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Armed Forces Personnel

I think that there is an element of confusion between post-operational tour leave and in-tour rest and recuperation. In that exchange of correspondence, we mostly debated in-tour rest and recuperation, and I think that the Chief of the Defence Staff was referring largely to that in his public remarks. I am sorry if the Chief of the Defence Staff does not speak privately to the Minister about his concerns and prefers to put his comments in the public domain, but he said what he said, and we happen to agree with him. While I absolutely accept that we do not live in an ideal world, overstretch is a reality, and I am afraid that that is a symptom of it. There is a general feeling among members of the armed forces that the Government are not necessarily always on their side. That was picked up by our military covenant commission. The creation of the post of Director of Service Prosecutions and the appointment of a candidate with no obvious military experience and unknown sympathies did not help to deal with that perception, and I hope the Minister will accept that perception is very important indeed. The Director of Service Prosecutions was hired last year and will assume his full duties in the autumn. We have discussed that delay in Committee, but perhaps the Minister will tell the House why there has been such a delay and what Mr. Houlder has been doing with his time. Hopefully he has been acquainting himself with the Army, Navy and Air Force, and attending to his single service duties. Over Christmas, separate bilateral status of forces agreements were signed by Baghdad and the United States, the United Kingdom and NATO. A further SOFA with Australia was refused by Canberra. We have it on the very best authority that the NATO and US SOFAs are remarkably similar and give better protection to troops, including the 15 UK troops operating as part of the small NATO contingent in Iraq, than the UK SOFA. The message received by our men and women is that their Government are less exercised about them than the US or, indeed, NATO. Ministers must act to ensure that our military does not suffer from the pervasive idea that personnel operating in the most difficult circumstances are backed by the Government only in so far as they provide a politically obliging backdrop. When things get tough, what are our people to think if Ministers' first instinct is publicly to blame officers in the field, who traditionally cannot answer back? Nobody should be in any doubt about the damage that that sort of thing does to the morale of our fighting forces and I sincerely hope that lessons have been learned. I recognise the national recognition study, in so far as it suggests the Government understand the need to inculcate the armed forces into the public imagination. The military covenant commission considered that in some depth and reflected the fact that the most important citizens as far as forming opinions are concerned are those currently at school. I wholeheartedly support the involvement of our armed forces in schools, as the Defence Committee appears to have done in its July 2008 report. I utterly condemn the suggestion by some teachers' representatives—however veiled—that soldiers in schools are somehow sinister. The suggestion that these laudable public servants and first-rate role models should not be welcomed on to publicly owned and run premises is frankly obscene. It is no good Ministers singing the praises of the troops on the one hand and failing to condemn the prejudices of the left on the other. In that spirit, I hope that the Government will wish to emulate the UK GI Bill unveiled by my hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) in September, which draws from the troops to teachers experience in the States. It addresses two needs, namely the need to facilitate the employment of people leaving the armed forces and the need for positive role models to whom children will relate. The Minister will know that I have in the past decried the disappearance of school visits teams in favour of the e-learning tool Defence Dynamics. In my view, interacting with an e-learning tool is no substitute for interacting with real people. What review has the Minister undertaken of the e-learning tool, which had its first anniversary in September? Have the overwhelming majority of packages been left to gather e-dust? As the Minister suggested, nothing is more important to service families than the education of their children, yet authorities that have to cater for substantial numbers of service children find they are out of pocket because of the cost drivers that they bring. My own authority, Wiltshire, does the best it can to smooth that, but it is a challenge.