Armed Forces Commissioner Bill (Second sitting)

Pam Cox Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 10th December 2024 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

Q Abby, do you have anything more to add to the answer you were giving to the Minister?

Abby Dryden: Just to say that with families and the commissioner, putting families of all kinds at the centre of everything that goes on is key. The notion of family has changed significantly, so it is about making sure that there is an inclusive understanding of what a family might constitute. For non-UK serving personnel it is important as well.

[Pam Cox (Colchester) (Lab)]

Q Apologies for the interruption earlier. I want to refer back to an answer you gave my colleague David Reed when you suggested that you had not had to forward any issues to the ombudsman as previously constituted. Have you ever forwarded issues to other agencies on behalf of serving personnel or their families? What kind of agencies might they be?

Abby Dryden: We do that on a regular basis. As for referrals to other charities, there is the Army Families Federation, the Naval Families Federation—that type of organisation—as well as specialist organisations for health conditions or for things that are specific to the individual that we have assessed might be of benefit to them. We also refer to legal advice if we feel that that is something they are asking us to provide them with. That is a regular thing that we undertake organisationally.

[Pam Cox]

Q But referrals to other ombudsmen or commissioners has not traditionally been part of your role?

Abby Dryden: Not usually, no. Not in my experience.

Examination of Witnesses

Colonel Darren Doherty, Mandy Harding and Air Commodore Simon Harper gave evidence.

--- Later in debate ---

[Luke Pollard]

Q Thank you all for coming to provide us with evidence today. As Devonport’s MP I get lots of copies of Homeport from the Naval Families Federation for my constituency office, so thank you for all those that come through the post. For me the extension to families is a key part of the legislation, because it is the first time that we have had the acknowledgement of families in the Armed Forces Act with a real focus on their welfare needs.

I am interested to get your perspective on how you think an Armed Forces Commissioner’s office would deal with and seek to build trust with the families, because it is much easier for the commissioner to visit a base. If there is accommodation on site, that might be the case. But we know that not everyone who serves and their families live on bases. We explicitly exclude the commissioner from having a right to inspect someone’s home without notice, for very good and obvious reasons. But how do you think the commissioner should access and seek to get views from and be responsive to the needs of families? I know that will change depending on service and location and the barriers to get there. It is important that we have an understanding about what they are so we can seek to overcome them. Can you expand on that kind of challenge? Shall we go to the Navy first?

Sarah Clewes: That will be the tricky bit—building the trust and giving prompt responses. Doing what the commissioner says he or she is going to do will be really important to build that trust. We know from the covenant, for example, that has been around for 12 years, that if you ask serving personnel and their families, a large percentage of them still do not know what the covenant is, what it does, or how it changes their lives, and that has been around for a long time.

That is just an example of how education is absolutely key, as is building trust and rapport and having really slick processes so that if somebody has been invited to ask a question they get a swift response in plain language. Again, that will be really important when you respond to a serving personnel. You might send them a link to a joint service publication or whatever, but that will not wash with families who probably cannot access the JSP because of the firewall. What good is that? So having those tailored responses and being mindful of the audience that will be new will be absolutely key, and that will be the tricky bit.

Collette Musgrave: I would echo Sarah’s comments. Something that we have grappled with for a long time is how you engage with families. It is really important to understand, as Sarah says, how important trust in the system is. If expectations are not met fairly swiftly, families, on past experience, will simply not engage. But there is a more practical element, which Sarah touched on: access, accessibility and understandability. Too many of the responses that come out of Defence and too much of the communication is in language that is simply not accessible to people who are not wearing uniform. As somebody who used to wear uniform and was an MOD civil servant, I would argue that at times it is not even accessible to me, so it is about making it clear and really easy to access and offering a range of access.

Yes, we are all shifting to digital, and yes, we have seen in our organisations a distinct switch to people wanting to engage with us via email or other digital means, but there is still a large section of families who are not really able or willing to engage with that process. They will need to be able to pick up the phone and speak to somebody, and to have somebody at the other end who understands what they are saying. If I may refer back to the housing issue, the roll-out of the new housing contract and the Pinnacle help desk, one of the biggest issues with that was not having somebody who picked up the phone. When someone did, they had no empathy or sympathy with the issues being raised, let alone an understanding of them. In terms of the physical process of access, that will be absolutely key in ensuring that that works for families, is consistent and delivers what they expect.

Maria Lyle: The only thing I would add is that there is an opportunity to get it right at the beginning. Yes, no one gets everything nailed on the first time—the person in that role needs to develop it—but if the offer is clear at the beginning, it makes it a lot easier. By that, I mean: is this office more strategic or tactical? That is part of the process that we are working out now. By that, I mean that if people are making a series of phone calls to that office, it will have to be staffed to deal with multiple thousands of calls a year. If that is not what the office is set up to do, and if it is more about dealing with and amplifying strategic messaging about what is going wrong, the communications could be based on that. But if families are led to believe, “This is somewhere I can ring and they will get my house sorted,” it is about managing those expectations and nailing those comms.

