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Armed Forces

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Baroness, Lady Park of Monmouth, for securing this important debate today. I have been associated with the Armed Forces on personnel issues for the past 15 years. My view is that we are at a critical stage in the compact and the relationship with our Armed Forces. We all remember when, under the Administration of the noble Baroness, Lady Thatcher, she had to instruct that a pay increase in double figures be awarded to the Armed Forces because they had fallen so far behind in the years before and that was affecting morale, recruitment and retention. That was a pretty simple and straightforward situation, which should not have been allowed to arise and had to be corrected by more money being found. The situation today is different and more complex, but we come to the same conclusion: more money is needed to help to resolve some of the issues that we have. In preparation for the debate, I looked at personnel issues from the time I was a member and chairman of the Armed Forces Pay Review Body and, indeed, the period of this Government’s administration. I came to the conclusion that the review body’s view that pay is not the key issue is absolutely right. This year, for instance, the review body awarded a 3.3 per cent basic increase, but, because of other allowances, that put 3.9 per cent on the overall wage bill, which is approximately double what the Chancellor of the Exchequer was looking for. The increase was not staged and it was met in full. That was not the case with other pay review bodies, so the particular circumstances of our Armed Forces have been recognised. The improvements in the pension scheme that we all considered a couple of years ago are certainly costing money and are a major improvement for the Armed Forces. The removal this year of the 100-day wait to qualify for the longer separation allowance is a major step forward, as indeed was the announcement made by the Secretary of State last year that from April 2006 there will be a tax-free bonus to personnel on operations of in excess of, say, £2,200 pounds. That is all very welcome. So, if it is not pay on the personnel side, what is causing what I would regard as a lack of morale—and I do not mean morale on operations; anyone who visits personnel on operations knows that they are more than 100 per cent committed and that morale is high—in the overall feel among the Armed Forces? Why is that so with the current pay situation? With my background, the first thing that you look for when you have that situation is whether pay is too low. If it is not necessarily pay, if, as the review body report says, between April last year and October we saw a doubling of the money deficit to well over 3 per cent, and if we have in the past year—2006—seen nearly 6 per cent of personnel in what are called general ranks leaving and nearly 4 per cent in officer ranks leaving, we have to do something about that. The situation is unsustainable, not only in the long term, but in the short and the medium terms. I remember when we were dealing with overstretch. Every one of the review body reports in the past 15 years has referred to overstretch. The MoD has had difficulty accepting that word; indeed, we tried to find other words to put the same case across. When considering overstretch and the time between operations, you are looking at the services as a whole, but that is misleading. You have to hone down into the operational services, which are only a proportion of that. Dealing with overstretch in overall percentages is in my view very misleading. We are having problems with recruitment, although I must say that the MoD’s method of marketing and recruitment has improved beyond recognition. I know that people are attracted to join the services when we are on operations. That is good, but we are missing out on younger people joining the services in the same numbers as they did. Perhaps for the first time for a very long time, we have our Armed Forces working in what are called operations but which I regard as a warfare situation. We are having to become used to reading and hearing on the news every day about people in the Armed Forces being killed. I know that when they sign up, they sign up to the fact that they may have to pay the ultimate price—with their lives—but to have this in increasing numbers in what is supposed to be a peacetime situation is very challenging. That spins off on the families, as the noble Baroness, Lady Park, rightly said. I think that that is one of the kernels of the problem, quite apart from the equipment issues, with which other noble Lords will deal. The families issue is increasingly difficult. I entirely recognise that the Government have done many things to improve the situation, but, unfortunately, we live in a changed society. People’s expectations are different and what families will now put up with is not what they would have in the past. There are areas in which we have not made as much progress as we should. For instance, accommodation is a running sore. The Government have put a lot of money into accommodation, but since 1997 rent for a lot of the lowest grade of service families accommodation has not been increased by the review body. Why? Because it did not feel that it could justify it; it was too embarrassed to ask for it. Since 1998, there has also been no increase in the basic grade, the lowest grade, of single living accommodation. So we are talking about a decade during which some accommodation has been absolutely appalling. That does not detract from the fact that a lot of investment has gone in and a lot of accommodation has improved, but that is no consolation to Armed Forces personnel who, unlike those in many other sectors of employment, are there for only a short time. For many of them, we are promising that we will invest, but they will be long gone before they benefit from that. We found that that was certainly an issue. The issue of access to social housing was raised. Personnel and their families move around. On access to health care, dentistry and schools, a lot has been done by the MoD in conjunction with the Department for Education and the Department of Health, but social housing is a real issue. It is a real issue because the £8,500, or just above, that people are now getting as a contribution to buying their own accommodation is totally inadequate and needs to be looked at. There, the MoD will be tied up with the rules on taxes and whether that is a benefit in kind. Ways must be found around that, because the civilian population’s access to social housing is also an issue and service personnel are often pushed to the back, so many of them have poor housing when they are in the services and no chance of social housing when they come out. I am a vice-president of the War Widows Association. We thought that we had a diminishing number of members, but that number is now going up. We are concerned—we have discussed this with the MoD, although it is not totally its responsibility—about the delay in inquests and the whole issue relating to coroners’ courts. We are discussing that with Ministers at the MoD and will continue to raise it. During the past couple of weeks, I have been in the United States, where I came across a disturbing situation. I met in a café what I thought were a load of bikers. One of them had the word ““Patriots”” on his motorbike. We asked what that meant and he said that, in the States now, when bereaved families are burying members of the Armed Forces, there are demonstrations at the funerals against those people having ever gone to war. Service personnel have no control over being sent to Iraq or Afghanistan, where some of them are killed. Their families then face demonstrations against them. The bikers were forming a protective barrier. Thank goodness we do not have that here. However, I know that our Armed Forces personnel and their families are criticised quite severely in the local pub or in their own town. I was delighted last night not by the outcome of the football match, although I know that the Minister is a football fanatic, but to have those 30 personnel at Wembley. We need to show more public support for our Armed Forces and I very much welcome the statement by General Dannatt in that regard. We in this House have a role to play in that support. I ask the Minister to take the following into account in the Government’s considerations. In the Falklands conflict, defence was apparently 5 per cent of GDP. It is now 2 per cent. Improvements that have been made since then for Armed Forces personnel have been taken from the general budget. I know that departments have to manage their budgets, but they cannot carry on doing that. In the current review, there needs to be recognition that the defence budget must increase and that an appropriate proportion of that needs to go to Armed Forces personnel and their families. Otherwise, the situation is unsustainable in the short, medium and longer terms.