Welcome to the Defence Committee for this regular session on women in the Armed Forces. It has been five years since the Atherton report, so this is a very pertinent and timely session. I am very pleased that we have with us an esteemed panel, including the Minister for Veterans and People, Louise Sandher-Jones MP. I believe it is your first outing in front of the Defence Committee, so a very warm welcome to you. I believe it is also the first outing for General Sir Gwyn Jenkins, First Sea Lord. A very warm welcome also to the Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Roly Walker, and the Chief of the Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal Harv Smyth, and a warm welcome back to the Director of Conduct, Equity and Justice at the Ministry of Defence, Sam des Forges. Before we begin today’s very important session, it would be remiss of me as Chair not to mention the major intervention overnight from Lord Robertson, who led the strategic defence review for the Government. I am asking about this at the outset because I do not want it to impress upon the wider session. Lord Robertson said that the Government’s “corrosive complacency” on defence spending has put the UK “in peril”, and he has accused “non-military experts in the Treasury” of “vandalism”. Minister, you will be aware that the Defence Committee has repeatedly asked for defence spending to be accelerated and for the publication of the defence investment plan. Are people right to mock the state of defence spending? Is there a different view at the helm of the Government, given what Lord Robertson is saying and where we are on defence spending?

I have a huge amount of respect for George Robertson; the work that he put into the strategic defence review made for a phenomenal piece of work. I think it is fair to say that we recognise the importance of the recommendations—we have accepted them, we are progressing at pace and some have already been delivered. We have made commitments to spend more on defence in this Parliament than has been spent for a very long time. You are all familiar with those commitments. He rightly recognises that the challenges that we face at the moment are more serious than they have been, certainly in my lifetime—incredibly serious—whether we look at eastern Europe or the Middle East. As I said, I have a huge amount of respect for George Robertson and what he has to say, but I would just say gently that we are working very hard to deliver against the recommendations and we are working very hard on investments. We have already started—I can point to various investments that we have made in kit and equipment. It is great that people are always urging us to go further and faster, and I am someone who always wants to go further and faster, for sure, but we have to recognise that we are putting in a lot of hard work to get this country ready for the challenges that we are facing.

Minister, with all due respect, the Prime Minister is constantly talking about further and faster. We have heard that and about how people are working at pace to deliver on the defence investment plan, but can you can you give us a date when it might be published?

I am not going to do that today. I would point out that we are making investments without the DIP being finalised. A lot of people are working very hard on it. I am sure that everyone here would recognise the importance of getting this right. It is a hugely important piece of work, and we have to get it right. It is right that people take the time to do that.

Right. We will now move on to the core substance of today’s sitting: women in the Armed Forces. Many of us are concerned about a seeming lack of lack of progress. The key metrics on women in the Armed Forces just have not moved. There are now many different individuals at the helm, including you, Minister, so we are hoping for a sea change in how the work goes henceforth. What are you going to do differently from what your predecessors did to move some of the metrics?

If you allow me, I will start my answer by reflecting on the journey that brought me here. As you know, I served in the Armed Forces. I was an officer in the Army Intelligence Corps for a few years. I think it is worth saying up front that I had a fantastic time serving in the military—the experiences it gave me, the lessons I learned and, above and beyond, the people I worked with, who were incredible. I would do it all again in a heartbeat, but I know that that is not the case for everyone. Even in my experience, which as I say was hugely positive, I can always say, “Oh yeah, but this also happened as well.” Having been given the huge honour and the huge privilege to be sat here in this role, I am very aware of the difference that we need to make and of the extra responsibility and duty that I feel to represent women in the Armed Forces to keep us moving forwards. It has been surprising to me just how far we have come, so I would just gently push back on there being a need for a “sea change”, because of the progress that we have made since I left. The pace of change has been surprising to me. For example, the efforts to improve the service justice system, the supply of menstruation products, and kit and how it fits have been fantastic to see. We will get into the details, I am sure, but when I look across what we are doing, in some of the things that I hear and some of the things I see—the good, the excellent and the not good—I can really see that we are making strides forward. This is something that is so personal to me, and I want to make sure that when I come to the end in this job, I can look back and say that I did everything I could to make the Armed Forces better. Everyone, male or female, has the right to serve in Armed Forces that are professional, respectful and utterly focused on delivering the mission.

Given your esteemed service to the country, which I have mentioned before here and in the Chamber, there are especially high expectations of you and that you will be at the helm of a major change. You are right about progress on certain issues, but as my colleagues will soon point out, we see a lack of progress on various metrics. However, I will now defer to the wisdom of my colleagues, as they go through their questions one by one. We have quite a lot to get through, so my request to panellists is, please, feel free to resist the urge for everyone to answer every question; likewise, I ask Members to target their questions at one, two or three individuals. Otherwise we will simply not be able to get through the plethora of issues that we want to cover.

It has been five years since the Defence Committee report, “Protecting those who protect us: Women in the Armed Forces from Recruitment to Civilian Life”, was released. The Atherton report, as we all recognise, was a significant report, containing upsetting detail of widespread mistreatment of our servicewomen, including sexual harassment, abuse, sexism and lack of suitable safety equipment, including appropriate uniform; yet we are sat here five years on and the first question that comes to mind is, why has there been no significant change in women’s representation in the Armed Forces since its publication? That is a question to the chiefs, perhaps by service.

First, thank you very much for the opportunity to present today and to answer your questions. All of us on the panel are gripped by the significance of the topic and why it is so important to the Armed Forces. Fundamentally, our job as leaders is to prepare the Armed Forces for conflict. We can only do that if we can build an Armed Forces that brings the best of the talent to bear, where everyone can bring everything they have to offer to help us to solve the incredibly complex challenges we face, not just from our opponents, but from the technological pace of change at the moment. We have to change the Armed Forces at pace to meet the threats that we see. That was fundamental to the defence review, when it was announced. We can only do that if we can really build high-performing teams. In the context of the diversity that we need to bring into such teams, people have to be able to bring the best of themselves into that work. That is one of the core reasons why this is so important to us. Secondly, of course there is a moral obligation on us. Our people volunteer to serve in order to protect this country. We are beholden to safeguard those people, so that they are as safe as they can be in the environment within which we operate and can to make those contributions. I think we all understand the context of why this is so important. In that light, we are seeing an increase in the number of women with us, joining the Navy in particular. We are up now to over 16% in recruiting. The expressions of interest from women to join the Royal Navy are up significantly, too, and the retention figures continue to improve as well. Even more significantly, when we look at the ranks and promotions in the Navy, in almost all ranks at the moment women are over-represented in terms of how many we pull forward on their merits in order to see promotion. One aspect of progress is a rising level of recruitment. It is not where it needs to be yet, but it continues to improve on a steady trajectory. Another aspect is representation that is filtering up in the Navy, in terms of our selection for future leaders within the Navy.

That is not dissimilar to what we heard from your predecessor last year, yet almost immediately after he walked out the door he manifested some of the things that we are hoping to talk about today. Maybe now is an opportunity to discuss that, to point to it as an example of change, or to discuss the existing concerns about the prevailing conditions in the service.

I draw two main lessons from the circumstances in which I took over the service. First, there are no excuses; the standards that we set and expect apply to everybody. It does not matter if you are a service chief or the most junior rank in the Navy; we apply our standards to everyone and we expect all of us to uphold them—particularly as senior leaders. Secondly—we should not be shy of this—it is a demonstration of the challenge that we still have ahead of us that a service chief can be dismissed. That tells us that we have some way to go on the systemic change we need to make within our own service and across the Armed Forces.

