Armed Forces Bill
House of Lords · Lords Chamber · 6 Jul 2026 · 42 speeches · Official Report
Second Reading
Moved by
That the Bill be now read a second time. Scottish legislative consent granted, Northern Ireland and Welsh legislative consent sought .
My Lords. I start by highlighting the interests I have declared: my son-in-law is an active reservist. It is a great honour and pleasure to speak to the Armed Forces Bill, as I know it is for us all. We should be reminded that without the Armed Forces Bill, the current Armed Forces Act 2006-the legislation that provides a system of command, discipline and justice for His Majesty’s Armed Forces-could not continue in force beyond the end of this year. Since 1688 and the Bill of Rights, it is a constitutional requirement that Parliament, rather than the King or the Executive, has the authority to exert control over our Armed Forces. It is Parliament, through our common consent and the act of renewal, that ensures that there remains a legal basis for the continued existence of His Majesty’s Armed Forces. As such, the Bill is for the Armed Forces, although it goes beyond simply providing the legal framework for them to continue to exist as disciplined bodies. It is an opportunity to renew the nation’s contract with those who serve. This substantial Bill does much for our current and former personnel, and the Armed Forces community as a whole, to provide better support, housing and protections for victims of crime, and to provide greater resilience for the nation by increasing the size and availability of the strategic reserves. It does this by delivering meaningful reform across four key pillars. The Armed Forces covenant-the pledge between the nation and those who have...
My Lords, I thank the Minister for his engagement with me and my noble friend Lady Goldie on the measures in the Bill. I extend my thanks to the officials for their professional and insightful briefing on the Bill. I reiterate at the outset that His Majesty’s most loyal Opposition fully support the Bill. We recognise the legal requirement for the renewal of the Armed Forces Act 2006 for the continuation of our Armed Forces, and so I share with the Minister the desire to see the Bill reach the statute book promptly. Before I turn to the substance of the Bill, I put on record our deep admiration for the men and women of our Armed Forces. Whether deployed on operations overseas, protecting NATO’s eastern flank or supporting the civil authorities at home, they continue to do an exemplary job. They do so at a time when resources, manpower and equipment are all being stretched to the very limit. Recruitment and retention remain a challenge, but time and again our gallant service personnel rise to meet the task they face. Whatever disagreements I may have with the Government about resource, I hope the Minister will accept that these take nothing away from our sincere respect for all those who serve. However, I cannot ignore the elephant in the room: this Government’s continuing unwillingness to properly fund our Armed Forces. The Government have spoken of making tough choices, but they have not-or at least not yet. Perhaps our NATO allies in Ankara will change minds. The defence...
I concur-and I am on the record as saying-that the defence investment plan needs the money: we need to get to 3% as quickly as possible. But does the noble Earl also agree that the coalition and Conservative Governments between 2010 and 2017 in fact cut the defence budget by 22% and made people compulsorily redundant? At least this action will increase the defence budget over the next seven years by 27%.
My Lords, we are dealing with a very different situation globally from what we were dealing with then. There was not a country in the western world that was not making savings on defence at that time.
Crimea?
Well, yes. I was saying that the money is not available now and the rest of it is to be financed by as yet unknown efficiency savings. The departments that have apparently been required to reduce their capital spending have not yet identified what they will cut, and the Government have not yet told us what asset sales they will follow through with. It is all rather unconvincing and unsatisfactory. There are of course ways to increase defence spending without more tax rises and more borrowing. The required funds could be found by a sensible and sustainable reduction in the welfare budget, scrapping the now discredited Chagos deal, appropriately reducing the size of the Civil Service or reprioritising some of the more extreme and costly net-zero projects. The depressing reality appears to be that this Government have not been willing to grasp the nettle and make the genuine hard choices to give our Armed Forces the funding they so desperately need-and are pleading for-to keep us safe. I now turn to the Bill. This side of the House welcomes the further incorporation of the Armed Forces covenant into law. It was a Conservative Government, through the Armed Forces Act 2021 that my noble friend Lady Goldie took through your Lordships’ House, who first placed the covenant on a statutory footing, requiring specified bodies to have due regard to its principles in the fields of housing, education and healthcare. That was a significant and hard-won step, and I am glad the Government...
