Armed Forces Act 2006 (Continuation) Order 2025

Considered in Grand Committee

Moved by

That the Grand Committee do consider the Armed Forces Act 2006 (Continuation) Order 2025.

My Lords, the purpose of this order is to continue into force, for another year, the legislation that governs the Armed Forces—the Armed Forces Act 2006. By way of background, Parliament renews the Armed Forces Act every five years through primary legislation. This first happened in 2011, then in 2016 and most recently in 2021. It will next be renewed in 2026. However, in the intervening years, an annual Order in Council, such as the one before us today, must be approved by both Houses. This will keep the Act in force for a further year, but for no later than 14 December 2026, when the present Act is due to expire. A new Armed Forces Act will therefore be required to be in place by December 2026 to renew the 2006 Act for a further five years, and then we will resume the practice of yearly renewals.

Having detailed the legislative framework for the draft order, I wish to turn to some of what lies at the heart of our Armed Forces. After announcing the largest sustained increase in defence spending since the Cold War, we recently unveiled our comprehensive strategic defence review, which declares clearly this Government’s intent to meet the threats we are facing and return the UK’s Armed Forces to a state of war- fighting readiness. This is why we are putting people at the heart of our defence plans. As set out in the strategic defence review, there will need to be a whole-of-society approach—wider participation in national resilience and renewing the nation’s contract with those who serve. In support of that approach, it is therefore essential that we improve the recruitment and retention of our personnel. This is why the Government have made the largest pay increase for serving personnel in more than two decades.

We will expand opportunities for young people to experience more of what the Armed Forces have to offer, delivering a 30% increase in cadets and introducing a voluntary gap year scheme. Further to this, we have brought back 36,000 military homes from the private sector as part of plans to transform Armed Forces accommodation, while we will also deliver a generational renewal of military accommodation with at least £7 billion of funding this Parliament, including over £1.5 billion of new investment for rapid work to fix the poor state of forces family housing. We are intensifying efforts to root out bullying and harassment, which have, as we all know, no place in our Armed Forces.

Against the backdrop of improving support for veterans, as exemplified by the new VALOUR programme, which will see VALOUR regional field officers working closely with local services and local government bodies on the application of the principles of the Armed Forces covenant for the betterment of our veterans. We will be updating kit and equipment across all three services to ensure that our nation and those who serve and will be serving in the future are ready to fight the war of tomorrow. That will mean harnessing artificial intelligence, drones, cyber technologies and other innovations alongside more traditional approaches to land, sea and air warfare to make us stronger and safer, because tomorrow’s conflicts will belong to the smartest and most innovative, as the war in Ukraine has shown and is showing.

My Lords, I support this continuation order. As has been explained, it keeps His Majesty’s Armed Forces legal until after the Armed Forces Bill in 2026 is enacted. The Minister has given a good trailer for the debate that we will have on Friday on the strategic defence review, so I will not respond on that.

I would like to make just one point. When the 2021 Act was being debated, I, Lord Mackay of Clashfern and other noble Lords pressed for the obligation to have “due regard” to the Armed Forces covenant to be extended from local authorities to include central government departments. We quoted, as examples in need of central government consideration, Gulf War syndrome and the right of abode in the UK for Hong Kong Military Service Corps veterans who had served full time in the Armed Forces. A compromise was reached, and the issue was set aside for further examination.

The present Government have made it clear from the outset that they would extend the responsibility for supporting the covenant to central government. This is most welcome—it will, I assume, be legally formalised when the 2026 Bill is being considered—but the importance and reach of the Armed Forces covenant has had a very long incubation. I was one of the first to raise an amendment to the covenant legislation, which I tabled to the 2011 Bill nearly 15 years ago.

My Lords, I support this continuation order. I start by declaring my interests as a director of the Army Reserve and the chairman of the Reserve Forces review in 2030. I will ask a couple of questions but, in looking forward to next year’s Armed Forces Act, I also want to make a couple of suggestions.

Historically, we have always focused on our obligations under Article 5 of the NATO treaty. This is why we have a relatively small regular Army but one that is at high readiness and is expeditionary in nature: we always plan to fight a relatively short war in continental Europe. Equally, it is why we have a relatively small reserve. However, our planning assumptions have been called into question as a result of the war in Ukraine, which has been an extended campaign, meaning that we have to look carefully at both regeneration and reconstitution. It is also, in effect, a war between two reserve armies.

I absolutely welcome the SDR because it has, for the first time, forced us to look seriously at Article 3 and homeland defence—something where, in the past, we have perhaps not paid attention to the detail in the way we should have done. It is clear that, with the focus now on both Article 5 and Article 3, the demand on the workforce is going to increase significantly. That is recognised in the SDR. I was pleased to see that one of the recommendations was that the size of the reserves should increase by 20%—albeit with the caveat of “when we can afford it”—but, looking forward, I have some concerns.

First, we have the most wonderful department in the Ministry of Defence, as well as wonderful civil servants, but it is not a department that is set up for legislation. I wish to share my own experiences, having been the Minister responsible for two of the previous Armed Forces Acts. When the time came, we sometimes struggled to make some of the provisions we wanted to make, because we simply ran out of time. So my first plea to the Minister is this: can we get ahead of this and make sure that the work is done? The last principal muscle move was in 2006, when the single services used to have three different sets of service law. We combined those into a single Armed Forces Act in 2006 and I am sensing, from where we are today, that the next Armed Forces Act will also have to be a significant piece of work. As your Lordships are probably aware, the regular Army and the Army Reserve are dealt with through two separate pieces of legislation, and delivering a whole-force solution adds complication. I fear that what we will have to do in the next Armed Forces Act is combine those two pieces of legislation into a single Act, which will be a lot of work.

