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Sir Nicholas Lyell: I think that my hon. Friend has conceded a point that he need not have. Although he is on the Select Committee and I am not, it is my understanding that the Bill would mean that an appeal tribunal could not increase a sentence. To that extent, a defendant would have nothing to lose from appealing.
Mr. Blunt: That is indeed the case. The point that I failed to make clearly enough was that the appeal process cannot increase the sentence that a commanding officer has given; it can only reduce it.
One reason for the additional 55 royal military policemen is to make watertight a case on commanding officer's orders against the soldier, sailor or airman who is before him. At present, the justice system, as administered by commanding officers, is reasonably rough and ready, but it is seen as just. In the normal course of events, their decisions are not appealed against. If one adds to it the bureaucratic necessity that the case against individuals must be watertight when it is taken before a judge advocate at a summary appeal court, we shall find that the bureaucratic burden placed on the adjutant, the regimental sergeant major and the chief clerk in organising the paperwork for ordinary commanding officer's orders will have a seriously deleterious effect on the administration of discipline in a unit.
When the Select Committee tried to obtain information from the Ministry of Defence, we were told that the figures for the number of cases that go to summary court
martial related only to those that resulted in a report on a individual's regimental record. Those numbers have dropped to 2,000 in 1999, and, when I heard that figure, I thought, "Good Lord. My regiment must have taken a good proportion of all the summary justice cases in the armed services." However, the wider figure is much greater. There are 24,000 cases a year of the ordinary process of soldiers appearing in front of their squadron leaders, company commanders or, for more serious offences, their commanding officers.In the evidence given by Brigadier Ritchie, we were told that 20 per cent. of those 24,000 cases would be appealed to the summary appeal court. Therefore, the number of cases handled by a summary appeal court is not 1,500, but nearer 5,000. That suggests that the Ministry of Defence has seriously miscalculated the amount of work that will be created for the court and the financial consequences that will flow from that.
Sir Nicholas Lyell: Will my hon. Friend consider another strange anomaly in the Government's approach? In the Bill, they propose to give those who are subject to service discipline an automatic right to go not to the commanding officer, which would be the equivalent of going to a magistrates court, but to court martial, which would be the equivalent of going to the Crown court. However, they want to take away the right of ordinary civilians to go to the Crown court and insist that they go the magistrates court. Is that not anomalous?
Mr. Blunt: Of course it seems anomalous, but one would have to wait a long time for consistency from the Government. This is the most important part of the Bill and the most destructive, particularly to the commanding officer's authority. It is not needed under the Hood judgment, and I beg the Minister to examine it.
We are not going to be in a position to test this thesis. If the Minister's legal advice is that a case will be brought that shows that a summary appeal court is required under the European convention on human rights, we should at least let that case happen. It is not as though the Government are not preparing enough opportunities to change armed forces legislation in the future. We shall be going round the buoy next year with the quinquennial Act. The Government tell us that there is not enough time, in the next 18 months, to put together a tri-service discipline Act, so we shall be going round the buoy again, presumably between 2001 and 2006, when the quinquennial Act will come round again.
We shall therefore have opportunities to put this right, but the damage that the Bill will do is far too great to be worth the risk of gold-plating the legislation on the legal advice that it might otherwise be liable to a finding against it in the European Court of Human Rights.
The point that flows from that is that, in his evidence to the Select Committee, the Minister told us--this was also made clear by Baroness Symons in another place--that he cannot guarantee that the Bill is bomb-proof against a future ruling of the European Court of Human Rights.
Suppose the European Court decides that the judicial officers who are now being appointed to look after the custody arrangements are not independent of the chain of command because they are being paid by the chain of command and they owe their duties to the chain of
command. The court might then think that the summary appeals court is also staffed by officers who are not independent of the chain of command. That would simply require a definition of the chain of command that is wider than the officer who has direct command of the soldier, sailor or airman in question.