My Lords, I find it rather rich that the noble Earl, Lord Minto, has attacked the Government for not spending enough on defence when the Conservative Party is still calling for tax cuts, as well as economies in other areas, and we are still discovering just how thin our Armed Forces had become in the last five years and more, and how much now needs to be done to repair where we are. The message of the strategic defence review last year, now 12 months ago, was that we are now in a different situation. We are facing more serious threats to this country of different sorts, and we need political leadership from the highest levels of government in a national conversation to carry the public with it, and explicitly to spend more money on defence. That is a painful message, and it is undermined by those who are still calling for tax cuts without quite explaining how those cuts will be paid for. Others on these Benches will address housing, military justice and other aspects of this Bill. I want to focus on the issues covered in Clauses 32 to 38: the Reserve Forces, their role, recruitment and retention, and conditions of service. The emphasis in the Bill appears to be primarily on regular veterans as the key to a strategic reserve, even into their 60s. I am conscious that there was a long history of Britain’s peacetime forces undervaluing volunteer reserve units. Our Army and Navy were designed for long-term deployments on other continents, not for defence of the homeland,...
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire. We share the honour of having fitted a military covenant report into the Armed Forces Act 2006 in 2011. This Bill deserves credit for finally setting out a more adequate statutory treatment of the military covenant, but it has been a long, slow process. Nearly 20 years ago, in 2008, a Command Paper first introduced an undertaking to treat the military covenant in statute. Three years later, as I have mentioned, the Armed Forces Bill of 2011 was the start. It introduced a single minimalist clause entitled “Military Covenant Report”. While welcoming its inclusion, I objected to its being inserted towards the tail end of the miscellaneous sections of the 2006 Act as lacking appropriate prominence. I also said that its insertion as new Section 359A of the Act, immediately following Section 359, implying in a contents list that the two sections were related, would be an unfortunate juxtaposition. Why? It was because Section 359 granted pardons to veterans executed in World War I for desertion and other disciplinary offences. The Government accepted these criticisms and, after further discussion, proposed a whole new part-Part 16A-on the covenant report. The Minister, Lord Astor of Hever, kindly invited me to put my name to their formal government amendment and to be the first speaker to introduce it. Only in later Bills was the concept of due regard by some local authorities introduced, initially in a...
I thank the Minister and his officials for their work on this Bill. It is a privilege to follow the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig, and I look forward to hearing further contributions from noble and gallant Lords with their wealth of experience. When I read in Hansard the record of the Second Reading debate on this Bill’s predecessor five years ago, I could not help but notice that the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, and the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, will simply be swapping places when they come to sum up this debate. In my remarks, I will focus on three areas: first, the Armed Forces covenant; secondly, the whole-society approach to civil preparedness; and thirdly, some niche comments related to the service police powers. “Covenant” is an ancient word with deep resonances in Judaism, Islam and Christianity. It is about gifts offered and received, about commitments made and honoured, lived in mutual reciprocity. When we ask much of our Armed Forces-and, God forbid, we might need to ask more of them and their families in the years to come-pledging a commitment to what they can expect in return for all that they give and, for veterans, have given, is the mark of a grateful society. “Gratitude” is perhaps an old-fashioned word these days, but when we lose it, recruitment drops, morale drops and retention drops. At its heart, the Armed Forces covenant seeks to embed gratitude-not special favours or a jingoistic patriotism, but a simple commitment to understanding, fairness and...
