Armed Forces (Flexible Working) Bill [HL]

Earl Attlee Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 11th July 2017 Lords Chamber

[Earl Attlee (Con)]

My Lords, I declare that I have no interests to declare because my commission was retired last Friday. Ill-informed public perception might be that my noble friend the Minister, if I do not toe his line, could have me called up and sent to South Georgia to be a lookout. Of course, we know perfectly well that he can do no such thing.

[Noble Lords]

Oh!

[Earl Attlee]

I am confident that my noble friend cannot do any such thing. I am also reasonably confident that he would not do so.

I strongly support the Bill for the reasons so expertly laid out by my noble friend the Minister. When my noble friend is on the Government Front Bench, he can make the Bill look like the best thing since sliced bread. But of course when he is on the Opposition Front Bench, he can make the Bill look like it is full of holes. But this is a good Bill.

Some have argued that the Government would not do this if there was plenty of resource for the MoD. That may be true but there is nothing wrong with giving the system a good wire-brushing. Even if we did have plenty of money for defence, I believe that we should still be doing this. My noble friend the Minister was at pains to make it clear that this was not a cost-saving measure. I accept that claim but I have to tell the House that it will save money because if we avoid someone prematurely retiring from the services, we will not need to train a replacement and training people is extremely expensive.

The noble Lord, Lord Touhig, and others referred to the loss of income for service personnel on a reduced commitment. He is right that their income will be reduced, but this could be offset by significantly improved circumstances for the spouse. Perhaps the new arrangements would facilitate the spouse securing a much more advantageous employment position, perhaps just by being able to give a commitment that the family will not need to move to another location.

How will it work? I am in a position to suggest to the House how these arrangements might work, and in a way that my noble friend the Minister is not really able to. The first point is that these new arrangements will not really be applicable to junior service people in their first few years of service. We need to remember that in the Army we have large numbers of soldiers who serve only three, four, five or six years, and this system is really not for them. In the Army, junior NCOs cannot continue to serve past a certain age if they do not get promoted to sergeant. It is called the manning control point. The reason is that we cannot afford to have 45 year-old lance corporals in an infantry unit. However, suppose an RAF flight sergeant, a highly trained technician, realised that a reduced commitment would enable him to continue to serve in circumstances where he would otherwise have to retire prematurely. He, or she, would apply through his unit. However, most importantly, I expect that the decision about whether to grant the application would be made by the RAF personnel centre, not at unit level. The decision would take account of the overall needs of the service, and other services will obviously have similar arrangements.

The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Walker of Aldringham, asked about how unit cohesion would be maintained. In my opinion, it is very unlikely that flexible working would be granted to a solider serving on regimental duty in a unit, for precisely the reasons the noble and gallant Lord outlined. However, I very much doubt that the Minister will back me up on this point because he will want to maintain maximum flexibility. That is the reality: you cannot be part-time at regimental duty.

What gets me excited is Ministers claiming that combat effectiveness will not be reduced by having women serve as combat infantrymen in the Army. It is simply ridiculous. I will need to have a friendly chat with the noble Baroness, Lady Burt, about the physical requirements of military service. Even more ludicrous is female Royal Marine commandos. I have never in my entire life been fit and strong enough to be commando trained, and despite this, until I turned 45, there were very few women who were as strong as me. I cannot understand how you are going to have female Royal Marine commandos without reducing combat effectiveness.

Going back to the decision made by the service personnel branch regarding whether to grant flexible employment conditions, the most important consideration will be whether there are sufficient deployable personnel available in the relevant career employment group or equivalent. There will be input from the unit, but the decision will be made by career managers at the centre.

I touched on the issue of high-volume junior ranks, but numerous staff and training appointments are not deployable. They are eminently suitable for part-time working arrangements. We must not forget that one of the flexibilities is a geographical restriction, so perhaps an officer could be posted to be commandant of a training camp. All he needs is an agreement that he will not be posted somewhere else, and he could continue to serve. Why should we lose really experienced officers just because of their family and personal circumstances?

I give my full support to the Bill, but despite that we will need to look at it very carefully indeed, as we look at every Bill in Committee and at later stages.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Earl, Lord Howe, for introducing the Bill and for the briefing he provided. He has always been careful to provide very thorough briefings. However, the constant theme that has arisen during this debate is the lack of detail. Many concerns have been raised as a result of the great trouble that we have envisaging how the measure will work in practice and be compatible with military requirements.

It is a pleasure to wind up this debate. Although it does not have the longest of speaking lists, it was a matter of “feel the quality, not the width”. It was good that noble and gallant Lords spoke in a way that brought us up short. We so often have conversations about the military as though we are talking about industrial production and it is just another profession. The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, hit the point when he said that this is about targeted military action. The noble Lord, Lord Sterling, talked about having the finest force in the world. Let us not lose sight of the fact that the military is about having personnel who are able to kill people, and who are willing to risk their own lives doing so. Other than a very small part of the police force, no other sections of our community are employed to do this; it is a very special way of working.

There were one or two outlying speeches, but curiously enough they came back to this special point. The noble Lord, Lord Dannatt, talked about mental health and its problems. The noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, talked about family support. I think this comes back to the fact that when you put people in these difficult environments, which we believe is essential to our nationhood, for want of a better term, you have to peculiarly and specially support them. So I look forward to possible amendments from the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, and, indeed, from the noble Lord, Lord Dannatt, if he ventures some—because we should treat these people whom we are asking to do special tasks in a special way.

Talking about individual speeches, I am afraid that I must dissociate myself and these Benches from the remarks of the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, which apparently suggested that women should be excluded from various tasks. I trust the military—

[Earl Attlee]

My Lords, to be clear: certain tasks. The Liberal Democrat Front Bench spokesman alluded to my speech, and did so very carefully. There are plenty of roles in the Armed Forces that women are brilliant at, but in my opinion there are some to which they are not suited.

