely due to its introduction.

We hope that we are facing a time when, after Afghanistan, we will have fewer deployments and fewer soldiers, sailors and airmen on operations for many years to come. Again, there is at least a risk that interest in and knowledge of our defence capability will decline in the next 20 years. I believe that the continuing armed forces parliamentary scheme will play an important role in maintaining interest in the armed forces even when we are not engaged in kinetic warfare around the world. We have as huge a role to play in the future as we had in the past.

We must thank Sir Neil for the past 25 years. Thanks to the initiative of the Secretary of State, Mr Speaker and the Lord Speaker, we are establishing the trust as a way forward so that in 25 years when we in this Chamber will, sadly, no longer be here, there will be another debate in this same Chamber saying how well the scheme has worked in the interim 25 years. I am most grateful to Sir Neil and to all who have been involved, and I look forward very much to the great honour of chairing the armed forces parliamentary trust in the years to come.

--- Later in debate ---

[Oliver Colvile (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Con)]

May I say what a pleasure and delight it is to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Walker? In a previous life, I served with you when we were both officers of the Battersea Conservative party, so I am aware how much direction I will end up being given should I get out of line.

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire (Mr Gray) for bringing the debate to Westminster Hall and for all his activities and diplomacy in trying to get a result. He has worked incredibly hard. He is a prime candidate for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office at some stage. I cannot pass by without also paying tribute to Sir Neil Thorne, whom I have known for about 30 or 35 years. I trained to be a Conservative party agent in Wanstead and Woodford when he was the MP for Ilford, South, so I learnt an enormous amount about him when I was knocking on doors during the Greater London council elections in 1981. He has always shown me an enormous amount of kindness and respect. I am incredibly grateful for that.

The debate is incredibly important and should be seen as a tribute to Sir Neil’s hard work and the effort he has made. The AFPS has certainly helped me, as the MP for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport, to understand better the role the armed services play in our lives and what we do. My constituency is a naval garrison city, with not only the Royal Marines, but the Royal Navy. I am delighted that I have had an opportunity to see how they operate first-hand.

I am also a Navy brat. My father was a lieutenant-commander when he came out of the Navy in the 1950s, having helped get the king and the gold out of Norway in 1940. My grandfather was the first lieutenant of the naval barracks at Devonport in the 1920s and the gunnery officer on HMS Valiant. My uncle commanded the Royal Marine garrison at Stonehouse, before becoming the commandant-general. Although I came from a service family background, I had never served in the armed services myself, so the experience of being a member of the AFPS has been incredibly helpful to ensure that I am better informed.

Tributes should be paid, for the work done to ensure greater transparency in how the AFPS operates, and that does not take away from the great tribute that Sir Neil deserves. He has given not only his time, but a significant amount of money to ensure the scheme’s operation, and that must be commended in a very big way indeed. The whole business of the AFPS is to ensure that we are better informed. We wear the kit and some of the uniform, so that we do not stick out like a sore thumb.

I have had a number of experiences through the scheme. I went to Shrivenham, where I heard the now late Richard Holmes make a speech about where he saw the armed forces and the international scene. I was on HMS Richmond with the hon. Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Ms Stuart), and we had a delightful time coming up from Malta into Menorca. The ship’s company had been off the horn of Africa, dealing with piracy. We had meetings with not only the junior ratings, but the leading ratings, as well as the officers. I learnt how important it is in this day and age, with the way that international conflicts take place, that a lawyer is onboard. One of the serving officers onboard—the chief executive officer—was a lawyer and able to say to her commanding officer, “I think you need to be very careful about how you operate here, because you run the risk of finding yourself involved in something.” The ship’s company were absolutely petrified of being sent back to Somalia and the horn of Africa, because it would have mucked up their leave arrangements. I am told that if there is one thing a commanding officer totally dreads, it is having to say, “Sorry, chaps, we’re not going back on Thursday. You have to go out and do a further week or so.”

