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Armed Forces Bill

Often, on operations, an individual will be given an order to accomplish a mission that is phrased in absolute terms. Sometimes that mission will be close to impossible to achieve. But the order is given in the expectation that the soldier will do everything that he can to accomplish it. If Amendment No. 9 were to be accepted, a soldier would face prosecution every time he failed to accomplish a particular mission. That cannot be right; and I am sure that it is not what the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, seeks to achieve. For the reasons that I have given, we are therefore not able to support the amendment, although I look forward to hearing from the Minister an explanation of what the phrase ““use his utmost exertions”” means in practice. Amendment No. 10, by removing the words ““despondent or alarmed””, would confine the offence of misconduct on operations, under this subsection, to communicating with people to commit an offence under subsections (1) to (4). This would narrow the offence considerably. It is currently worded to catch people who are damaging morale. While the language seems archaic, there needs to be something in the Bill to catch individuals who are damaging morale. The maintenance of morale is one of the key principles of operational effectiveness and it needs to be protected under service law. Amendments Nos. 11 and 12 extend the offence of obstructing operations to anyone, not only to those subject to service law. I agree with the sentiments expressed by my noble friend Lord Attlee. I will be interested to hear from the Minister what safeguards there are in ordinary civilian law to protect military operations from being jeopardised by civilians, and whether he believes those existing safeguards are sufficient. I have the greatest difficulty with Amendment No. 14.