Armed Forces Bill — House of Lords, 2021-11-23
Topic: Defense
Desmond Browne (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, I have added my name to this amendment and propose to speak for a few minutes in support of it. First of all, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool, on the concise way in which he put the arguments for this amendment—he has exhausted nearly all my notes. I do not want to take up unnecessary time in the House this evening—we are running later than expected—as I think he made the arguments very well, but I want to reinforce a couple of them Before I do that, I want to go back to the genesis of my involvement in these amendments. I did not put my name to either of the two amendments debated in Committee, although I do support raising the minimum recruitment age for the Army to 18. I support that because, in studying and researching these amendments, I came across some quite persuasive evidence of an inappropriate level of potential damage to young people who had gone through that. I investigated further why that could be the case and learned quite a lot about the immaturity of people at 16 and their physical and mental ability to handle properly what they may have gone through in training. I have now discovered other things about this which worry me even more. I did not think that the benefit to our military, or to other young people, justified potentially damaging such a significant number of young people. That is why I spoke to it in that fashion in Committee This amendment was tagged on to that. When I looked at it, I honestly thought that, in this day and age, in the 21st century, there was no justification for continuing this discrimination. It seemed that we were on the wrong side of history on this, and there was no justification for pursuing or sticking with it—I thought it was a no-brainer. I was not surprised that there was not much debate about it; it seemed pretty straightforward, and I more or less said that When the Minister responded to the debate and seemed not to concede that this was even discrimination, I intervened and asked her a specific question about what the Army thought it got out of this and why it persisted in doing it. She again gave me an answer, which is to be found in Hansard at col. GC 461. She did not quite say that it was not discrimination but suggested that the Army was not intending to discriminate. She promised to write to me, and she did so today. Her letter expands on what the Army is intending to do The truth is, of course, that there was a review in 2015, and the Army put its best case forward at this attempt at judicial review. Two things came out in that very clearly, particularly in the evidence of the brigadier who was then the Army’s chief witness—whose name does not really matter but whose evidence is in the public domain It was about force level—about the ability, for a longer period, to take advantage of people in whom they had invested a lot of training. It seems from the noble Baroness’s letter to me that it is now more about what the recruits get out of this than what the Army gets out of it; that is a welcome development. We could go back to the debate about whether it is justifiable for some of these recruits, with the potential for damaging others, but I do not want to rehearse all that We debated all this on 8 November. The issue was not been raised in the debate at all, but Corporal Kimberly Hay was convicted of punching two recruits in the very establishment that everybody was singing the praises of just a couple of days later. I was surprised. I had no knowledge of this, obviously, but it had not been mentioned. That incident led me to delve into this issue a bit more. I discovered that, between 2014 and 2017, 50 cases of assault went to court martial but with no findings of guilt. This seemed to have been for process reasons rather than because any witnesses were deemed not to have been telling the truth. The criticisms made about the unsatisfactory nature of the prosecution were about the way in which the Army police had investigated the matter, rather than that any of the many witnesses who gave evidence against some 17 trainers had not been believed. Around the same time, between 2014 and 2020, there were 60 complaints by trainees or parents about the way in which trainees were treated at AFC Harrogate None of this seems to have been reflected in the debate or the information given in the debate. That certainly makes me want to reconsider many of the things said in support of AFC Harrogate and what it was actually doing with these young people. My suspicion is that this issue will not go away—that, like many issues over the last 10 years that have become apparent about institutions, it will be a slow burner but eventually much more will come out. Of course I cannot ask noble Lords to make decisions about changing legislation on the basis of an argument as weak as that, but history tends to suggest that there is something there that needs to be investigated My final point is to ask what the Army in the current circumstances gets out of this. Over the last decade, the size of the Army’s core recruitment pool— 16 to 24 year-olds—in the United Kingdom has remained steady at about 7 million potential recruits. I am not suggesting that the Army seeks to recruit them all, but that is the cohort. The stability of this demographic is projected to continue—it will not go down—but the targeted strength of the Army has reduced by 29% from 102,000 in 2011 to a planned 72,500 by 2025. In broad terms, for every four new soldiers the Army needed to recruit and retain a decade ago, it needs only three now, drawn from a demographic that has stayed about the same size The Army’s own evidence to the judicial review—which failed because of the terms of the Equality Act, not because the distinction was not discrimination—was that, if it lost those recruits for those extra two years, it would then need to recruit 40 more recruits each year. That was the evidence that it put in. I cannot take all these complicated figures to their logical conclusions, but it suggests to me that the problem is solved for the Army. I do not see what the justification is now for continuing with this discrimination. The Army should follow the logic of its own junior entry review of 2019, which is to change the terms in which they sign up 16 year-olds into the service.