My Lords, it is a real pleasure to follow the right reverend Prelate. This is my first contribution in this House on the matter of defence. The reasons it has come now are twofold. The first reason is the time we are living through. In my time in government, in the Home Office and No. 10, we dealt with terror attacks, the Novichok poisonings, cyber attacks, and the use of chemical weapons in Syria. But the scale of the threat, and the response we need, are of a different order of magnitude today. As we have heard in the debate, that means a whole-society response. We need to widen the debate that we have in this House and the people who engage in it, not least on the question of funding. Meeting 3% and 3.5% of GDP towards defence will be incredibly challenging, but it is important that we get there. I do not envy the current Government in trying to do it, but it is a long-term task. The trade-offs are real, and we should not pretend that they are not. That means a wider conversation about what we have to sacrifice to meet those funding commitments. The same is true when we think about the contribution that we want people to make to our defence beyond our Armed Forces. We need to hear more about that national conversation. I encourage the Government-again, it is a difficult conversation to have-to try to be more open in how they tackle and approach this question. It is not something we have done for a very long time, and I do not think we can come up with the answer behind...
My Lords, I am very happy to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, because I too have been trying to understand defence, both personally and professionally, over the last year. I declare three interests that have helped me. Like her, I am taking part in the Armed Forces Parliamentary Scheme, so ably chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Stevens, who is in his place, but as part of the Navy. In parallel, I have become the proud sponsor of HMS “Achilles”, the last of the new Astute class nuclear submarines being built in Barrow. Finally, I am an adviser to the Lakestar resilience fund, which invests in defence and societal resilience technologies. Therefore, I am lucky enough to have spent time on bases and in ships, in classrooms and in boats, and in service accommodation. I feel as though I have met hundreds of servicepeople, but I have also been thinking about the technologies that sit beside our national resilience. The two experiences are different, but they reinforce the same thought: when we talk about defence, we often talk about platforms, procurement and capability, yet much of our resilience depends on more practical questions. Can we recruit and retain talented people? Can they build a stable family life? Are they learning quickly enough to keep pace with technology? What happens when they take the uniform off? Until recently, perhaps like many people in this country, my understanding of what our Armed Forces actually do was embarrassingly shallow. I could not have...
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox of Soho, who spoke eloquently about the need for improved housing for service men and women and their families. I am grateful, too, to my noble friend Lord Wallace of Saltaire for his introduction to the Bill. In my contribution today, I want to focus on protection from sexual and violent behaviour and domestic abuse, stalking and harassment, in Clauses 5 to 10; support for victims of service offences, in Clauses 11 and 12; service courts, in Clauses 21 to 27; and Schedules 2 and 3. These clauses and schedules all have a direct impact on the victims of offences perpetrated by service men and women. I have some concerns that, as they stand, the proposals do not give parity with the non-military administrative police and court systems. I also want to ask some questions about the protocols on visiting forces, in Clauses 41 and 42, in the light of the recent case in Cambridge. My Front-Bench portfolio of victims and vulnerable people is more usually found in home affairs and justice legislation, and it is good to work with the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, again. It is also good to see the Bill trying to strengthen the arrangements inside the military criminal justice system to match those elsewhere. I particularly thank Aurora New Dawn and the Suzy Lamplugh Trust for their briefing on the Bill and for copying the letter that they have sent to the Secretary of State for Defence. Both groups are very concerned...
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton. I start by declaring an interest that, as of 15 June, I was appointed Assistant Chief of the Defence Staff, with responsibility for reserves and cadets. I am now the de facto most senior reservist in defence. Perhaps if the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, could give me another couple of weeks to get my feet under the table, I would happily accept the burden of responsibility for the things he mentioned in his remarks. I hope to offer him some encouragement that progress is indeed being made. Equally, before taking up this recent role, I was asked, in my capacity as the independent chair of the Reserve Forces Review 2030-RF30-to give oral evidence when the Bill was in Committee in the Commons. After consultation with the Minister, and with the permission of your Lordships’ House, it is in this capacity that I speak today-as an extension of that earlier evidence session. I support the Bill, as it brings much-needed clarity and simplification to the role of the Strategic Reserve and provides the enablement, through the formation of a non-departmental public body, for the reserve forces and cadets associations. The reserve landscape is complex. RF30 sought to simplify this landscape by broadly dividing the reserve between the Active Reserve-part-time and predominantly, but not exclusively, paid volunteers, such as me-and the Strategic Reserve; that is, former regular service men and women who retain a...
