Armed Forces Bill — House of Commons, 2021-07-13
Topic: Defense
Leo Docherty (Conservative, Centre-right): I am grateful for the right hon. Gentleman’s encouragement. I hear it, and I reassure him that we will address this matter with absolute resolve. It will be at the heart of the veterans strategy, which I will announce this winter Turning to new clause 3, let me reassure the House that the interests of armed forces personnel are already represented and protected through a range of mechanisms, including the Service Complaints Ombudsman, the pay review bodies, the annual continuous attitude survey, and more than 50 diversity networks operating within Defence at various levels, run mostly by volunteer members, with senior officer advocates and champions—and, lastly but most importantly, there is the chain of command. We therefore resist the new clause I turn to new clause 4. In June 2021, the annual UK armed forces mental health bulletin showed that the overall rate of mental ill health is actually lower among service personnel than in the general population, but of course we are never complacent. We are constantly striving to improve our mental healthcare support for service personnel and, indeed, veterans. We resist the new clause because it lacks utility and would merely add to the administrative burden of those seeking to support our service personnel. Indeed, a duty on the Secretary of State to report annually on healthcare provision already exists as part of the armed forces covenant Amendment 1 would give the Attorney General the role of deciding whether the most serious crimes are prosecuted in the service courts. We have already considered this issue carefully as a recommendation of the Lyons review, but we believe that enhancing the prosecutors protocol is the most effective way to improve decisions on concurrent jurisdiction, because it allows decisions to be made early on, by independent prosecutors who have close working relationships with civilian and service police If the AG had to give consent, the process would be slower. The AG would effectively be asked to endorse decisions that had been made very early in an investigation, and it is hard to see what the AG would be adding. However, if the AG were to disagree with those earlier decisions and veto the trying of a case in the service justice system, there would be no easy way to transfer that case to the civilian system. That may have the undesired effect of making it difficult or impossible to prosecute the case in either system For that reason, we resist the amendment. We have a more pragmatic approach, because we want a workable, transparent and rigorous process for decisions on jurisdiction. We want cases to be heard in the right system, and we are confident that the service justice system is capable of dealing with all offences, whatever their seriousness and wherever they occur. We must bear in mind that the civilian prosecutor will always have the final say Turning to amendments 2 to 8, the covenant duty covers public bodies delivering healthcare, housing and education, because those are the key areas of concern for our armed forces community. We have ensured that the legislation can adapt to the needs of the armed forces community in future by making provision to allow the Government to widen the scope of the covenant by way of affirmative regulations. The Bill is evergreen, and if we need to expand it in future, we will.