My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, for moving this amendment, which concerns a very serious and important issue. He mentioned Deepcut. I urge all Members of the Committee to get the Blake report on Deepcut, which was commissioned by the last Government, as we may have forgotten the background.
I am not convinced by the new clause proposed in Amendment 5, and I hope that the Minister shares that position. However, I would like to ask the Minister about service police records. We are all aware that there will be serial offenders who are posted from unit to unit. I would even dare to suggest that if a commanding officer knows that someone is “a bit dodgy” for one reason or another, they might rather get rid of them, and so send them off to another unit. Then, that same serviceperson becomes a problem in another unit. If the service police were carefully recording complaints against a serviceman—unit 1 gets a complaint; unit 2 gets a complaint—while it may be only slightly inappropriate conduct, there would be a record so that if something serious happens, and the serviceman already has a record of minor offences, you can be pretty sure that there is a problem. If someone has been serving for 15 years and there is not the slightest suggestion of a problem, you might take a slightly different view. My issue is this: are the service police recording every single complaint against a serviceman? I can assure the Committee that I have seen this in the reserves where we had a problem with a junior officer and it turned out that he had had a problem in another unit as well.
Members of the Committee have suggested that the Armed Forces have a problem. I do not deny that there is a problem, but my question for the Minister is this. Is it a bigger problem in the Armed Forces than it is in the civilian world, such as in industry, for instance?