Baroness Goldie (Con)

My Lords, we are getting into the home straight, so I will try to accelerate the pace. The effect of Amendment 35, tabled in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Minto, would be to add retired holders of a qualifying rank to those eligible to sit as members of a court martial. The problem this amendment addresses is a simple one of numbers: court martial panels must be drawn from officers of sufficient seniority and, crucially, sufficient distance from the defendant to ensure impartiality. Where the defendant is of relatively junior rank, that pool is large enough, but where the defendant is a senior officer, the pool of serving officers senior enough and unconnected enough to sit in judgment shrinks dramatically. The Committee will recall that, when the service justice system last had to try an officer of very senior rank, the court administration unit struggled to assemble a panel at all, precisely because every available serving officer of sufficient seniority had some prior connection to the defendant, whether through shared courses, shared postings or simply the small world that senior rank inevitably creates. It was only the defendant’s departure from the service by the time of trial that allowed the difficulty to be resolved through the use of civilians, a workaround unavailable had he still been serving. This is an example that the Minister himself used to defend the Government’s changes to the court martial through the Armed Forces (Court Martial) (Amendment) Rules 2024. When this amendment was debated in the other place, the Minister responded at some length on a related but distinct point concerning the automatic qualification of former warrant officers who receive a commission. That is a fair point, so far as it goes, but it does not address the underlying difficulty my honourable friends identified, which was the shortage of eligible serving officers when the defendant is senior. I do not believe that concern has yet been answered, and I hope the Minister will use this opportunity to address the point. The other matter raised in Committee in the other place by the then Minister, Al Carns, was that there was no capacity issue for the courts martial, but that was not the experience of my honourable friends, who undertook a visit to Portsmouth as part of their work on the Committee, nor the recollection of the Liberal Democrat Member of the Committee. While capacity in the service justice system might not be the most severe problem in the world at the moment, what is to say it will not become so? So why not safeguard against that possibility by allowing retired officers to also partake in the court martial? This is a fairly straightforward and perfectly well-intended proposal and I hope the Minister might be able to look on it with some favour. I beg to move.