My Lords, it is somewhat daunting to follow my noble friend Lord Lancaster of Kimbolton. He certainly knows what he is talking about. We have to talk about money. It is the critical lifeblood of our Armed Forces and their effectiveness. This Labour Administration are totally failing to recognise fully their financial responsibilities for the defence of the realm. We are on a collision course with a Russia that is on a war footing. The threats are not imaginary; they are real. Yet the current Labour Administration are intent on sleepwalking into a critical situation for want of mobilising the immediately necessary and substantial funding to keep our country safe. Yes, the UK is extremely vulnerable and exposed at this time, not least because of the very substantial underinvestment in our nuclear submarine capability. The strategic defence review made abundantly clear the scale of the increased investment in defence capabilities that is needed. The defence investment plan has quantified the requirement at £28 billion over the next four years. The reality is that the current Labour Administration have prevaricated and procrastinated until very late, coming up with a-very rushed-financial commitment of just £15 billion over four years, but substantially sourced by as yet unidentified cost savings. This is just far too little and far too late. Defence expenditure will rise in 2030 to just 2.7% of GDP, far short of the 3% committed by the Prime Minister to our NATO allies. No...
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Magan of Castletown, who has rightly pointed out the inadequacies of the funding package announced last week in the defence investment plan. However, that is not what I wish to talk about this afternoon. I welcome the strengthening of the Armed Forces covenant, but I do so in the wider context of the funding-and underfunding-of defence. We put the Armed Forces covenant into being in 2011, following several years when the Armed Forces had been under huge pressure as a result of the double commitment in Iraq and Afghanistan. At that time, there was an imbalance between what the nation was asking the Armed Forces to do and what it was providing them with in order to carry out their tasks. That imbalance was translated into what is now the Armed Forces covenant. The covenant now focuses largely on individuals’ requirements and making sure there is no disadvantage, which is good, and we are now going to widen it and its legal underpinning. I stress that the origin of the military covenant, as we called what is now the Armed Forces covenant, was a moral foundation to ensure a balance between what the nation was asking of the Armed Forces and what the Armed Forces were being given to do it with. In welcoming the strengthening of the covenant, I make the wider point that there is that moral consideration, as well as the legal underpinning. Secondly, I welcome the defence housing strategy, but we have been there before. I have...
Baroness Carberry of Muswell Hill
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Dannatt, and I start by congratulating the Government on bringing forward this Armed Forces Bill in this particular form. My noble friend the Minister has set out how the Bill strengthens the nation’s enduring covenant with armed services personnel. I thank the men and women who serve, who defend our nation and who protect our interests. Every Armed Forces Bill is of course more than just an administrative requirement: it says something important about what the country stands for. This current Bill is an opportunity to modernise, strengthen and improve. As has inevitably been noted, the Bill arrives alongside the defence investment plan. Whatever the level of noise around that plan, there is no denying that this Government have already shown that they are prepared to make hard choices to invest in defence and that there must be even more, even harder choices to come. Meanwhile, against a background of growing global instability, the Government are acting decisively, with money attached, to begin to shore up our defence capabilities to meet present and future external threats. Fundamentally, the Bill is about the people who defend us and I hope that one of its effects will be to help with recruitment, retention and morale. The Bill builds on the big pay increases, better housing, expanded childcare and the more flexible offer of service that the Government have already brought in. As my noble friend the Minister...
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle
My Lords, it is a pleasure to take part in this debate. I welcome noble Lords who have said that they are relatively new to engaging in military issues, which is something that your Lordships’ House should encourage more of. In this age of geopolitical shocks, unlikely to reduce in intensity or frequency any time soon, and direct if undeclared attacks on the UK, we need far more and broader engagement in security issues than has traditionally been the case. We need a realistic assessment of the level of Armed Forces that the UK population and economy can support, rather than seeking to find a place in the world beyond our capabilities, and a realistic assessment of the unstable diplomatic environment in which we operate. We know who our friends are, and we also need to know that those who have been our friends in the past may not be so in the future. We owe it to the Armed Forces, as the whole of society, to be brutally realistic about the circumstances we now find ourselves in. I begin by being positive. I welcome the defence housing strategy and the creation of the defence housing service, which, as the letter to noble Lords from the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, put it, aims to put first the needs of forces personnel, veterans and their families. That will be a welcome change from the disastrous privatisation-one more disastrous privatisation-of forces housing that, as the Financial Times summarised it, “sparked multiple court actions and saddled the government with billions...