General Walker, altering the underlying question slightly, some of the progress that we hear about for a bottom-feeding organisation is perhaps just a manifestation of waiting these people out. Perhaps that is a framing for my original question: why are we not seeing any improvements, and why are we only pointing to improvements that are baked into the system? We know there were changes and that the dilution rates were good in the late ’90s and early 2000s.

Chair and members of the Committee, thank you very much. I stand by what I said when I presented to the Committee last year about the impact that the Atherton report had five years ago—the cases of inappropriate behaviour and where we fell short of our standards. It made me feel ashamed of the way that women had been treated, and I stand by that now, even more so the longer I am in this job. None the less, I have to reflect that there is some cause for a degree of justified internal pride. One of the reasons is that for the first time in our history, there is a woman serving at every rank in the British Army, from four-star general down to private. That is a thing; it is not necessarily the most important thing, but it cannot be dismissed as trivial. It is an example. I take absolutely no credit for the fact that the Army has got to that stage. It has taken a long time to do so, and I will come back to who does deserve the credit, but I am just really proud of being the chief at the time when that happened. Women now make up 11.7% of the Army, which has fluctuated over the years. I would say that that is still too low—I fully agree with the Committee that it is too low. I say that because a nation expects its land forces to be filled with the brightest and the best, and patently we are not accessing all of the talents of society. For no other reason than we need to get ready, we need to attract the very best of our people. There is a degree of progress. Female representation at senior ranks has roughly doubled in the last five years. You can look statistically at every rank, grade and cohort, and show that there have been positive improvements, from the other ranks all the way up to senior officers. I will concede that while the numbers may be going in the right direction, they are not going fast enough. I come back to my previous point, which is that we have got to get ready for what may well be coming. We opened the session with one observation of that. We need to attract more people. I do not think that ambition is the problem for the Army—I cannot speak for the other services; nor do I think aspiration is our problem. One in five applicants to the Army this year are female. In fact, we have increased the proportion from 20% to 22%, so it is a little bit more than one in five. That is the highest we have had in five years. It has been higher in the past, but contextual factors had to be brought into account. Increasingly, our challenge is not in applications but in converting them into trained recruits. We can come back to that, because there are loads of interventions that I would welcome the opportunity to dive into.

That is a specific part of my question. I was going to draw it across, but you could answer that now.

Indeed. Once women join, the data tells us that they tend to stay longer. Retention rates for Army servicewomen are higher than for Army servicemen. I know that we will get into discussing areas where we fall short on behaviours and I make an absolute commitment to you, Chair, the Committee, the Army and our people that we will address those. To the specifics of conversion, there seems to be a correlation with some of the medical entry points where the demands of being an Army soldier—this applies to men as well as women—means it takes women longer to reach the level of physical and mental resilience needed to go through the training without getting injured. We have a series of interventions, largely informed by the stair programme, which some of you are familiar with. That is a longitudinal study into women in ground close combat, which was run out of the academy at Sandhurst. That has driven data and science into human performance optimisation. I would really welcome the Committee taking the chance to go to Sandhurst and be briefed by the scientists and the experts on what we have learnt from that study—for both sexes and all soldiers. We believe that is now leading into soldier conditioning assessments prior to them taking the physical tests, which then begins to give them an idea of the distance they need to travel, the interventions needed through either physiotherapy or strength and conditioning, cardio or whatever it is—and whether it is physical. Equally, you can look at nutrition, sleep patterns, course construction and the sequencing of training and how that is all evened out to give young people who have shown the determination to serve their country the very best chance we can to get into uniform and follow their career of choice. There is a host of interventions in there, which we can definitely follow up on in writing, but my recommendation is, please, go and see it.

Air Chief Marshal, what is your response—perhaps with a focus on mid-career retention or attrition, particularly in the RAF?

As an introduction, this is my first day before the Committee as the chief. Obviously, we have done a couple before with the chairman. I am glad that as CAS this is my first intervention because it is such an extremely important topic for all the reasons that have been shared across the panel already. I would also link this specifically to our development of operational edge. That has never been more important in a world that is becoming more volatile as each day goes past. In the last six to eight weeks, you will all have seen the Royal Air Force completely deployed across the breadth of the Middle East responding to the Iran war and performing exceptionally well with an exceptional team. In the seven months that I have been in this role, I have been crystal clear with the RAF about my approach to culture and behaviour and how our ethos of respect, integrity, service and excellence fundamentally underpins our operational edge, for all the reasons that have been discussed already, alongside this idea of us staying one step ahead of our potential adversaries, of which there are many and which continue to grow. The ballistic missiles and the one-way attack drones that my people are currently fighting in the Middle East do not discriminate, and neither should we. The way to protect our people is to have superior forces with superior morale. That is part of this discussion. I am in the business of creating an Air Force that represents our country and communities, and we are seeing that pull through at this moment. That said, as has been shared here, we can always be better in terms of the action that we take today to make our processes faster, cleaner, better understood and better trusted. In parallel, there is also the relentless charge for cultural change, both in single services and across defence as a whole. That cultural change is what I would call “Operation Constant Effort”. It is a daily quest for us all in these positions. From an Air Force perspective, you will have all seen the written data that has come through. There is a plethora of data. To touch on some of it, at present, women are represented to the tune of 16.5% of Regulars in the Air Force. What is interesting is that in our Reserve forces, it is closer to 25%, which is a great achievement. On expressions of interest—to your earlier point, Calvin—we are seeing enormous interest across the UK, particularly from women, in much of our engagement through digital media. In 2023, we were seeing about 65,000 expressions of interest. This year, it is double that: over 125,000 females are reaching in, because of what they see on Instagram, social media or many of our media campaigns. It is about turning those expressions of interest into people who are serving in exceptional teams. That is the challenge we are all dealing with on a daily basis. One other stat—then perhaps I will hand back—is about retention, and it relates to your point about mid-career. If we look back two to three years, between 8% and 9% of women in the Royal Air Force were leaving earlier than we would have expected. That figure is coming down, and it is continuing to trend down. At this moment, it is 6.8%. That is because of all the different interventions and mechanisms that we have put in place, some of which we have talked about here. They might feel quite low level—uniform changes, better shoes—but it is about, day to day, showing our people that we care about them and listen to them. From my perspective, seven months into the role, I am seeing a set of statistics that is trending in the right direction. The trick now is to keep that going and to accelerate it.

As I look past you and see your PSO, who is an example of that, I would like to thank you and hand back to the Chair.

This is an incredibly important topic, but we could be criticised as a Committee if we did not ask at least one of the service chiefs whether they agreed with Lord Robertson. Can I ask you, General Jenkins, whether you think he was right to say that there is a “corrosive complacency” at the top of the defence establishment and in the Treasury?

Please respond very briefly on this, because, as I said at the outset, I do not want it to dominate the session.

The only thing I can say from the inside is that this could not be taken more seriously at the moment. I see no sign of complacency among anybody I work with or provide advice to.

I notice that you do not mention the Treasury, but thank you for that. The question I want to focus on in relation to the inquiry is about the interventions that make a difference in retaining and developing female members of the Armed Forces. General Walker, can you talk a bit about what interventions have worked in increasing net strength female representation, what have not worked and how you have learned from that?

