House of Commons The Select Committee on the Armed Forces Bill The Armed Forces Bill Special Report of Session 2010–11 Ordered by the House of Commons to be printed 8 March 2011 HC 779 Published on 10 March 2011 by authority of the House of Commons London: The Stationery Office Limited £22.00 Select Committee on the Armed Forces Bill The Select Committee on the Armed Forces Bill was appointed by an Order of the House of Commons to consider the Armed Forces Bill. Current membership Rt Hon James Arbuthnot MP (Conservative, North East Hampshire) (Chair) Alex Cunningham MP (Labour, Stockton North) Thomas Docherty MP (Labour, Dunfermline and West Fife) Gemma Doyle MP (Labour/Co-operative, West Dunbartonshire) Mr Tobias Ellwood MP (Conservative, Bournemouth East) Mr Mark Francois MP (Conservative, Rayleigh and Wickford) Mr Kevan Jones MP (Labour, North Durham) Mark Lancaster MP (Conservative, Milton Keynes North) Jack Lopresti MP (Labour, Filton and Bradley Stoke) Sandra Osborne MP (Labour, Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock) Christopher Pincher MP (Conservative, Tamworth) Mr Andrew Robathan MP (Conservative, South Leicestershire) Bob Russell MP (Liberal Democrat, Colchester) David Wright MP (Labour, Telford) Powers Extract from the Votes and Proceedings, 10 January 2011: “Armed Forces Bill,—Ordered, That the following provisions shall apply to the Select Committee on the Armed Forces Bill: 1. The Committee shall have 14 members, to be nominated by the Committee of Selection. 2. The Committee shall have power— (a) to send for persons, papers and records, to sit notwithstanding any adjournment of the House, to adjourn from place to place and to report from day to day the minutes of evidence taken before it; (b) to admit the public during the examination of witnesses and during consideration of the Bill (but not otherwise); and (c) to appoint specialist advisers either to supply information not readily available or to elucidate matters of complexity relating to the provisions of the Armed Forces Bill.” Publications The Report and evidence of the Committee are published by The Stationery Office by Order of the House. All publications of the Committee (including press notices) are on the Internet at: www.parliament.uk/afbcom. Committee staff The current staff of the Committee are Georgina Holmes-Skelton (Clerk) and Miguel Boo Fraga (Committee Assistant). Contacts All correspondence should be addressed to the Clerk of the Select Committee on the Armed Forces Bill, House of Commons, London SW1A 0AA. The telephone number for general enquiries is 020 7219 5857; the Committee’s email address is [email protected]. Media inquiries should be addressed to Alex Paterson on 020 7219 1589. Armed Forces Bill 1 Contents Report Page 1 Introduction 3 The Armed Forces Bill 3 Our inquiry 3 2 The Armed Forces Covenant 5 3 Other provisions 7 Independence and powers of Service police 7 Drug and alcohol testing 7 Service complaints procedures 7 4 Matters not in the Bill 9 Veterans ID Card 9 Recruitment of Under-18s 9 Civilian Courts 9 5 Conclusions and recommendations 10 Formal minutes 11 Witnesses 25 List of written evidence 26 Armed Forces Bill 3 1 Introduction The Armed Forces Bill 1. An Armed Forces Bill is required every five years to provide the legal basis for the Armed Forces and the system of military law which exists in the UK. It also offers an opportunity to make amendments to existing primary legislation. Armed Forces Bills are, by convention, committed to an ad-hoc select committee of the House of Commons after Second Reading. The current Armed Forces Bill received Second Reading on 10 January 2011 and the Committee was appointed on 17 January 2011 with a tight deadline to Report the Bill back to the House by 10 March. As a select committee, we had the power to: • take oral and written evidence on the substance of the Bill; • undertake UK and overseas visits; • deliberate in public to consider formally and amend the Bill as we saw fit; and • publish a Special Report setting out any conclusions or recommendations. 2. When the Select Committee on the last Armed Forces Bill was established in 2006, the power to undertake formal consideration of the Bill in public was an innovation, introduced in part on the recommendation of its predecessor Committee in 2001.1 Since our predecessor conducted its work in 2006 the House has established the practice of public bill committees, which similarly take evidence and deliberate in public, although they may not travel. 