Baroness Fraser of Craigmaddie
My Lords, like others, I start by welcoming this Armed Forces Bill. There are many measures within it that have been identified today that are in urgent need of our attention, such as the provisions to ensure that service personnel and their families have access to quality housing and the intention to modernise and strengthen our Reserve Forces; particularly the inclusion of support for employers, for example. I declare an interest: I have a daughter who is a serving reserve officer in the very unit that the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, mentioned, the London Scottish. I also welcome the desire to place the Armed Forces covenant fully into law. The Bill rightly recognises that our duty to those who serve must not end with warm words but must be reflected in legislation and public policy. However, in some areas, I wish that the Government would go further. As others have identified, the measures in this Bill extending the recall liability and easing the transfer from regulars to reserves focus on the Strategic Reserve. If we are really going to adopt a whole-defence approach and increase the Active Reserve by 20%, we need to be much smarter about who we have, what skills they bring and how we attract, train and retain people within all the Volunteer Reserve Forces. The MoD does not manage or track total spending on Reserve Forces. Answers to Written Questions in the other place show that the MoD has no idea as to the make-up and skill set of the Reserve Forces. My...
I am delighted to speak after the noble Baroness, Lady Fraser. I am an Army brat. I am not sure how many of them are in the room, but my father was a serving officer and I was brought up in some 25 different insalubrious married quarters around the world, so I have some feeling for what we speak of. In addition to that, as Comptroller and Auditor-General, I had the pleasure of making quite a lot of reports on both the MoD as a whole and on the Annington Homes “deal”, which is probably the most neutral expression I can use. I am clear that we owe a massive debt to the Armed Forces, and it is not easy to pay it off, because it requires seeing them integrate into society in a comfortable way, which is often very difficult for them, quite painful, and not always successful to be honest. We need to recognise responsibility for a lot of people who have been deeply embedded in major institutions for long periods, and are coming out of that and trying to live what we would call a normal life. They need help when they are doing that, and if we are not responsible, then I do not know who is. I respect and support the objectives of this Bill, and I believe the best way I can help is by trying to point out a few areas where we need to be on guard against building disappointment into the legislation. The Bill places a legal obligation on various public bodies that are likely to be providing services to service people before or after retirement to give due consideration to the armed...
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Morse, who spoke movingly of his experience of some 25 married quarters and the immense debt we owe to the services. I entirely agree with him. I declare an interest as president of the Association of Military Court Advocates, though I speak entirely on my own behalf. In the last 30 years, the traditional court martial system has been completely overhauled as a result of the European Court of Human Rights decision primarily in the case of Findlay in 1997. It was ironic to hear the noble Earl, Lord Minto, talk about the modernisation of the justice system and at the same time call for the abolition of our membership of the European Court of Human Rights. I had a flash of when I was a bus conductor as a young man and the driver told me how, in his youth during the First World War, he had been tied to the wheel of a gun carriage and lashed. The military justice system has come a little way forward since those times. As the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig of Radley, reminded us, the main reforming legislation was the Armed Forces Act 2006, which set up a justice system under the control of civil judges in serious cases and, in particular, independent of the chain of command. On our last excursion into this area in 2021, more reforms were pushed through which have now been brought into force. I am pleased to see further important reforms in this Bill, which I entirely support. It is extremely important to the...
