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Armed Forces Bill

My Lords, like the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mayhew, I do not have the same first-hand experience of service discipline as many of the noble and gallant Lords taking part in this debate. It is 50 years since I completed my national service in the Navy. My excuse for taking part is that, more recently, 30 years ago when serving in another place, I served on the Select Committee considering the Armed Forces Bill of 1976; and the very special procedure that the other place uses for considering these quinquennial Bills is a useful introduction and education to the range of issues of service discipline that we are considering here today. Indeed, five years ago in this House, when we were considering the previous Armed Forces Bill, I timorously suggested that there might be value in there being a Joint Select Committee of the two Houses to carry out the pre-legislative scrutiny of these quinquennial Bills. I have read with considerable interest and benefit the report of the Select Committee in another place and in particular the evidence of the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Boyce. He said that there should be a tri-service Act which maintains options for ““tolerable variation””. That is a rather satisfactory outcome of this legislation. Indeed, I will have to think hard about the points made by my noble friend Lord Thomas of Gresford on the composition of courts martial, because that is one of the tolerable options and variations. Probably in normal cases the majority of the members of a court martial would come from the service of the individual whose case was being considered. We will need to come back to that point. Perhaps there are arguments in favour of my noble friend’s point of view. The other point about the Bill is that it is an enormous operation transforming the structure of service discipline. It is an enormous tribute that we have the Bill. Will the Minister say how long it will take us to introduce it? It is a large and complex operation and, as has been suggested, it will be necessary for people to get to know something about the new procedures. These things cannot necessarily be carried out overnight. When we go through the Bill we see that a great deal of it depends on regulations. The Minister himself made a point about Clause 127(2)(e), which is a complex matter that will be determined by the regulations. I wonder how far we will be likely to be able to see or draft the regulations when we come to consider the Bill in detail in Committee, because it seems that a number of the points, and points of substance, including the issue of the roles and definition of commanding officers are matters to be prescribed. It would be useful if we could see those before we come to make our final conclusions. One thing that I am particularly pleased about is the fact that the Government changed their mind in the Commons about annual renewal of the Armed Forces Act. The Act is to be renewed by order every year, maintaining a very long-standing historical principle whereby the Armed Forces are authorised once a year by both Houses of Parliament. The lapse of that provision, as was originally proposed and was strongly argued against in the Select Committee, would have been a mistake. Only yesterday, we saw in the Government’s response to the Deepcut review how far they have moved in developing a commissioner of military complaints. It will be necessary to examine in some detail the specific amendments that the Government table on this point to discover whether there has been a significant change in response to Nicholas Blake’s report, or to what extent this is little more than a cosmetic change. We shall need to give a good deal of consideration to that. From what has been said so far, and what I suspect will be said in later contributions, there will be plenty of opportunity for detailed consideration of this Bill in the Committee of the whole House to which it is to be committed later this evening. But I join others in welcoming an important step forward in developing a framework for military discipline and, like others, pay tribute to those who are going to be subject to it—our very gallant servicemen of all three services.