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Army Barracks (Deaths)

: I am reluctant to give way, because I want to give time to the Minister to answer all queries, if the hon. Gentleman will forgive me. In the other place on 19 April, Lord Drayson made a specific commitment. He said that the Government expected to be able to respond to all the recommendations from the Blake report within two months. As the hon. Member for Dunfermline and West Fife (Willie Rennie) said, we are halfway through that process. It would be helpful if the Minister did not go through each recommendation in detail but gave us some idea about the progress that the Ministry of Defence has made and about whether we are on track to hear its full response to those 34 recommendations, as Lord Drayson said, by the end of May. The Armed Forces Bill is a vehicle to implement some of those changes. I understand that it will be back before the House in the week commencing 22 May, which is only a couple of weeks away. That does not give the Ministry of Defence very long to publish any amendments to the legislation, so that Members may have a proper opportunity to study them. I should be grateful if the Minister outlined the Ministry of Defence's thinking about whether it will hit that timetable, and when in good time it intends to publish any amendments, so that the debate can take place. One thing that came out of studying the documents was that there has been a significant number of reports and investigations. A number of Members have today repeated the call for a public inquiry, and it is worth restating the Opposition's position, which my hon. Friend the Member for Woodspring (Dr. Fox) laid out in response to the statement from the Minister of State. There are those who believe that a public inquiry is essential for restoring public confidence in the Army. I do not think that there is a general lack of confidence in the British Army. There may be specific anxieties, but I do not believe that a public inquiry would deal with them, nor, in particular, with some of the media reporting that would inevitably attend it. An inquiry would be a vehicle for ill-informed speculation that could make the situation worse. Given that some of the investigations were poorly handled in the first place, and given the suspicion at the beginning of the process, from the families' point of view, they may always quite understandably have a nagging suspicion that there is something that they have not been told. I am not convinced that a public inquiry would address that issue.