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford. I take this opportunity to thank all those who serve and have served, and their families. This Bill is about more than just military law; it is about the promise we make to those who serve our country and their families that their service and sacrifice will be recognised, not only while they serve but long after their military service has ended. Our Armed Forces do not serve alone. Their families also make sacrifices in support of that service. I welcome this Bill, in particular the measures to strengthen the Armed Forces covenant. My own experiences have shown me why these issues matter so deeply. Earlier in my career, while working at JP Morgan Chase, I had the privilege of managing a colleague who had served in the Royal Engineers. He brought with him not only highly transferable skills but also professionalism, teamwork, a good sense of humour and a can-do attitude that benefited everyone around him. His military experience enriched our workplace and demonstrated the enormous value that veterans can bring to employers across every sector. My work as a councillor gave me a different perspective. I helped a veteran who was experiencing serious housing difficulties in the private rented sector. Despite those challenges, he continued working as a bus driver, supporting his family-including a severely disabled child-while completing a law degree and then a master’s in law. Today, he is a practising...
My Lords, the Armed Forces Bill comes before the House at a very important time in the history of our nation. The threats facing our country are the most complex there have been for many decades. War continues to rage in Ukraine, which is a reminder that our country’s defence cannot be taken for granted. We need to invest properly in our Armed Forces. This starts with giving our brave Armed Forces personnel the best possible support. There is much in the Bill to welcome. The creation of a new defence housing service is a long overdue step to improving the unacceptable standard of military accommodation that too many service families have endured for years. Good-quality housing is fundamental to keeping up good morale, giving our Armed Forces a place they can call home during active service. There are changes also to expand our Reserve Forces. Likewise, the reforms to the service justice system should improve efficiency and confidence that cases are dealt with fairly and transparently. However, there are important areas where the Bill does not go far enough to support our Armed Forces. Most concerningly, the protections in the Armed Forces covenant do not apply to every corner of the country. The Bill proposes to strengthen the commitment to our Armed Forces by extending the statutory duties under the covenant to devolved and local government across this United Kingdom. The intentions behind this are good, but it is simply unacceptable that the Bill will potentially leave an...
My Lords, it is a pleasure to speak after the noble Lord, Lord Hay of Ballyore. Before I come to my remarks, I declare my interests: I am the chair of the cadet health check team; my daughter is currently wading her way through basic training to join the RAF; and I am an honorary colonel of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers cadets. I welcome the opportunity to speak on the Bill, and I do so with great respect for those who serve, those who have served and the families who support them. The Armed Forces are not simply a military institution, they are one of the great social institutions of our country. They teach discipline, duty, teamwork, resilience, courage and service. At their best, they give people a sense of belonging and purpose. That is especially powerful for young people who sometimes find it hard to find these things and may not have access to them elsewhere in their life. That is why I want to focus on what I believe is missing from the Bill: a stronger recognition of the wider social impact of the Armed Forces, particularly the role of the cadet forces. The Minister will understand my going on about the cadet forces. Across the United Kingdom, cadet units are doing extraordinary work. They give young people structure, they teach self-control, they build confidence, and they connect children and teenagers with adult volunteers who model responsibility, leadership and service. For many young people, particularly those from struggling communities, this can be...
I declare my interest as an honorary officer in the Royal Naval Reserve and as chair of the Armed Forces Parliamentary Trust. At this stage of the debate, after such a wide-ranging and thoughtful set of contributions, I will make just three brief points. The first is in respect of Clause 2 of the Bill, on the Armed Forces covenant, which, as a number of other speakers rightly pointed out, builds on the progress that has been made in recent years. In fact, it was five years ago that I, in my former role, together with the Minister for Veterans and People, launched what was called Op COURAGE. It provides specialist mental health services for veterans. It has been great to see its progress since then. The Bill is now expanding beyond health, education and housing to bring in scope a wider range of public services for the Armed Forces covenant. I will just raise two questions for the Minister on Clause 2. The first is a very detailed one: new Section 343AZB appears to exclude GP practices individually from obligations under the Armed Forces covenant. Instead, it talks about integrated care boards as health bodies, but not GP practices. He will also be aware that the Royal British Legion has argued that the Bill does not explicitly list non-departmental public bodies, such as HMRC or HM Prison and Probation Service. Can the Minister say whether he regards those as in scope of the provisions of the Bill or whether that is a lacuna, as the Royal British Legion appears to believe?...
