Clause 1 - Pension and compensation schemes: armed and reserve forces
Armed Forces (Pensions and Compensation) Bill
3:45 pm
Mr Julian Brazier (Canterbury, Conservative)
No, of course not. I have never argued that. In a way, the two points made to me by Government Members more or less balance each other out. Members of the armed forces accept that they cannot be members of trade unions, and that no voice speaks for them other than the chain of command, whose advice is necessarily secret and is not provided to Parliament. When one accepts that those drawbacks are an inevitable feature of service life, as many of my relatives have done in the three armed forces, one expects in return a greater degree of parliamentary scrutiny of one's terms and conditions of service than would apply to those public sector bodies that do have powerful groups, such as the Police Federation, the various civil service unions and all the other bodies that represent public sector workers, to represent them—which is almost the whole of the rest of the public sector.