My Lords, my comments will be brief, but I hope the Minister will not read that as meaning that I lack an interest in this. I am passionately supportive of this amendment and thank the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, for bringing it forward.
We all know that military veterans have a wide range of skills to offer civilian employers, especially SMEs, but we also know that quite a few—although far from all—veterans need support to make the adjustment to the civilian workforce, whether that be in updating skills or dealing with the adjustment back to civilian life or with service-related trauma. I have always looked at the zero rating that the Government propose not as a saving for the company as an incentive to employ the veteran but as a means to enable that company to provide the necessary support—the upskilling and the more social forms of support—to enable the veteran much more quickly to belong and be part of the company that he or she has joined, and to be
successful in that role. For that reason, three years seems eminently sensible. The idea that it is a virtually instant process for someone to make that transition from military to civilian life is, I think, artificial.
If I understood it correctly from some of our off-piste discussions, the cost of providing support is in the range of £20 million a year. That is trivial in terms of any departmental budget. To, in effect, triple that, which is what this proposal is doing by calling for three years, does not seem an unreasonable ask—nor does the amount of money involved. It will disappear somewhere to the right of the decimal point in the Treasury accounts. I hope the Minister will take this opportunity to rethink. It would look well for the Government to take a more generous approach, and it would also underpin the success of what is, I think, a good strategy.