My Lords, it is a pleasure to speak after the noble Lord, Lord Stevens, who, as he said in his declaration of interests, is currently chair of trustees of the Armed Forces Parliamentary Trust, which runs the Armed Forces Parliamentary Scheme. I am currently a trustee, having attended all parts of the scheme, starting off in 2015, when the noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson of Abinger, and I were the only Members of the Lords who participated in the scheme. People were not quite sure what to do with Members of the House of Lords on the scheme. They did not quite know how the arrangements would work. Everything was thought through for Members of the House of Commons. So I am absolutely delighted today that we have heard from so many Members of your Lordships’ House who have participated or are participating in the Armed Forces Parliamentary Scheme. That means that we have heard a range of different voices today. The right reverend Prelate pointed out that all that seems to have happened since the last Armed Forces Bill in 2021 is that the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, and the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, have swapped places. I and the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig of Radley, have not moved, yet some of what I am hearing from the Opposition Benches sounds quite similar to what I was hearing in 2021, and the responses that I suspect we will hear from the Minister this evening may sound quite similar as well. In particular, the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, and the noble and gallant Lord,...
My Lords, it is a pleasure to wind up this debate for His Majesty’s most loyal Opposition. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Newnham, that I am very pleased to be sitting here and I do not envy the Minister sitting over there. Everything has its moment. As my noble friend Lord Minto said, we on these Benches support the Bill. This House has renewed this legislation every five years since the 2006 Act, in an unbroken constitutional tradition stretching back to the Bill of Rights of 1688-a discipline this House takes seriously. We certainly shall not be a roadblock to its progress. This has been a rich debate; as the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, said, there have been many contributions which have been genuinely interesting to listen to. However, one issue has recurred with such frequency it is almost like a musical reprise: funding. I shall leave the Minister to respond to that in whatever way he can, but the current position is overwhelmingly regarded as unsustainable. Turning to other matters addressed by my noble friend which resonated with others, I want to reflect briefly on some contributions from around the House. The importance of housing was universally agreed throughout the Chamber. As the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Norwich reminded us, houses, flats, terraced accommodations, bases and dockyards also have to be homes. I am grateful to him; we should never forget that. On housing and the creation of this new defence housing service, there is a risk...
I thank the noble Baroness for winding up the debate and noble Members from across the House for their contributions. I am really pleased-as I think the Opposition Chief Whip heard me say-that everyone is in favour of the Bill. I would hate to be answering on a Bill that everyone opposed; I would be in serious trouble answering all their questions, challenges and gaps, so I start by saying that I am so pleased that everyone is in favour of the Bill. Somebody outside the Chamber used the term non-controversial, but I will not use that phrase as it was made outside the Chamber. That said, noble Members from across the House have made some serious points about how a Bill that they support could be further improved. I accept that and the challenge for the Government to take it forward. As I said in my introductory remarks, we all want the Bill to succeed because we support its aims. Let me deal with some points. We have had the debate about funding, and I appreciate that the noble Earl, Lord Minto, and the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, will continue to make their various points about that. I will make the same points back, and that debate will continue. However, a number of noble Lords, including the noble Earl, Lord Minto, raised defence housing. I do not often get irritated-and I am not irritated-but I find it slightly strange that a Government who have committed £9 billion of public money over 10 years to improve housing are being taken to task on it. That is all I will say:...
I hope that the intention to proceed with it will be coupled with a date when it will be done.
That is always my intention-rather than to be just aspirational-to try to demand change of the system. The noble and gallant Lord will know from his experience and military service that even a senior rank or senior ministerial rank does not always mean things moving quite as quickly as one would hope. Certainly, this is not an aspiration but a desire to actually bring it about. We will work with other government departments to try to ensure that something happens on that as quickly as possible. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Norwich raised various issues and welcomed the covenant. He heard what I had to say about single-person accommodation and the importance of a whole-society approach. A number of noble Lords mentioned service police and we will come back to some of those issues in Committee. The noble Baroness, Lady Penn, heard me talk about some of the changes to visas. She mentioned the importance of paternity leave and raised that with me at another meeting outside the Chamber. Of course, we will look at that and see how we can take it forward. I think she mentioned an individual case as well; if she wants to write to me about that, because I do not know the case, I will look into it for her. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Norwich made a really interesting point with respect to not just the Church of England but faith organisations as a whole. The moral dilemma there is between supporting the Armed Forces and appearing to support war versus being a...