I touched on this briefly last year, but I will expand on it now. One of the very interesting insights that we developed out of the military academy, but that has now been rolled out across the soldier academy, is the sense of a critical mass. It is a cohort. You need to get to almost 30%, whether in a section, platoon, unit or whatever. You need to get to 30% or so before the culture changes from within. In a very heavily gendered organisation like the Army, where we are 90% men and 10% women, as the Army Servicewomen’s Network tells me, “We cannot change it on our own”. They are quite right: 10% cannot bring about these changes. There is something here about interventions that can create these cohorts as an end in themselves, but also as a catalyst for leadership, role modelling and encouraging the servicemen to join in.

Is it the units with critical mass that then spread the word?

There are some units where it happens very naturally. In the Army Medical Services, for example, you will see a very equitable balance of men and women in the units, and you can correlate that with concerns and issues, culture, behaviours, expectations and aspirations. It is easier in some units than in others. There is a degree of letting Army servicewomen have a personal choice on where they want to go to serve. We could, in theory, really encourage service in particular infantry units where there isn’t representation. If someone does not want to be there in the first place—because they do not necessarily want to join the infantry or, if they do want to join the infantry, because they do not necessarily want to join that unit—forcing them to go may end up being counterproductive. I think this is one of those situations where they go where they want to go because that is how they want to serve the nation. We should respect their advice and judgment. We need to make it easy for servicewomen, if they join unit X, to transfer mid-career or in the early stages. I had a fantastic testimonial from a sergeant who had transferred into the infantry and is now a platoon sergeant of a very tough infantry regiment. It is a remarkable example of how someone, at different stages of their career, will find their niche and their calling. We need to make it as easy as possible for them to go to where they feel they can best serve.

Are there interventions that you have tried that have not worked?

Can I come back to you on the very specific details? The danger is that I will ad lib that answer. There will undoubtedly be things that we have tried that have not had the desired result. It may have been the right thing, but we did it in the wrong way, and there may well be things that we did with the best intentions that turned out to be the wrong thing.

You are a learning organisation. You are going to try some stuff. It might work; it might not.

I could not put it better. That is what we are trying to do. To reiterate, please understand that we are trying to optimise unit performance. It is astonishing when you are led by the science and the data, not the anecdotes.

Thank you. Sam, do you want to comment?

I have a couple of numbers that might be helpful. Wraparound childcare has been a real positive for our men as well as our women. We estimate that about 10,300 families are impacted by that. We know the importance of wraparound childcare across society. We have also seen quite a large proportion of women taking up flexible working opportunities. There is important stuff there. We mentioned the science of human performance. Sometimes, perhaps, it is one of the things that some of our women are a bit more nervous about. Although it is not finalised, I have a draft copy of our report “Science of Human Performance: a guide for servicewomen preparing for arduous courses”, which is based on 10 years of fantastic science work by Professor Julie Greeves. It is always going to be more challenging for our servicewomen to meet certain tests or achieve certain things if they do not understand their own physiology, the vitamins that might be most useful for them and the way that they might address menstrual cycles—all those sorts of points. We have some fantastic, in places world-leading, data that is going to better enable our women to achieve some things where, perhaps, they slightly had their hands tied behind their backs. I would also recommend to you—I hope I have not killed too many trees by printing some copies of it—the Women in Defence organisation’s fantastic annual review of the changing face of defence. It talks about the critical mass point and looks at it through the lens of industry as well. Industry has reached pretty much 30%, but it is probably stagnating a little in the current environment. In the last year, it has really focused on women in decision-making roles. Where do we want that challenge or differential in thinking? We want it in some of those leadership roles. That will then have an impact on culture more broadly. There is some positive and interesting insight there about the change over the last five years, where we are seeing women’s voices at the top decision-making table. I recommend that review, which is also online.

I think I have a minute left. Harv, you have been raising your hand, did you want to say something quickly on this?

Broadly, in the round, on the interventions that we are making and how they are informing people’s decision to stay longer, the two words I would use are trust and opportunity. Many interventions are building trust with all our team—not just with the women cohort—that we are listening, seeing and acting. That is incredibly important. In the Air Force, one constant piece of critical feedback is that it takes too long to close out a case. When someone raises a complaint, it takes way too long to close it out. We have redeveloped how we do that. Where previously the average was eight months for a good run at it, we are now achieving that in less than 35 days, through a slicker process and better education—actually, the trend is coming down. Again, that is good. People want to know that, if they make a complaint, it will be acted on and closed out quickly, rather than drifting on and on like a sore wound.

Minister, the MoD has made claims about building trust in the service complaints system. Can you describe to the Committee how you can prove that is the case?

We have taken a number of steps to improve trust. Crucially, the tri-service complaints unit is taking serious allegations to do with harassment, bullying and so on into the tri-service space, so that we can ensure consistency across the services and see that we are truly applying a standard that an outsider or victim can look at and know is there for them. We have also stood up the Victim Witness Care Unit, which you can reach out to if you have been the victim of unacceptable behaviour or a criminal act. You do not need to have reported it or told anyone else about it; you can reach out to that unit, and you will be supported and helped. The unit is incredibly powerful, because you can go to it as a victim when you are in the first stages of processing what has happened to you. I know that many victims are very worried about coming forward and what the consequences of that might be, but they are still in desperate need of support. Having something they can go to where they can be given that support and talk through their issues will help them to understand, if they wish to report it formally, what the options are and where they can go. I know you asked specifically about service complaints, but we should also note how important it is that we now have our Armed Forces Commissioner, Polly Perkins. Knowing that we have someone independent, who is very well respected, to come in and do that role is a real signal. We can talk about the practical implications of having that role, but the fact that we now have a commissioner is huge.

You describe what you are doing, which is interesting, but my question was specifically about what proof you have that confidence has increased and is increasing in service complaints.

That is an interesting one. I will come back to you if we have tracked that specifically.

That is clearly what we are interested in. You can put all the systems in place, but we need to know whether people feel confident in using the system. What proof do you have that satisfaction is increasing, or that people are more comfortable and confident in using it, to back up the system?

In service complaints, most of the chunky changes we introduced in 2022 were about taking the single services and direct chain of command out of those cases and introducing more independent folk for investigation, decision-making panels and so on. We have seen over the last three years about a 74% increase in complaints being made. I recall that Mariette Hughes, as SCOAF, appeared before the previous Committee. I have to make sure that I quote her correctly, but I think her comment was that she was not seeing anything telling her that the culture is getting worse, but rather that people had better access. In each of her reports over the last few years, she has identified significant improvements. I am conscious that the timing of this hearing does not cross over very neatly, but her next report will be really interesting.

You see what I am getting at. We are looking for credible evidence and data that there is confidence. Making complaints is one thing, but actually being satisfied that a complaint has been dealt with in a proper way is another, and I am not hearing any evidence that it is happening at the moment.

If you read the last few reports from the Service Complaints Ombudsman, she has identified improvements in the system. Her next one will come out very shortly, and that will probably be the one that comments on it.

What I am hearing is that you do not have any proof or evidence that confidence has increased in the way that service complaints are being dealt with.

The increase in complaints is an indicator. I think it is for the independent SCOAF to opine on those views, and we shall see that report shortly.