Therefore, upstream of that, it is about being very clear and coherent about what the office is setting out to do. Is it individual case management for any family who rings up with a problem? That is very different from an office that views the evidence and goes, “The key issues for military families are these three. Here is what my team is going to do about them.” In terms of what you communicate to families, those are quite different beasts. It is really important to get that right.

[Pam Cox]

Q Thank you for joining us this afternoon. One of the key functions of the new commissioner will be to promote

“the welfare of persons subject to service law and”—

this is a key phrase—“relevant family members”. That is left deliberately broad. What is your view on how a relevant family member might be defined?

Collette Musgrave: Where to start? This is a problem that we have grappled with for many years. The Army Families Federation is 42 years old, and what a family member looked like back then is very different from what a family member looks like now.

Maintaining that flexibility about what a family member is has been absolutely key for us in being able to properly support families. It may very well be a spouse or civil partner, or it may be a child. It may be a grandparent, if they were involved in caring for or supporting the family in any way. It may be an aunt or uncle. Quite frankly, with many of the people we deal with, some of whom have had quite challenging and difficult upbringings, it may be that they regard their wider friendship network as their family and their support network. It is a real challenge sometimes for us as an organisation to delineate and work this out so that we can best support the individual or the family in question.

Clearly, when it comes to the provision of defence processes and services, there are quite clear rules and regulations about who is in scope. My organisation and I personally might take issue with some of those, but none the less they are quite clearly laid out. One of the key difficulties that families face is often navigating that alongside their expectations, and alongside how wider society and some of the statutory external bodies I referred to earlier regard a family. It is that level of confusion that this process will have to work through quite quickly, referring back to Maria’s point about expectation management.

I note that in the debate and the questions in the House there were quite a lot of comments about bereaved families. There has been a significant amount of work over the last couple of years on identifying and supporting bereaved families, and meeting their actual needs rather than their perceived needs. We would certainly like to see bereaved families being addressed in some way within the scope of the Armed Forces Commissioner’s activities.

That would probably be something of a challenge, because the needs and requirements of a family when they are initially bereaved can be quite different from those of a bereaved family 10 or 20 years down the line. That would most definitely be something of a challenge for the Armed Forces Commissioner to work through. Nevertheless, we feel quite strongly that bereaved families should be included in the scope of the definition of families. Beyond that, it is not straightforward. We would like to see the broadest possible definition, because that is what service personnel and their families need, and it should be responsive to their needs and not to what happens to be in the relevant JSP.

Maria Lyle: I recognise that in the legislation, there may need to be—I do not know; I am not responsible for passing this Bill—a clause about what is applicable overseas and in the UK regarding families, for example, and how they are defined and dealt with.

I will give a live example of why it is important to keep the definition as broad as possible. At the moment, adult children are no longer defined as “dependents”, but many families talk to us about the needs of their young adult children who cannot access bases because they can no longer get a dependent’s pass, perhaps because they are at university or have left university. These days, of course, it is really hard for a young person to get accommodation, so they often stay at home sharing married quarters in a way that they would not have done 10 or 20 years ago. It is that sort of thing—the changing shape of family—and this Bill is an opportunity to allow some of those issues to be voiced and made relevant to an Armed Forces Commissioner.

Sarah Clewes: A family may also constitute a couple who have chosen not to have children or who cannot have children. We may think of them as a couple, but actually they are a family, because they are a couple. Are they within or without scope? It is important to consider every single differing family dynamic so that people are not excluded.

[Michelle Scrogham]

Q How do you envisage this Bill improving service life? You mentioned the importance of communications and getting the information to service personnel. How do you see your role in that?

Maria Lyle: I was thinking about that element beforehand. It depends on how the process pans out, in terms of how strategic or how tactical the role of the commissioner’s office is. We want this Bill to be a really helpful change in how military families and personnel are supported, so we want there to be as useful a working relationship with the Armed Forces Commissioner as possible.

For example, we would be really keen to share with the commissioner on a regular basis the information and evidence that we receive all year. There is a rich pattern of data across the sector—the third sector that deals with families—that could be brought to bear in terms of identifying exactly where the big issues are that the Armed Forces Commissioner could shine a light on, perhaps leaning in with Government Departments.

The change in this Bill is the report to Parliament. The armed forces covenant also provides for a report to Parliament every year. That is not necessarily independent; it is Government reporting on themselves. The legislation gives a layer of independence. If we can use this mechanism and get behind it to help the commissioner to have the evidence they need to enact change, that is certainly how we see our role and work with the commissioner’s office.

