Lord Lancaster of Kimbolton (Con)

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate. I offer my congratulations to Emily and James, and I look forward very much to the engagement party next month—it will be fun. Equally, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Carberry of Muswell Hill, on her excellent maiden speech. I have to say that I was given exactly the same advice about drinking Guinness when I joined the Army—other drinks are available, and we will hear from the noble Lord, Lord Beamish, in due course. I start by declaring my interest as a humble reservist and head of the Army Reserve—I have been a proud reservist now for some 37 years now. Indeed, my early career was under the then Group Captain Stirrup at RAF Marham, filling holes in his runways. He is not here to hear that, but I certainly remember him, though he will not remember me. I shall make three brief points, which I will expand on later. The first is that while the service complaints system has had a troubled birth, it has evolved into a pretty good system. As we lift and shift it into this new Bill, I hope that we resist tinkering with it and, perhaps, moving two steps backwards. Let us be very careful about that. Secondly, I really welcome the aspects relating to the family. I am a firm believer that we recruit the soldier but we retain the family. I am slightly concerned that we raise expectations as to what the commissioner will be able to deliver. I do not want to overpromise and then underdeliver; at the end of the day, it is about money, and I fear not that we may lead people down the garden path but that, as the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, says, we do not have the money to correct the problems. My third point is simply around a technical amendment when it comes to the application of the Bill to Gibraltar, or not. We have made that mistake in the past with a previous Armed Forces Bill, and if I have time I will expand on that. What has not been described fully is that, while the ombudsman has an important role in the service complaints system, the majority of the work is done by the single services themselves—and an awful lot of work goes on. There are hundreds of complaints each year, and that takes an awful lot of staff time. I will speak predominantly about the Army, because it is the service I know, and it has had to recruit 22 extra posts in recent years just to deal with this work, and very few cases actually get to the ombudsman. I worked closely with one of the earlier ombudsmen, Nicola Williams, when I was Veterans Minister, and I know that we have made progress. However, we judge the success of the system through three tests: is it efficient, is it effective, and is it fair? The Army has done a lot of work in the last two years. Is it efficient? On the target of 90% of service complaints being dealt with within 24 weeks, for years we were stagnating at around 44%. When the next results come out, we will be up to 70%, so progress is being made. However, I emphasise how much work this takes to deliver. Is it effective? Well, how do you judge effectiveness? While 45% of career management complaints have been upheld, 40% of bullying, harassment and discrimination complaints have been upheld— I will come back to that—and 54% of pay and pension complaints have been upheld. They are being upheld, so it looks like the system is becoming more effective. I want to highlight the case of Major Milroy, an Army reservist who won an employment tribunal over differential pay compared with his regular counterparts and not being able to access a pension until 2015 when the rules changed in 2005. My concern is not the case itself, because the MoD is seeking to repeal it, but that over 200 reservists felt obliged to make a service complaint on the back of that because they were concerned that if they did not, they would be timed out. It goes to the heart of sometimes poor communication from the Ministry of Defence about what is required and what is not. Finally, is the process fair? The number of appeals is down, which implies that there is greater fairness, but we still have concerns over bullying, harassment and discrimination. Data suggests that a higher proportion of complaints come from minority groups and women. Following the Wigston review in 2019, with 36 recommendations and, as the Minister highlighted, the tragic case of Gunner Beck in 2021, with the coroner’s report just two weeks ago, clearly much more work needs to be done. One of the concerns, as the HCDC report in 2021 on women in the forces said, is a lack of trust in the process—89% of women did not feel that they could make a service complaint, because it would not be taken seriously. I am pleased that some progress has been made. This is a significant change. Now, complaints within the Army do not go through the chain of command and the commanding officer—often, people did not want to complain to their commanding officer—and 80% of them go to the Army service complaints secretariat. That is a much better process, where people do not feel constrained by their chain of command. However, as ever, there is an unintended consequence—speedy resolution is now not as easy as it was, and in some cases that is exactly what people want. Also, the number of complaints is up, but partly because we have the My Complaint app and better publicity. That complaints are going up is not necessarily because the situation is worse but because people understand the system and are using it, so that is probably a good thing. I am running out of time. Like the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, I want to say a word about accommodation. We know that accommodation is poor. We are prioritising service accommodation over training estate or the Army Reserve, but I worry that we will now have lots of complaints about accommodation which we already know about. Unless we are prepared to commit the money to sort it out, we will be raising expectations. It may be a radical thought, but the Bill’s provisions are due to come in in 2026 and the increase in defence spending in 2027. I do wonder whether we should delay for a year to make sure that we can meet expectations.