The RAF Families Federation suggested that we need to revisit the recommendation for an independent defence authority. Do you agree?

I will always look at suggestions and recommendations and bottom them out. My question, without solutioneering, is what is the real focus they are trying to get after that? Are they putting forward that there are concerns about the independence of the scrutiny of our system? I think we can point to measures to ensure that we are doing that. You can go down that route, but we obviously have an Armed Forces Commissioner now, so I would say that there is an ongoing conversation. I would not necessarily say that it jumps out as something we need right now.

May I ask each of the service chiefs, who have mentioned the statistics on a number of issues, how the key performance indicator of 90% of service complaints being dealt with in a certain timeframe is going? Are service complaints being dealt with in the timeframe that you have agreed to? We will start with the Air Chief Marshal: what timescale are you hitting at the moment? I think it is 24 weeks, if I recall correctly.

Yes. The stats are showing that we are making a gentle improvement.

What is the current figure?

I do not have the current figure, but I will get it for you. We are making a gentle improvement—it could be better.

But you do not have the figure.

I will get back to you on the figure.

We are waiting for the next report to tell you what the figures are going to look like.

What were the last figures you had?

I do not have those available to me at the moment.

What about you, General Walker?

Sixty-one per cent hit the timeline.

Which year was that? Are we talking about 2024 or 2025?

Last year.

Okay, 2025. Why is it that the RAF and the Navy do not know these figures?

Because I have my aide behind me, who is helping me to answer with the evidence so that you can get it now rather than coming back to it later.

This question is important, because one thing that came out of the Atherton report is that leadership from the top is crucial to turning this around. We need to be assured that you, as the heads of service, are on top of the data and the information. That is why I asked the question—not to try to trip you up, but to see how well you are on top of the data. If you are really going to lead from the front and make the changes that you have alluded to, we need to understand this.

Page 23 of the evidence we submitted has a summary from—

That was for 2024.

We expect the 2025 report to be out in the next few weeks.

So you do not have the 2025 figures to hand now?

No. They are owned by the independent SCOAF, so we have to be slightly wary—it is for the SCOAF to articulate those figures in her report as the independent check. It is that slightly awkward thing of the SCOAF needing to tell you in her report, which will come out shortly.

I think Derek Twigg has made some pertinent points. Minister, I think it needs to be noted that, according to the Armed Forces Continuous Attitude Survey 2025, 86% of those subjected to bullying or harassment do not actually make a complaint. Therefore, there is something inherently wrong in the system, as people do not feel confident enough to make a complaint. How are you going to change that?

That is an important point. There are two distinct stages when you have been a victim of unacceptable behaviour. There is the system that kicks in when something is reported, and I think we can point to a lot of things that we have done to improve the system when it is reported. The worry for me is when things are not reported or very informally reported. There are a number of different factors there. Something we are doing that will have a powerful impact on that is that we have the pilots of our violence against women and girls prevention taskforces. I think that there is a real education gap—a lot of people in the military are very young. A lot of them will be under 25, and they do not necessarily recognise or understand when they have been the subject of unacceptable behaviour. Certainly I did not when I was at the beginning of my career. When I look back now, I can say, “Actually that was unacceptable, and x, y and z should have happened,” and I can pinpoint the reasons why I didn’t say anything. I think, therefore, it is important that there is education for people when they are starting their military career—“These are the kinds of things that are unacceptable.” It feels really counterintuitive: you would think that somebody would recognise when they are being bullied, when they are being harassed, or when they have been the subject of unacceptable behaviour, but actually it is not always the case at all. I think, therefore, education for people going through training is hugely important. There will be a number of other factors that mean that people are not coming forward. One thing that I would hate to see—I do not have the data to know how big a factor this is—would be if somebody does not have confidence that their complaint will be taken seriously. I would hate it if that was the case. I think that is something that is within our power to really strongly target.

Last year, when we had all three chiefs in front of this Committee, I asked a really simple question: are women in the Armed Forces as safe as they would be in civilian life? I did not get a single yes or no response. Nobody would answer the question. I will again put that question to all three chiefs. I would like to see a definitive answer to that, whether it is a yes or a no.

Could you restate the question?

Do you think women in the Armed Forces are as safe as they would be in civilian life?

Objectively, yes. Because of the policies, the framework, the extraordinary effort that we go to to take civilians through a recruiting and application process, imprinting on them values and standards that are not necessarily what they would have been brought up with or would be a frame of reference in the life that they would otherwise lead. That, I think, is very different from their colleagues in other civilian sectors. So there is a point of difference. The way we train them, the way we build teams, the way we live together, the way we work together, the way we have our own independent justice system, the way we have our own independent approach to complaints—all of that represents the safeguards and the guardrails to protect our people from predators, perpetrators and ne'er do wells. Objectively, I think we have a very, very safe system. But people make choices. You know that; we know that. The important thing is that when people make the wrong choice and people are wronged, they have a way of having their voice heard, and that action is taken decisively, and for the encouragement of better behaviour by others. I would say in that framework, we have a very robust, extraordinarily resilient and something we should be very proud of. Ninety-six per cent of soldiers and officers come to work every year and don’t commit any offence or have any allegation of crime or mistreatment or anything. Of all the offences, only 4% of the Army are responsible. The vast majority of people will have a fulfilling, safe, respectful career. We have to recognise that people make choices and that is what our system is guarding against.

I agree entirely with CGS. I think as an organisation, the Armed Forces, and the Navy in my sense, has a phenomenal amount of regulation, training, education, support, checks and balances in place that we wouldn’t see in much of the civilian sector at all. Right from the beginning of training, we educate young people on the standards and the culture that we expect them to live within. Then we do that at every level of command as they progress throughout their career. I think that has got to be a gold standard of how you inculcate people into the very high standards that we expect people to conduct within, to live within the Armed Forces. The question you ask is a relative question, in terms of which bit of the civilian sector, which bit of the Armed Forces, in what conditions. However, what we can assure you is that we are an organisation that willingly invites scrutiny and challenge to the way that we look after our people and keep them safe, and then imposes policy and practice, and education and training in order to make sure that policy is carried out. We should take a lot of comfort from that. In the relative sense of whether there is still room for improvement, of course there is. Of course we will continue to take the actions that are required to keep our people as safe as possible, even in the difficult circumstances that we sometimes operate in and the environment that we put them in. As I said in my introduction, this is the moral obligation of us as defence leaders. These people volunteer for service and put themselves in harm’s way to protect this country. What we should do is protect them. The simple answer to your question is: yes.

It is differentiating specifically between the Armed Forces and civilian life that I was interested in. Are they more at risk within the Armed Forces, Air Chief Marshal?

I think it has all been said, to be honest. I am in exactly the same position as my two colleagues. Are we aware of the issues? Yes. Do we put robust mechanisms in place? Yes. Do we constantly test those? Yes. Are we working to reduce any risk, be that real or perceived, to as low as possible? Yes, we are. For me, perhaps the litmus test question is: as a dad of two daughters, would I recommend joining the service to either of them? The answer to that is yes. In fact, one of them works down the street in the MoD. I am completely aligned with my two service chiefs.

Brave choice, given that that has been listed as one of the worst and most toxic places to work for women. I would love to have a conversation about her experiences. To move on, with all those things in place—with all the changes that we are making and that you say you are making within the forces—why is sexual harassment still as prevalent now as it was five years ago when we got the Atherton report? Again, I will put that to the chiefs.