Sarah Clewes: Just to add to that, I think evidence is absolutely key. If we were to go for a scattergun approach and ask several charities, they would have an opinion. However, is that helpful? The families federations work very hard to provide evidence so that we can find the themes and find out what matters most. That is not to say that we discount other things that may be in the margin, but I think it is so important to have an evidence base on which to make decisions. Otherwise we could just go for a scattergun approach, tie ourselves up in knots and jump on things that perhaps are important to some, but are they as important for others? We need a certain amount of prioritisation, and that is exactly what we have been doing for a number of years. The opportunity to build on that and funnel some of the information upwards for decision making is most welcome.

Collette Musgrave: Just to build on my colleagues’ comments, I think many—not all, but many—of the issues that face service personnel and their families, and that impact positively or negatively on their decisions about whether to join and stay in the armed forces, are fairly well known and have been looked at in the past from a number of angles. As Sarah and Maria say, there is a rich level of evidence already in place. It is a question of using that, but really trying to understand the scale and depth of the issues.

The issues are all well known, and there are many of us who will get behind a certain one at a certain time, or there will be an external event that prompts examination. But it is a question of understanding, across that broad range, which ones are really impacting rather than being an irritation. What is making a real difference, and what is the depth and scale? Getting in behind those issues is where the Armed Forces Commissioner could bring real value. Galvanising all the various bodies externally, and across defence and across Government, to co-ordinate and co-operate to do that could be quite a significant and positive change.

--- Later in debate ---

[Pam Cox]

Q You may know that from a previous life I have an unusual, and possibly unhealthy, interest in comparing the powers of commissioners and ombudsmen. Why are we creating a new commissioner when we might have upped the powers of the existing ombudsman?

Luke Pollard: You could argue that we are doing both. The SCOAF function has wanted own-initiative powers for quite some time, but there was a sense that simply giving additional powers to the Service Complaints Ombudsman, a system that scrutinises a formalised and legislated-for complaints system, was not quite the way to exercise the own-initiative powers—the thematic investigations. That is why we have created a new office, effectively rolling in the SCOAF, but being clear that there is a change that improves the scrutiny function and provides a massive expansion of the opportunities for service personnel and, for the first time, their families. As a result, it needed to be named accordingly to demonstrate that change. In theory, we have delivered a better SCOAF as part of this function and a broader Armed Forces Commissioner opportunity.

We have not amended the SCOAF legislation at this stage. As I mentioned, if amendments are required there will be an opportunity to make them in the armed forces Bill that will follow. This sets the broad parameter that there should be own-initiative powers and independent persons to advocate on behalf of servicepeople. That is why the legislation has been drawn up as it is.

[Pam Cox]

Q I have one brief follow-up. I note your comments about refreshing the contract between the nation and those who serve. Given that, why have you not included a duty for the MOD to respond to the commissioner’s reports?

Luke Pollard: I think I picked that up in my answer to my hon. Friend the Member for Dunfermline and Dollar. I am happy to have a look at what that could be like. It is not normal for it to be in every piece of legislation that we would respond to reports. The normal process within Government is that there would be a response. But I am happy to include my hon. Friend in the conversations I am having to try to work out whether it is a requirement to add that to primary legislation, or whether a commitment to respond, as would normally be the case, would be sufficient to address those concerns. I am happy to have a conversation.

[Helen Maguire]

Q We would all like to see a strong and independent commissioner—a real champion for the armed forces. What certainty can we gain that the Secretary of State’s powers, as set out in the Bill, will not undermine the commissioner’s independence?

Luke Pollard: We have deliberately drawn the powers to be quite limited. The Secretary of State can restrict access only on national security grounds or where there would be a danger to a person. The example that might work there is visiting the frontline during combat operations. There would clearly be a danger to our people if there were to be a formal visit, and there would probably be a danger to the commissioner in that situation. That gives a prudent safeguard power.

We have deliberately tried to separate the powers that might normally exist for the Secretary of State from this role so that there is more independence for the commissioner. By establishing a novel route to Parliament, we have also provided Parliament with greater ability to raise any concerns. If the commissioner encounters any difficulties with interactions with the Ministry of Defence or other providers of services for our people, they are able to raise that in their reports. Those are then given to Parliament to be able to independently scrutinise, separate from the MOD.

What we have tried to do is to separate those functions out. I think we have succeeded in doing that in the Bill. The style of how that will happen in practice will depend on the person appointed to the office and how that office is established. However the principle of impartiality and independence from the Ministry of Defence—and, importantly, from the single services—is at the heart of this legislation. The legislation is designed to build trust, so that people can go to the commissioner if they want to raise a concern.