To give just one example, in the Army Reserve we have no less than nine categories for reservists: part-time volunteer reserves, like me; officer training corps; specialist advisers; sponsored reserves; specialists; musicians; lateral entry reserves; specialist reserves; and, of course, the regular reserve. While it is possible to move between those categories, it is not easy and certainly not quick. That does not deliver the flexibility we need. If I have one plea for the next Armed Forces Act, it is that we simplify, simplify, simplify. We must make it more straightforward to access people and for them to move between different service categories so that we can use their talent.

As a practical example, all too often people join the Army Reserve not because they want to use their skill set but because they want to do something completely different. I recently met an Army platoon sergeant in an infantry battalion, who was actually a vet. There comes an age when you probably do not really want to jump in and out of trenches but to use your core skill set. However, the ability for him to transfer from being a sergeant in an infantry battalion to use his professional skill set as a vet is possible, but goodness me it is long winded and slow. We need to address that.

I have two other points. Through the Ministry of Defence Votes A, your Lordships will realise that Parliament sets the upper limit of the numbers of our Armed Forces. This is perfectly logical for the regular Army, because we have a fixed number and they all have to be paid for. However, we also fix the upper limit of the number of the reserves. I see no logic why, because they are entirely different. The control mechanism for the number of reserves is not how many we have, because we pay for them only when we use them, but the budget we allocate to the reserve, which we can divide as and when we need. There is no logic as to why we would have a maximum number, as the demand signal for the number of uniformed personnel will only go up and we have no specific figure to date for how many we will need for homeland defence. The upper limit for the volunteer reserve and the regular reserve—those who have served in the regular Army but still have a reserve liability—in the reserve land forces is 67,580, for the Royal Naval Reserve and Royal Marines Reserve it is 23,420 and for the Royal Air Force reserves it is 17,450, according to this document. If you add all those up, I fear that the demand signal, once we factor in what we will need for homeland defence, is significantly more, so why are we artificially restricting ourselves to those numbers?

My final point is on funding. Fear not—this is a plea not for more funding but for consistent funding. The Ministry of Defence has one of the most complicated accounting processes that I have ever met. To try to simplify it, it is split into two: CDEL, or capital funding, and RDEL, or revenue funding. Within revenue funding, we have committed spend and uncommitted spend. Rightly, the pay and salaries of our regular Armed Forces come under committed spend; it cannot suffer in-year savings. While the pay rise is welcome, that goes into an increase in committed spend, which means that the amount of uncommitted spend reduces.

Of course, the Reserve Forces are funded through uncommitted spend. Therefore, every year, they are potentially subject to in-year savings. This is very complicated and difficult. It means that, although we say to an Army reservist, “We want you to come and do this staff job. We want you to commit to 120 days per year and reorganise your civilian career so that you can come and make your contribution. This is how many days you have to commit”, historically, through successive Governments, we have then turned around and said to them, “I’m very sorry but, because your funding is uncommitted, we’re going to have to cut the funding and you won’t be able to do as many days as you can do”. It will come as no surprise to anybody that, when it comes to retention, this is a major problem.

So my plea as we move forward is this: can we please treat all of our uniformed personnel on the same basis? We should treat, at the start of the financial year, the funding for those individuals—in the case of the reserves, it can simply be one pot of gold that we can then carve up—as committed funding. Only if it is committed funding can we then say to the reservists that we genuinely value them and can guarantee them a certain amount of work this year; that will mean us being able to retain them.

My Lords, I am acutely aware that I am likely to be interrupted by the Bells.

The statutory instrument in front of us is one that we are very used to. I was listening to the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig of Radley, and the noble Lord, Lord Lancaster, and thinking that I am obviously very new to these annual events because I have been here only since 2014; you feel that you are getting older, as they seem to speed up every year. In many ways, there is little to be said on this Armed Forces Act 2006 (Continuation) Order because, by definition, we all want our Armed Forces to continue. If Parliament did not approve the SI, we would still have Armed Forces, but they would not be subject to enforcement and so on. Inevitably, I wish this statutory instrument well; I also pay tribute to His Majesty’s Armed Forces and everything that they do for us.

As the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig, pointed out, the Minister seemed in his opening to be trialling his speech for the SDR on Friday; perhaps he is aware that the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, will probably steal any thunder that any of us may feel we have. I think that it is a good thing to rehearse some of the SDR issues.

In the light of that and the Minister’s comments about forces accommodation, he has bandied around some figures but is he sure that the money will be wisely spent and that, at the end of this Parliament, he and any other defence Minister will be able to say that forces accommodation is now up to standard? We are about to have a Division, I believe, on decent home standards for His Majesty’s Armed Forces. We are told that the standard of forces accommodation meets decent home standards, yet the feedback is so often that there is black mould and there are all sorts of questions about the accommodation. What security and confidence can the Minister give us on that?

The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig of Radley, also reminded us that the last time we had an Armed Forces Act 2006 (Continuation) Order, we discussed— I was part of the discussion, and I have raised this matter on several occasions—bringing the Armed Forces covenant under the purview of central government and making central government accountable. Like the noble and gallant Lord, I welcome the Government’s commitments on this and wonder when we can expect to find out more about them. As promised, here is the Division.

My Lords, the Committee will adjourn for 10 minutes.

Sitting suspended for a Division in the House.

My Lords, as all noble Lords are back, we may as well resume.