I do not have the data to hand, but when I was first briefed on the level of sexualisation in young people in society, and the level of exposure to drugs, drink and violence in wider society, it was not a surprise to me that, when we take 10,000 civilians generally between the ages of 17 and a half and 20, and train them to be soldiers, in those early weeks and months of onboarding them into our organisation, we see the greatest correlation of behaviours that are at odds with our values and standards. But the story is one of transformation, I would say.

But it is not. If we are still getting the same numbers five years after the report came out, that has not changed. Clearly, whatever we are doing, whether it be right at the start when people are coming in, is not enough, because nothing has changed in five years.

My personal view is that this gets harder before it gets easier because of the trends in wider society, which you will be very aware of. We have to accept the level of misogyny, the level of rancorous behaviour or rancorous belief systems, and the tension in wider society as the environment from which we attract people. People are drawn to the armed services because they want to be something different, and it takes a while to transform them from civilians into, in my case, soldiers. That is a journey. It is not a cliff edge where you walk in the door and suddenly you are a different person. These have got to be learned and applied behaviours, and, as I covered in my first answer to your question, the guardrails are there to do that—to do the very best for our people so that they can do their best for the nation.

Do you think the guardrails need strengthening if it is still happening in those very early days? If we are throwing in a mix of younger recruits with a mix of vulnerable young women, and if we understand that that is where there is a big risk, why are we still doing that?

I think there is a high degree of vulnerability everywhere, rather than just in specific genders. I think that we put a big burden on our junior leaders, who are the instructors, and I think there is increasing recognition that they deserve support as they increasingly start the journey of taking civilians who want to be soldiers, and bringing them into that moral and ethic framing of what it means to be a soldier in the 21st century, and what soldiering entails. We can provide more support and preparation for them, which is why, in many ways, in the Army specifically we have established the soldier academy and the NCO academy. That is why I am very proud that the Army Sergeant Major has just published the NCO creed, which is a very clear articulation of what it means to be a junior leader in this Army today and what is expected of them. I think that all of that is to equip them with that junior-level leadership responsibility for our most inexperienced soldiers, who will ultimately bear the greatest risk in combat, because it is on their shoulders that battles will be won or lost.

I understand that. Are you aware of how many in those early positions of leadership have been fired for wrongdoing— for sexual misconduct?

Yes. Eight.

Okay. So, clearly, it is not just the people who are coming in at the lower-level ranks who have not had the training to understand what is wrong and what is not.

Which is why they are discharged.

There are other people in positions of power. I will now move on to General Jenkins, if I may.

At least part of the picture here is that there is increasing confidence in people’s willingness and trust in reporting unacceptable behaviour, so I do not think that we are looking at a level playing field in that sense, and we continue to see those numbers rise. At the moment, we would assess that that is a good thing and that our processes are generating more confidence in our communities to raise issues, as they see that our education programmes are working in terms of allowing people to objectively understand what is unacceptable in the context of the culture that we want to create. That is resulting in more reporting. Over time, we should see that those figures start to plateau and that we build transparent, easy-to-use processes that enable people to raise concerns without fear of criticism or censure in some way. That will then enable us to understand what the real picture is within our communities. I think what we would see is that these figures should actually continue to rise for some time. Then we can have the discussion about, “Okay, what is the real baseline here, and how can we reduce that?”

In the interests of time, I would just like to ask the Minister this question: what are your priorities on seeing the survey from last year on sexualised behaviours?

It comes back to the point that I talked about earlier. First off is taking a systems approach to this, so that there are multiple levels where, if something unacceptable has happened, it can be caught by the system and then processed appropriately. I think we have seen where that has not always been the case. We cannot have single points of failure in this system. The second point really comes to, as I said, bridging the gap, so that people feel they can come forward and report what has happened to them, regardless of the severity, and that there are different paths, so that they feel they are being listened to, and—really crucially—that they do not feel that the consequences for the perpetrator are on them either, because I do think that that is a big thing that stops some people from coming forward. I have talked about the prevention taskforce that we are running and how that is focused on where we have some of our recruits; I think that is a really crucial part. But when we come and talk about culture, I think culture does take a long time, and I think it comes to your point about it not having changed by that metric in five years. Culture does take a long time to change, and we know how important junior NCOs are in setting that culture. I can point to things that we have put into place where I think it is too soon to have seen them have that impact. I said earlier that I am always somebody who wants to go further and always wants to be able to go faster, but it is about having accountability. I think that it is about recognising that what is really great in the military is that we build really tight and really strong teams. I can point to where I was really supported by my male colleagues and really looked after, and treated really well. We just have to recognise the pressures that people might feel under, when behaviour does fall short of standards, to not report something. We really have to take that into account. It can be frustrating, because at the heart of that is the education part. We have talked about the kind of people we take into the military; we take them from a wide range of backgrounds, and we take people into the military who might have been subject to abuse themselves, who might not know or recognise the standards that we need to set. There are lots of discussions going on about, you know—

I do understand. That was the point I made earlier—that we are putting people in a known situation of risk. What are your priorities and what do we need to do to change, really briefly?

Education of people when they come in, so that they can recognise those standards, and so that they can recognise and understand the full range of options available to them. I do not think that, if I just stopped a member of the Armed Forces in the street, they would know all the options available to them. Certainly I didn’t when I was serving. Those two things.

Brilliant; thank you very much. We have a quick supplementary from Fred Thomas.

General Walker, we know that one of your main concerns is about recruit and retain. You mentioned earlier, and I want to ask you further about it, that your sense is that there are various “rancorous belief systems…in wider society”.

Oh, “rancorous”. Yes.

In the context of women in the Armed Forces, and more widely with the type of person you are managing to get in through the door, what do you mean by “rancorous belief systems…in wider society”, and how does that affect the Army?

I have children in their early 20s, so I am well aware of, and have done my own work to understand, just what is going on with things like the manosphere and the sense of deepening risk within young people, all of which is accelerated through social media. That sort of environment is, to my mind, the issue. That is for all of us; all our children are growing up in that world, and there is a parental responsibility to understand that environment. But I also recognise that a lot of that generation are coming through into the Armed Forces. We had a fascinating—for me, but maybe not for you—board-level discussion with all our non-executives and all the team leaders in the Army, to understand what our role could be as an example, with how we take anyone from anywhere, irrespective of their gender, their identity, their orientation or anything, and bring them together into this extraordinary organisation in which they become soldiers prepared to lay their lives down for the sake of other people. That is not a natural thing for people to want to do, but they are drawn to it. There is something in that, where I think we are an example of what could be, but when we look outside, at that environment, it looks like it is going in the other direction. We may well be an example to show what an integrated organisation that puts purpose and vision to the fore looks like. That is our value proposition, not just as a fighting force that can fight and win the nation’s battles—that’s what you pay us to do and what we will do every single day—but in what more we can do, in the theme of the SDR, to reconnect with the society that we represent, that we need to draw our depth from and for which we need to be as resilient as possible. I am brought back persistently to things such as the cadet schemes and the impact that they have on lives and other areas. My view is that we need to be doing more of that stuff because of the positive impact that it has on society.

Some 7% of the forces come from ethnic minority backgrounds, yet those backgrounds are significantly over-represented in the stats that we see for women and complaints. But we know that most complaints never surface. What is the Department doing, Sam, to address racism as well as sexism?