3. The convention of committing the Armed Forces Bill to a select committee rather than a general committee allows the Bill to receive thorough scrutiny. We welcomed the freedom to determine our programme of evidence taking and the opportunity to analyse the various aspects of the Bill in depth. We have greatly benefited from the power to undertake visits away from Westminster, giving us the opportunity to see facilities first hand and speak to personnel and their families directly. We also recognise the value of the greater degree of consensus and collaboration that a select committee format encourages. Therefore, while we recognise there may be scope to consider committal to a public bill committee in future, we recommend that select committee scrutiny continues to be the convention for the Armed Forces Bill, where the content of the Bill is significant enough to warrant it. Our inquiry 4. Following the precedent set by past Armed Forces Bill Committees, we resolved to undertake a select committee-style evidence-based inquiry, followed by formal line-by-line consideration of the Bill. For this latter stage we adopted public bill committee procedure for the consideration of clauses and amendments. We launched our inquiry on Tuesday 25 January 2011, issuing a public call for written evidence. We also decided upon a number of 1 See the House of Commons Select Committee on the Armed Forces Bill, Armed Forces Bill, Special Report of Session 2005–06, p 4 4 Armed Forces Bill witnesses for oral evidence sessions and resolved to undertake a number of visits within the UK, namely, to the Reserve Training and Mobilisation Centre in Chilwell, near Nottingham, the Defence Medical and Rehabilitation Centre Headley Court in Surrey, and the Military Court and Army Garrison in Colchester. These visits were helpful and informative and provided valuable opportunities to gauge the views of ordinary Service men and women on a range of issues, both matters directly significant to the Bill and in relation to broader welfare concerns. 5. We received 24 written submissions from a range of organisations and held four oral evidence sessions. We took evidence from Ministry of Defence (MoD) officials, the Service Complaints Commissioner for the Armed Forces, the Deputy Chief of Defence Staff (Personnel and Training) and the three Service Principal Personnel Officers. We also took evidence from the three Provost Marshals and the Chief Constable of the Ministry of Defence Police. Finally we heard from the Royal British Legion, Help for Heroes and the Confederation of British Service and Ex-Service Organisations, and the three Service Families Federations and the Forces Pension Society. The written and oral evidence to the Committee and transcripts of the deliberative sessions have been included alongside this Special Report. We are grateful to all those who contributed to our inquiry by providing evidence, either in writing or in person, and to those who contributed to our visits. 6. This Special Report does not provide a detailed summary of the contents of the Bill, the evidence we received or the discussions had during the formal consideration of the Bill.2 This Report instead gives an outline of the issues we considered in greatest detail and makes a number of observations and recommendations on matters requiring the Government’s attention. We hope that bringing the oral and written evidence we have taken and the discussions had during the formal consideration together into one document will assist the House in its further consideration of the Bill. 2 For further information on the Bill itself, see the Explanatory Notes to the Bill, Bill 122—EN Armed Forces Bill 5 2 The Armed Forces Covenant 7. The most controversial aspect of this Armed Forces Bill relates to the Military Covenant. The Covenant is, at present, a largely unwritten social and moral commitment between the Nation, Government and Service personnel, which implies that in return for the sacrifices that Service personnel make, the State has an obligation to recognise that contribution and retains a long term duty of care toward Service personnel and their families. At present the Military Covenant has no statutory basis. The Coalition Government made a commitment in their “Programme for Government”, published in May 2010 to “work to rebuild the Military Covenant”.3 The Government subsequently indicated an intention to enshrine the Military Covenant in law for the first time. On a visit to HMS Ark Royal in June 2010, the Prime Minister commented: It's time for us to rewrite the Military Covenant to make sure we are doing everything we can. [...]Whether it's the schools you send your children to, whether it's the healthcare that you expect, whether it's the fact that there should be a decent military ward for anyone who gets injured. I want all these things refreshed and renewed and written down in a new Military Covenant that's written into the law of the land.4 8. An independent Task Force on the Military Covenant, chaired by Professor Hew Strachan, was established in summer 2010 to support the work to “rebuild the Military Covenant” and published its Report on 8 December 2010.5 The Task Force made various recommendations as to how the Government could rebuild the Covenant through various local and national initiatives, such as the Armed Forces Community Covenant.