My Lords, I thank the Minister for giving way. He will know Northern Ireland extremely well, and he will know that there are at least five councils of Northern Ireland that do not implement the covenant. What do you have when your veterans lose out? You end up with a two-tier system where, across the rest of the United Kingdom, the covenant is very much rolled out. There is an opportunity in the Bill to try to address that issue, so it is not the responsibility of a local government to implement the covenant. This issue has been going on for some time. I could name the councils involved, but, when you have five councils out of 11, you are in a situation where you have almost half of Northern Ireland not implementing the covenant and veterans losing out, when the rest of the United Kingdom and the veterans benefit from the covenant. So I ask the Minister: is there a way, within the Bill, of addressing the issue around Northern Ireland and the covenant?
The noble Lord explained some of that in his question. There is a particular situation, as he will know, with respect to Northern Ireland and the application of the covenant to all bodies there. As he will know, the duty applying to local authorities does not apply, and that becomes a problem, but we expect the covenant to apply to Northern Ireland through what the UK Government do. It is an ambiguity and it is difficult, but we will always seek to apply the covenant where we can, where it is appropriate, and where it fits the various devolution settlements with respect to that. The covenant supports the Armed Forces community in Northern Ireland. Borough districts and city councils in Northern Ireland do not generally exercise functions in the policy areas in scope of the covenant legal duty. This does not exclude councils in Northern Ireland from pledging their support for the Armed Forces community by becoming a covenant signatory. I think that is what the noble Lord referred to. Some councils will choose to do so and others will not. That is the situation as it stands.
The Minister must recognise that if this goes through without any recognition that Northern Ireland is again being treated differently, it really is not good enough. Surely, they are the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the covenant is so important to all those people who have served in Northern Ireland and who live there.
The noble Baroness will know from my record that the Government support the Armed Forces community in Northern Ireland completely. I went to Armed Forces Day in Northern Ireland last year, a government Minister went to Northern Ireland just a couple of weeks ago to support Armed Forces Day, and I have been asked to an event in Northern Ireland in a few weeks’ time, which I hope to go to. Support for Northern Ireland’s Armed Forces community with respect to the aims of the covenant are clear. We seek to recognise the reality that is there. Councils can pledge themselves to the covenant if they wish. A number have done so, but some have chosen not to. I reiterate the Government’s support for the Armed Forces community in Northern Ireland. I turn now to a couple of remarks the noble Lord, Lord Stevens, made. On the covenant, as I said, it is the bite of the “due regard” that makes a difference. We saw, when it was introduced by the last Government, that “due regard” has impact as it seeks to bite. Cultural change will cause the councils-as they were then; they are now national bodies-to start to do things that they would not otherwise have done. It is good that drones are in the Bill. They start to plug a gap. There will be questions about how we deal with that. I thank the noble Baronesses, Lady Smith and Lady Goldie, for their remarks. There are many questions that we will have to come back to. I finish by saying that I welcome the general support for the Bill. I also welcome...
Bill read a second time.
Commitment and Order of Consideration Motion
Moved by
That the bill be committed to a Committee of the Whole House, and that it be an instruction to the Committee of the Whole House that they consider the bill in the following order: Clauses 1 to 3, Schedule 1, Clauses 4 and 5, Schedule 2, Clauses 6 and 7, Schedule 3, Clauses 8 to 31, Schedule 4, Clauses 32 to 36, Schedule 5, Clauses 37 and 38, Schedule 6, Clauses 39 to 46, Schedule 7, Clauses 47 to 56, Title.
Motion agreed.
House adjourned at 7.45 pm.