Mr. Brazier: In reinforcing my hon. Friend's excellent point, I put it to him that part of the problem is the huge influx of judges into the European Court of Human Rights from countries that regard the state in general and the military in particular as oppressors. There is something faintly ridiculous in the idea that the court is now able to affect our armed forces, when many of the judges come from countries from which many of the asylum seekers who are now before our domestic courts have come.
Mr. Blunt: I entirely agree with my hon. Friend.
The final and most absurd point about this wretched legislation is the cost to the armed forces. The Ministry of Defence estimates that it will cost some £6.5 million. I am not remotely confident that that is anything other than a grotesque underestimate, not least because the Ministry's figure for appeals from summary justice cases is only 20 per cent. What are we getting for that money? We are getting 55 more military policemen; 35 more civilians, most of whom are lawyers; and the benefit of regularly paying highly priced lawyers to deal with the Bill's custodial provisions and to advise the summary appeal courts in commanding officers' jurisdiction.
I am sure that those people will be a fine body of men and women, but, when one considers that the cost of that little lot--as a company, it would probably not give too clever an account of itself in action--is about the same as the salary bill for an infantry battalion, one wonders where the money is to come from. Will they be paid for out of the Lord Chancellor's budget or further taxation from the Treasury? No, it was made absolutely clear in the other place that the amount is coming out of the defence budget.
The cost of the measures is equivalent to that of the manpower of an infantry battalion. Will it add to, or subtract from, the effectiveness of our armed forces? It will undermine their operational effectiveness. Not only will a shocking arrangement be forced on the armed forces concerning appeals in the summary justice process and the process of choosing court martial without that being required under case law as it now stands, but the armed forces themselves will have to pick up the bill. Frankly, that is the last obscenity in the Bill.
I urge Ministers to consider the two particular measures that I have described, if they will not consider the course of action that I shall now recommend.
Mr. Blunt: I shall take the intervention of the Chairman of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for Walsall, South (Mr. George).
Mr. Bruce George: I must say how sad I am that the hon. Gentleman is leaving the Defence Committee, even though his replacement will be a most capable addition to our team of 11. I want to correct a misapprehension. The hon. Gentleman implied that I had behaved in an authoritarian manner in cutting him off in his prime
during the questioning session a few days ago. I did extensive research, by counting, and I found that, of the 123 questions asked of my hon. Friend the Minister for the Armed Forces and his colleagues, 54 were asked by the hon. Gentleman. People will not criticise me for being too authoritarian; they will ask why I did not cut off the hon. Gentleman earlier.
Mr. Blunt: I have no idea why I was so stupid as to allow the hon. Gentleman to intervene when he has, as Chairman of the Defence Committee, been so mean as to interrupt me.
At the beginning of that session, the Chairman was, for the first time, extremely anxious not only that I should be there but that I should take a leading part in the questioning because he did not expect too much interest from his hon. Friends. I fear that he was right to do so. This afternoon, the only speech by a Labour Back Bencher was that of the hon. Gentleman himself. I suspect that, if the Select Committee had not considered the matter, even he might not have graced the debate with his presence. The fact that Labour's contribution to this debate has been so limited is a shocking indictment of its interest in defence.
I return to what the course of action should be. The Government should at least drop the two parts of the Bill that are not required under ECHR case law. That would be a satisfactory compromise, although it would leave the custodial provisions, which I hope will be sorted out in Committee, ludicrously flawed and difficult to implement. We should be saying that the French have got it right, and that the Bill is irreconcilable in terms of individual rights and the rights of the state, particularly given the way in which the European Court of Human Rights has developed.
Brigadier Ritchie told us that the summary justice system is the vital ground that has to be defended. The Armed Forces Act 1996 and the Bill both chip away significantly at the effectiveness of the summary justice system that sustains the armed forces discipline, cohesion and morale. Therefore, the time has come to face the fact that we will have to get that reservation to protect our armed forces. This is the vital ground of our armed forces and, by extension, a vital interest of the United Kingdom. I see no other solution but to withdraw from the European convention on human rights and immediately reapply, obtaining the necessary reservation to protect our armed forces, their vital ground and our vital interests.
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