I have spoken at length in the House about mental health and our armed services, and ensuring that there is support. It mentioned that in my maiden speech. I serve on the Defence Reform Bill Committee; I am finding it very interesting and hope that I can contribute to it. When I went to the Royal Marines training grounds in Lympstone, I met a Royal Marine on Woodbury common who had served in Afghanistan. He said that when he came back from deployment and had to unwind somewhat, he found it very difficult. He spoke to his wife and she said, “Gosh, don’t talk to me about the day you’ve had. I’ve just had an awful day of answering thousands of e-mails.” He thought that he could not get far by talking about his experiences. He went to talk to his mates, and it was only then that he realised that he could not talk to them either because they did not understand the experience that he had been through. He had to find his Royal Marine colleagues in Aylesbury, which is not exactly the most naval of places, to explain his experiences to them.

The scheme means that we understand not only what motivates people to work in our armed forces and do that brave job, but what the families go through. We need to ensure that we give those families 110% support, which is why I welcome the Government’s community covenant initiative. We go abroad when take part in the AFPS. I went to Afghanistan with the hon. Member for Redditch (Karen Lumley), and one thing that I felt was slightly missing was that we did not have one conversation with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office about the politics of that part of Afghanistan. I encourage my hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire, when he eventually takes over the AFPS, to promote greater understanding about political situations and what the Foreign and Commonwealth Office is doing. At the end of the day, the things that we ask our armed services to do are merely tools in our foreign diplomacy. When diplomacy goes wrong and a state goes out of control, we expect our armed forces to go in; but in the end, there has to be a political and diplomatic solution. We can most certainly develop that and ensure that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office is much more involved.

Thank you very much, Mr Walker, for allowing me to witter on for a bit. I very much hope that equally good and constructive comments are made during the rest of the debate.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Lewis]

Exactly. That is precisely how people who have engaged in the scheme have understood their responsibilities, with very few exceptions. When one considers that the final stage of the scheme is membership of the Royal College of Defence Studies, that is quite remarkable. It may not be common knowledge, but those of us who are fortunate enough to be parliamentary members of the RCDS are taken on as full members and are considered to remain members for life. The essence of the RCDS course is meeting people, learning from them and establishing formal and informal contacts that will stand one in good stead in relation to one’s understanding of defence developments at home and abroad.

To inject a slightly quizzical note into my speech, that is why I was a little concerned recently to read an article about the eminent military historian Sir Max Hastings being refused the sort of informal contact that for many years he and many others have been allowed with senior serving personnel in the MOD network. That runs counter to the spirit of the armed forces parliamentary scheme, but I hope that it is simply a case of over-zealous application of some rule against leaking things to the media.

Certainly, if we reach a situation in which people like Sir Max Hastings—eminent historians and public commentators—cannot secure the degree of access that they used to have, or indeed if a similar bar is put on hon. Members, all I can say is that Ministers should take a deep breath, look at what has happened with the armed forces parliamentary scheme and realise that a tunnel vision approach to access by civilians, whether they are reporters or Members of Parliament, to the military is counter-productive.

The armed forces parliamentary scheme is a boon to hon. Members with little knowledge of defence, as it is to hon. Members when, as sometimes happens, their political party goes through a phase of anti-militarism. There was a period—thank goodness, long in the past—when the Labour party shifted in a unilateralist direction, and I am sure that it was very valuable to those courageous members of the Labour party who did not go in that direction to be able to recharge their intellectual batteries by having access to such a scheme. It is important that Members of Parliament who want to support the armed forces have the intellectual ammunition, on a non-partisan basis, to speak with authority about them.

I conclude by pointing out that the scale of the scheme when it started was for two Members of Parliament to visit each of the three armed forces, with two more visiting the Royal Marines, which is of course a subset—some would say, a superset—of the Royal Navy.

[Oliver Colvile]

A very fine subset of the Royal Navy.

[Dr Lewis]

Indeed, which was the reason for my quick interjection of the word “superset”.

The scheme then moved to having five Members per service, and it now has very large numbers. We measure the effectiveness of a scheme or organisation by the demand for it. There is a huge demand for this scheme, and we are very grateful that the supply will continue to meet the increased demand.