Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)

My Lords, I shall speak very briefly to this set of amendments, really to provide some balance, because I feel that we should hear both sides of the argument. The noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, in introducing these amendments, said that the commissioner should not be visiting without the Secretary of State being aware, and I entirely agree with that. Obviously, the Secretary of State is the person with political responsibility, who needs to know what is going on and whether the commissioner has identified a potential problem. However, not being aware is not the same as having seven days’ notice. There is a very large gap between those two things. What we have just heard from the noble and gallant Lord about the commanding officer having the right to deny access is, I am aware, not directly in line with these amendments. However, on day one in Committee we talked about how the ombudsman, as structured, has not worked and has not had sufficient powers. We have to be careful to make sure that we are not putting a commissioner in the same position here. We have to be realistic: there may be a systemic issue, such as those we talked about on the previous day in Committee, and a concern about the treatment of female service people. We might hope that a commander would always want that issue to be exposed and understood, but we cannot guarantee that, and it is really important that we do not disempower the commissioner with changes to this Bill before they are even created and put in place.