Particularly in the service complaints space, we have been doing quite a lot of work with the SCOAF—now the Armed Forces Commissioner—to get some independent reviews of those cases, to try to better understand some of the underlying pieces and to see whether there are things that we can change in terms of process to better support people. Again, until the SCOAF/Armed Forces Commissioner’s report is laid in the coming weeks, I cannot comment on that, because she will be providing an independent view of how successful or otherwise that is, but there has been a great deal of work jointly with the Service Complaints Ombudsman to both understand the root causes of that and then drive some changes. I apologise if I am being slightly hesitant; I am just conscious that it is the SCOAF’s story to tell.

We are five years in, so there should be something to tell, right?

Yes.

So what is that?

I have tried to tread carefully so that I am not saying what the SCOAF might say shortly, but there has been significant work in terms of review across those cases to understand why there was that over-representation and whether there are mechanisms that can be put in place, including through some of the dip sampling and assurance processes as well.

The dip sampling is trying to get to the unheard complaints.

And, equally, having an independent review of cases that are particularly associated with folk from the global majority, from women—

Ethnic minority backgrounds.

Yes, absolutely. I am just hesitant to say more, because I think the detail might be coming out from the SCOAF.

Okay. What other support are you providing to the service chiefs in terms of, say, networks and the like to try to get to those people and hear their voices?

We have some fantastic service networks—multicultural networks and so on. I think service chiefs have been involved in talking with them in the various conferences they have held. Each service has an Armed Forces—I cannot remember the term; you might use slightly different language for them, but they are kind of race action plans. The chiefs might be able to speak better to the work they are doing on that front. Q46 Mr Bailey: Air Chief Marshal Harv, can you offer some tangible examples?

Exactly as Sam says, the mechanisms are in place. From my perspective, this is about how we overtly communicate about it. You have highlighted the stats there, which, frankly, are still unacceptable. We as service chiefs must be communicating very clearly with our people across the breadth of the service that there is no place for this in our services. All the mechanisms are in place for people to report it. It comes back to my comments earlier around building trust for our people, so that they know what the mechanisms are, and know that when they are brave enough to come forward and report it, it will be listened to, dealt with and acted upon swiftly. As I said earlier, that is one of the biggest criticisms I get from both females and ethnic minorities. When I say, “Did you report it?” they will share with me their experience. You know me well: I am very open-door; lots of people come to talk to me individually about different experiences they have had. My first question is generally, “Have you reported it? Where are we in the process, and do you need my help to push that through?” People say, “Well, I’ve not reported it, because my experience is that it will just go nowhere, or it might impact my career. I have no trust in the system.” We as service chiefs have to work harder to pull that through and fix it.

You referred to these networks. A lot of these are bottom-up and organic. They have grown. This, to me, is evidence of when you get peer pressure beginning to change things from within and from below, and it is much, much more powerful. It supports very well-intentioned, top-down direction and policy; it makes it real. I really commend the Army Multicultural Network. We had an absolutely tremendous day at Sandhurst. Likewise, I commend the Army Servicewomen’s Network. Again, if there is ever time for you as a Committee to go and hear from them, rather than have me parroting their good work, I recommend that you do that. I give them all the credit for all of the understanding that I have and the depth of feeling that we have on this. That is a really, really powerful network. We are refreshing version 2 of the race action plan. We are, as a consequence of the first version of the race action plan, coming up with a general action plan as well. All of these will result in structural changes, not just words.

Thank you, and we will take you up on that offer.

I echo the point on the networks. Of course, at the heart of this, we have to recruit more minority groups into the Armed Forces. We have to get these percentages up, for all the reasons I outlined in my introduction, to make better teams for us to solve our problems. We continue to be challenged to access those communities and convince them that we are offering fulfilling, safe, exciting career opportunities in the Armed Forces. It behoves us to demonstrate that that is true, and the networks have an important part to play in that, because ultimately this changes by shifting the percentage of balance within our Armed Forces. We have to show what is true, which is that we can provide a safe environment for people to come and join the Armed Forces, regardless of their background or gender.

Thanks very much, we will take you up on the invites to meet the networks.

Definitely—much appreciated.

My question is directed to you, General Walker, and it is about the Army Foundation College at Harrogate, where junior soldiers, 16 to 18-year-old children, are trained. We as a Committee have visited the college, so my line of questioning today is no reflection on the impressive young people we met or the staff there. However, you will know as well that, time and time again, we keep hearing that things there are improving for young female recruits, yet recent data shows that, between 2021 and 2024, there were 122 investigations into sexual offences against under 18-year-olds, 80 of which were sexual assault. We do not know how many were against young female recruits, because the MoD refuses to break those figures down for us. In the last five years, North Yorkshire council has received 89 safeguarding notifications concerning staff at the college, and the Centre for Military Justice recently said it was not confident that young women or children are safe at that college. General Walker, could you talk me through what I would do if I was a young female at the college and I had been sexually abused or sexually assaulted? What would the process be for me?

Thank you for going to visit; it was an offer I made to the rest of the Committee, and I am really grateful to those who did go, because you have to see it to believe it, and you have to hear it from those testimonies. I am very glad that you also recognise the extraordinary young people we have there and the effort that has been put into preparing them. I think this bridges to both the previous questions from Michelle and the follow-up from Fred, which is really around recognising the challenge that a lot of young people have when they join the military and are confronted with these very high standards of behaviour and the values that we expect of them as soldiers throughout their career. To me, that is proving the point: the prevalence of sexualised behaviour, of inappropriate behaviour, of unwanted attention, I think bears that point out. That is why we have such a strict—

I do not wish to interrupt you, General Walker, but some of the safeguarding notifications concerned staff at the college, so that was not young people but staff. This is what I am trying to get to the nub of. The data does not bear out that things have improved there, and if I was a young woman studying or training at the college, what would I do if I was sexually abused or sexually assaulted there? Where would I go for help? Who could I talk to?

Well—

I am interested in whether the general knows, because it is the general’s remit.

Let’s be very clear: you go to the police.

And how would I do that? Can I leave whenever I want? Can I walk out whenever I want?

You can call a helpline, you can walk out as part of a policy, you can report it to—

What does “walk out as part of a policy” mean?

You can literally walk out of that college. If you are not in a lesson or not under structured training, then you can. But you can call 999. There are helplines all over the place. There are hotlines and anonymous tips. There are welfare staff who are there, there are instructors, and if it’s clear that it is your instructors who have done it—

Is it a private phone, or are these phones all in public places? My understanding is that, initially when you join the college, you cannot leave for a number of days and you are restricted in when you are allowed your mobile phone. So again, my point is: where would I go and what would I do if I had been sexually assaulted and I desperately needed help?

I see what you mean. This is in the very early stages, where you are trying to get that sense of team working going. This is where that college has, because it is an educational establishment, been checked by Ofsted repeatedly; you and I can go through the excellent reports from Ofsted, as well as from North Yorkshire council. It is about making sure that we have the safeguarding that would apply in any other residential educational establishment and that is possible there, and very high levels of welfare staff and safeguarding staff. There are outlets there. If young people do not know that, that is on us for not educating them that these are their outlets.

The Ofsted process is slightly different for you. I am an ex-children’s social worker, so I know what these inspections look like. I would say that the inspections that have been held at the college are very different from those that would be held at any other residential establishment for children. I just point that out. What are you trying to do, General? What actions are you going to take to make sure that next time we are reviewing this, the stats that I have just read out are not the same, and you are not getting comments like, “Children are not safe there,” from outside organisations?

