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Armed Forces Bill

Amendment No. 187, on which I can be brief, would extend the service jurisdiction to civilians in military aircraft before it is necessary to do so. That is why we do not believe that it is necessary. Speaking more fully on Amendment No. 188, the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, asked whether we believed that the schedule was fit for purpose. We do, since the extent to which the new Act should apply to civilians has been very carefully considered by the Ministry of Defence. The starting point was to identify those civilians with a sufficient connection with the Armed Forces to justify making them subject to a limited range of offences under service discipline. Two key requirements emerged from that. First, that civilians should be subject to this limited system if they are physically located with the forces, for example, when resident or staying in service accommodation, or travelling in Her Majesty’s ships afloat. Secondly, even if not physically located with the forces, civilians should be subject to service discipline if the nature of their relationship with the forces is such as to justify it. Thus, for example, the jurisdiction should extend to persons working in the support of the forces. I have seen for myself in operations the vital work that those civilians do, for example, in the support of our communications network. The noble Earl’s substantive amendment would not cover the range and diversity of the civilian workforce connected to the Armed Forces; for example, journalists, freelance consultants, employees of welfare bodies such as the British Red Cross, or the Navy, Army and Air Force institutes, to name but a few, would be excluded. More broadly, the amendment does not provide flexibility for the Defence Council to categorise civilians on a case-by-case basis or to specify geographical or physical locations to where service disciplines should apply. In short, the noble Earl’s amendment is undesirable and I hope that he will not press it.