My Lords, Amendment 4 is a probing amendment. I am very grateful to the Minister and his team for the meeting that we had—it seems a very long time ago—just before we rose for the Summer Recess. We went through these issues with him. As the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, said, employment patterns are changing. The idea of joining the service man and boy—or perhaps it is girl and woman these days—seems very much a thing of the past, or at least not what is always expected. We want to understand exactly how
this works and what the Government’s intentions are behind it—hence the probing nature of the amendment. We are after the what, the how, the how long and the how many.
The devil in this sort of thing is very often in the detail. We on this Bench have some concern that a lot of the detail will be in secondary legislation. I know that we will be dealing with that and I know that my noble friend Lady Smith will be dealing with those issues later. However, I would be grateful if the Minister would respond to these points—he has had the summer to look at them with his team—and then we will see how we can move forward from there.