Everything is reported to the police, if there is any sense that a crime has been committed in English law.

And as a young person, could I do that myself? Sorry, I know I am going back, but my understanding is that in the initial phase, you cannot just leave and you do not have access to your mobile phone all the time. Again, how would I report that to the police? Would I have to stand in a corridor on a phone and say it where everyone can walk past and hear what has happened to me? I am just trying to figure out how this works in reality.

Practically, there are welfare teams, there are members of staff, there are trainers and there are people in positions of authority who they can go to and who are trained and responsible to direct them to the right place.

But 89 of the referrals to North Yorkshire safeguarding are about staff. Again, if I could not go to those staff, because it was one of those staff—

They were referred. They were able to be heard; their voice was heard. They were reported to the appropriate authorities.

But how far down the line? The data that we requested from the MoD is not forthcoming on this. Had they been subjected to further abuse before it eventually got reported? We don’t know.

Let me see—

These are children, General.

Exactly. Let me see, through data protection and freedom of information, what we can get there. Forgive me, I understand what you are getting at. I think there are very clear signposts for young people, if they feel unsafe or vulnerable or if they have been attacked, about who they can go to and who they can report it to. The evidence of the referrals tells me that the system does work. The counterfactual is: which ones do we not know about? These are the ones that we do know about. When it comes to, as was asked in the previous question, discharges where instructors have been abusive or violent, or have committed crimes, then of course the zero tolerance policy on unacceptable sexual behaviour applies and they will have been discharged, as is right. There is no mitigation in that particular context. My summary is, let me come back on the very specific questions of how long it took from the complaint and whether there were any obstacles to those complaints reaching the authorities. Let me try to work that out for you.

I do not want to hog any more time, General Walker, but I am not convinced that if something had happened to me of a sexually abusive nature, as a young recruit in that college, I would know where to go and I would have the confidence to go to somebody. Do you not feel that there is a two-tier system compared with other residential colleges? Is it not time that the Children’s Commissioner came for a thorough visit and had a chat to some of the young soldiers?

Please do. I really encourage you and the panel to spend as much time with those soldiers as possible. That is your right and, I think, part of your terms of reference here.

I was referring to the Children’s Commissioner, who has statutory rights and would visit any other residential college. I think it would be good if she could visit, because it does look like there is a two-tier system for the military college compared with other residential colleges for children.

I defer to your expertise.

And the safeguarding alerts in the other residential colleges are nowhere near as high as this. I do not want to hog time, Chair, but I think it is important to put that down.

Just to add a couple of really practical things, you mentioned making phone calls in public areas. I know you met colleagues at the victim witness care unit on the visit, and perhaps I can read out their email so that people do not have to speak in a corridor and can email them to make that initial contact. The email is people-dscc-vwcugroup@mod.gov.uk. People can use it to make some of those connections, and it is also available on the external Government website.

I am sorry to interrupt you, Sam, and I do not want to go around in circles, but would they have access to a computer? We could go on all day, but I am just trying to get to the practicalities. There is clearly something not right; the data does not back up. There is something clearly going awry at the college, because time and again, there are so many alerts. That is the point I am trying to make: there is something not right, and it needs looking at.

Agreed. General, I did raise this specifically with you during the last session on women in the Armed Forces; you might recall our exchange. I agree with my colleague Emma Lewell. Having visited AFC Harrogate, we know that there are issues that need to be gotten into, and we are still in a very unsatisfactory situation. However, given the time and the fact that there is still a lot of ground to cover, I want to come to you, Minister. On sexual offences and domestic abuse, the number of investigations being dealt with in the service justice system is actually rising; the problem is that judicial outcomes are still very limited. What should victims take away from that situation?

First, I understand from what you are saying that you are thinking in terms of a comparison to the civilian justice system. Is that right?

Yes. Basically, what I am saying is that the number of investigations is rising, but the outcomes are very limited, so there is a problem there, wouldn't you say?

I think we should avoid an arbitrary thing that says that if an investigation does not result in a conviction, it has not done its job properly. One of the ways we try to understand whether we have the right level of convictions is that we would, potentially, look at other systems. It is not always quite correct to compare the civilian justice system and the service justice system from that point of view. Domestic abuse within the forces is an aspect that we do not talk about as much when we are talking about these topics. I think it poses a lot of challenges. I can point to some of the work we are doing in the Armed Forces Bill to improve the range of protections and orders that our service justice system is able to put in place to protect those victims. Crucially, it is about making sure we have that victim-centred approach here as well, and we can point to the steps we are taking to improve that. In the country as a whole, when we look at domestic abuse, it can be incredibly frustrating when we see the outcomes and testimonies. Then again, it is frustrating for me that the service justice system is not head and shoulders above, when we talk about domestic abuse. I do not necessarily see a rise in reports as a bad thing; it could be that people feel more confident to come forward and report. Again, I would always say that if you feel you have been a victim, just go to the police. What I find concerning or frustrating is where allegations are made, but are not being made to the police and are not being referred to the police either. That is why we are doing things like expanding the duty on anybody with a command duty, when they hear an allegation of that kind, to report it to the police if they believe that that has not already been done. I think it comes back to a theme I want to keep hitting throughout all of this is: the really important two halves of the system. There is a system that kicks in when something is reported, but it is about getting people to take that huge step of reporting and having confidence in the system—having confidence that when they make a complaint, they will be protected in the immediate aftermath and the complaint will be processed properly and taken into account. I can point to certain aspects of the service justice system that show that we are making huge strides forward, particularly from when I was serving. I completely take the point that you can make the case that we are still not where we should be, but I honestly think that we are making serious strides forwards.

Can I ask a specific question? A key reason for maintaining the jurisdiction of the service justice system in relation to serious sexual offences was its ability to operate overseas. However, the RAF Families Federation has told us that support and safeguarding for victims and witnesses overseas has been a significant vulnerability. Minister, what are you doing to address that?

I will to turn to Sam, who can talk about the victim and witness care unit.

Touching on the earlier point about domestic abuse, the recently released stats, which have just come out, show a 50% conviction rate of those in court martial for domestic abuse-related matters. However, it is so small that it is impossible to compare with the civilian system. On your point about overseas services, one of the things we are using is the sexualised behaviours and sexual harassment survey, plus data from our Defence Serious Crime Unit, which has helped us to identify areas where we want to go further. At the moment, the VAWG taskforce will focus on the Catterick and Plymouth areas—that is where we are seeing higher risks, so we are therefore working to do more innovative work in those spaces. Equally, the second phase will be some of these overseas locations. We are thinking about Cyprus as one of the areas where we want to do more work not only to understand the underlying causes but to test, adjust and use more innovative approaches. I believe that we are looking at providing further welfare support. I hesitate to say this, in case I might be wrong, but I think there might be someone from Aurora New Dawn involved in Cyprus as well.

Given what the RAF Families Federation said, do you actually support the view that there remains a significant vulnerability?

I am not sure that there is a significant vulnerability.

Why do you think they said that then? Are you talking to them?

I am not in their minds. The victim and witness care unit provides support to folk in overseas locations—for example, we have just opened a new victim and witness suite in Germany. I think that all feedback is really helpful, and we share their concern about overseas locations, hence targeting overseas locations for some of that early victim and witness care focus.