[Lord Tunnicliffe]

I thank the noble Earl for that intervention. I will go on. Where it is reasonably practical, I do not believe that it is appropriate to exclude women on the basis that they are female. I believe that it is entirely appropriate for the military to set standards of physical performance required for a task. I entirely accept that will mean that in some areas the probability of women achieving those standards may be quite low, but the test should be: are they capable and is this reasonably practical? In that sense, I dissociate myself from the noble Earl’s remarks.

But underlying all this, we support the principle behind the Bill, as I think does everybody. The Armed Forces have distinct, often highly demanding, working conditions. However, the distinct nature of life in the forces does not mean that we should not offer our loyal service men and women opportunities to work flexibly when circumstances allow. The world is changing about us and our institutions must change. My noble friend Lord Brooke described how reluctant organisations had subsequently found flexible working to be of value to them and their employees, and how problems could be overcome. Nevertheless, while accepting the general principle, we have reservations.

We have concerns that this shift may present a slippery slope that eventually coerces or even forces service personnel to reduce their hours to save the MoD money. I have total faith that the noble Earl, Lord Howe, would not do this, but I do not have total faith that subsequent generations would not do it. In my career I have employed large volumes of labour to do jobs where the demand changed. Frequently, I would have given my right arm to have flexibility—to have that labour solely when I needed it and not to have to employ it when I did not. Flexibility is a way of saving money. Indeed, a number of noble Lords mentioned that—including the noble Earl, Lord Attlee. The noble Earl, Lord Howe, himself said that while this is not a money-saving issue, it will save money in recruitment and retention. But the fact that it is there and the continuous pressures on budgets will mean that people will be tempted—and it will not be straightforward; it will be pressures at various unit levels—to coerce and to use these devices to save money.

We on these Benches worry that junior personnel, who have already been subject to pay caps, may lose out if the introduction of flexible working is used to justify a decrease in the X-factor payment. Most of all, however, we worry about the lack of detail in the Government’s proposals. Once again, I thank the Minister and his officials for the documents that they have provided so far. However, given that this commitment originates from the Government’s 2015 strategic defence and security review, it is disappointing that your Lordships’ House has not been presented with either a more substantial Bill or indicative regulations. The department’s policy statement mentions that these proposals were drawn up following “consultation with service personnel”. Again, we have not seen the detail. The noble Earl, Lord Howe, referred to a trial. Where was the trial, what sort of units were involved, and what was the impact on those units?

The noble Baroness, Lady Jolly, said, over and over again, that we need to see the detail. The Minister should know that there is one thing your Lordships’ House does well, and that is detail. We need that in the Bill. I therefore hope that the Government will be more generous in providing information before Committee. Colleagues have asked legitimate questions during today’s debate, and I hope that they will receive detailed answers, either in the Minister’s remarks or by letter.

While the scope of the Bill is narrow, this debate has given us an opportunity to consider some related issues. In their 2010 SDSR, the Government committed to cutting 25,000 civilian jobs in the MoD by 2015. Unfortunately for the former Defence Secretary and current Chancellor, a miscalculation necessitated a further reduction of 3,000 civilian roles in order to come in on budget. Previous Governments of both parties have pursued a thoroughly sensible programme of getting the military out of uniform where they were effectively doing civilian jobs. It was a splendid programme that meant that you did not have people in uniform doing certain jobs, particularly in the increasingly complex areas of procurement, programming and all the various support roles the modern military needs. Instead they went into civilian jobs, where they could have a lifestyle like civilians, with the same flexibilities, and in general they cost less. There was almost a philosophy building up that people in the military—people in uniform—were the ones who did the real, active military stuff. They were deployed overseas at notice, fought in the front line and manned combat platforms. I wish that that had gone on, because if it had, we would have a clearer distinction to talk about now.

Combined with the lowest-ever recorded levels of satisfaction with the basic rate of pay and pension benefits, it is little surprise that some see their future outside the Armed Forces. I hope that this is one of the areas being looked at as part of the wider Armed Forces People Programme, because the introduction of flexible working can be only part of the answer to the ongoing retention problem.

We all know that service personnel form close bonds with their units. These bonds see our service men and women go to great lengths for each other, working not only for Queen and country but for each other. This includes, at times, laying down their life to save that of a comrade. The noble Lord, Lord Dannatt, said that these arrangements must be used sparingly; the noble Baroness, Lady Jolly, said that there would possibly be unintended consequences; and the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Walker, was uncomfortable about how these geographic arrangements would work. We hope that all these issues can be overcome but, before we pass this legislation, we need to know just how it will apply.

This may not be a reason to oppose these measures but can the Minister confirm whether any thought has been given to the possible impact of some personnel in the same fighting unit having significantly different working patterns from those of their comrades? Can he say a few words about what steps, if any, would be taken by commanding officers to mitigate any issues that arose? The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig, talked about these matters and was worried about the concept of part-time working. He felt that the words themselves were somehow incompatible with commitment.

Can the Minister also commit to providing more information about the specific criteria against which applications will be judged and about how each of the forces will go about the constant task of assessing the compatibility of flexible working with their operational needs?

In conclusion, Labour supports any attempt to strengthen the rights of working people, whether in civilian life or in the Armed Forces. It is vital to ensure that the Armed Forces can recruit and retain the best talent. Providing flexible working opportunities has a potentially important part to play, but it is certainly not the only answer.

In the spirit of cross-party co-operation, referred to by my noble friend earlier, we very much look forward to working with the Minister and his team to improve this Bill and to improve the lives of our hard-working service men and women. However, we will need much more detail to understand exactly how the legislation will work.