When will that work be completed?

That is phase two. We have increased victim and witness care support, which is the same as what we provide to folk in the UK. We are also putting independent sexual violence and DV support over in Cyprus. One of the things with the violence against women and girls taskforce is that it is aiming to test and adjust some of the ideas from the broader cross-Government work on violence against women and girls. I think that it is a known challenge into which a lot of resource and effort is going.

That will involve the families federations at some point.

Yes, and I am sure we will connect via the Armed Forces Commissioner.

I want to come back to an earlier question about the Armed Forces continuous attitude survey, which was mentioned briefly. The survey says: “Of those who have experienced bullying, harassment or discrimination in the last 12 months, around one in seven made a formal written complaint about their experience…This is unchanged since 2023 which saw the proportion of personnel making a formal complaint almost double, returning to previously reported levels. However, the majority of personnel who have been subject to bullying, discrimination or harassment do not make a complaint (86%).” Again, coming back to my earlier point, how can the Committee be confident that service personnel are confident in using the complaints system? Although there has been an increase in complaints, 86% did not make complaints, even though they were subject to it. I am still at a bit of a loss as to what the MoD is doing to assure the Committee that there is any evidence that confidence is increasing. So far, you have failed to do that.

Through the very fact that, since we introduced those changes, such as taking the direct chain of command outside of those complaints—they used to be dealt with by just the local commanding officers—we have definitely seen an increase. We have made changes, and we have an increase in the number of complaints.

It is just that we have not seen any evidence so far that the confidence has risen—that is the point.

The confidence to make a complaint is the highest on record in 2025.

What about the number of people who did not make a complaint?

But we are seeing it increasing.

I think it is relevant to go back to your earlier question. In 2025, 51% of individuals who raised a service complaint said that they were happy with the objectivity and fairness of the handling of their complaint. That was an improvement of 13% compared with 2024. Obviously, 51% is not good enough. But 44% were satisfied with the time taken, which is an increase from 26% in 2024, again, it is a lower figure than it should be.

I would like to move on to the broader culture within your various services. We have spoken mainly, of course, about women in the Armed Forces—that is the session’s focus. We have also spoken about race. Can I ask about religion? I will come to the Navy first, so to you, General. We saw reports in mainstream media—based off reporting in a particular regimental magazine—about massive increased uptake in Christianity. That was among recruits in the Royal Marines and involved stories about baptisms happening on a Sunday in the regain tank at Lympstone. Even as recently as 2016 when I was there, that was not happening. Church was empty on a Sunday. Apparently, now you cannot get in. It is so full that people rock up an hour early—that is the capacity. Are you tracking that at all in the Navy from the top down? Are you aware of that?

No, I am not. It would be the short answer. I am not tracking that specific circumstance.

That is a completely fair answer. Other services, are you tracking the rise of Christianity at all? Do you get that reported to you at all?

Anecdotally, prayer groups, yes. It has always been strong in some communities where you have a sort of cohort and it sustains itself. I have not seen the figures coming through—I do not check church attendance or any of that. But I have heard of it anecdotally.

Nothing beyond what we would consider normal. Definitely nothing to the specific of what you have mentioned.

I can say a couple of things. I attend a church close to where I live but I cannot report a significant increase in attendance. It is healthy, but I have not seen a particular surge. The chaplaincy continues to provide a really important function for us across the services. Particularly for us, obviously, on deployed platforms—on submarines and ships—they provide an avenue outside of the chain of command for people to raise concerns and/or seek their spiritual welfare. That remains a really important offer that we make and service that we provide.

I am fascinated. It is the reporting that we have had of things that are changing that I am really interested in. But you have given good answers, thank you. When you are looking at people, Minister, do you have what is happening with religion in the forces regularly reported to you?

No, but I want to reiterate how important the chaplaincy service is. I am not somebody with faith, but I really value the chaplaincy service and what they provide.

Can I also ask about women in the Royal Marines? The Royal Marines are very over-represented in Parliament, Government and in top jobs in the MoD compared with the proportion of the Armed Forces that they make up. Clearly, if we are talking about leadership roles and women in future leadership roles, having no women being regular Royal Marines commandos is probably a problem. That avenue has been open to women since 2018, I think, and currently no women have been successful through the course to become a Royal Marines commando. Do you think that in the current state of play, without things being changed, that we will have women come through who do pass the full course as it is now?

Yes, I believe we will. I believe we can point to the success of women passing the all arms commando course as evidence that these tests are within the capacity of females to pass. In many ways we have an interesting scenario where we, as the Navy, will hold up the example of what the Royal Marines have done to try and make it as level a playing field as possible for women to join—from expressions of interest, preparation for training, and the advocacy networks we have established, through to inviting others from across the services and from different countries to come and provide advice, support and mentorship for women candidates when they are beginning Royal Marine training—but we have not had a successful candidate yet. I am confident that we will get successful candidates past those tests, and we are determined to ensure that that is as smooth as it could possibly be. They can then enjoy a fulfilling career within the Royal Marine Commandos once they are there.

Director, did you want to comment on the religion question?

If that is okay. We spent a lot of time with the chaplaincy and the various faith and belief networks. Recently, the Army has brought in its first non-religious chaplain, who is making a really positive difference to folk who might not follow a particular faith or belief system, and just giving optionality. One of my other reflections is that, in the current environment we are facing in the Middle East, the way our Jewish and Muslim networks have worked together to build understanding and advise the Department has been really outstanding. Our Sikh network does fantastic work on outreach and visibility. Those are just a few examples. Our Christian chaplains do fantastic work, but it is a broad church.

I am sure we are all very supportive of the chaplaincy service across all the services—I know I am personally, from my time in service. I am so short on time, I am going to have to ask a separate question. General, I have heard anecdotally from serving Navy personnel who are women that life is okay ashore on naval bases on the UK mainland or abroad, but that at sea it is significantly different. Do you recognise that characterisation? Does that reach you at all?

What I can say is that we have some best practice within the Royal Navy in terms of how we assess the climate and the culture that can be created on deployed platforms—ships and submarines. Our culture team is a team of experts, which we can and frequently do fire in to assess the culture that a leadership team can create on a ship, and ensure that the environment is where we would expect it to be. That enables us to take action if it is falling below the standards we would accept, and/or, where we see exceptional leadership and a thriving platform deployed in any sense, we can then share that best practice across the piece. Much of what I have been doing since I arrived in the Navy to change the way that we assess our leaders is to put an emphasis on the climate that they can create within their teams. Within the Armed Forces, traditionally we have a top-down leadership assessment—you will be familiar with that. Your ability to impress your first reporting officer is what dictates whether you can progress your career. I am absolutely determined that within the Navy—I know fellow chiefs share the same perspective—we must assess our leaders on the climate that they can create for their people. That goes back to what I said at the start: we need high-performing teams to solve the most complex problems in the most difficult circumstances. That cannot survive if we have toxic leadership or if we have not created an environment where people can bring the best of themselves to work. I passionately believe that.

I am also pleased that we have Dame Nia Griffith with us from the Women and Equalities Committee.

Thank you very much. I will specifically focus on the cultural change. It is five years on, and we have heard criticism that cultural change initiatives are still a bit of a tick-box exercise, and that personnel are not really engaged with these matters and solutions. Is that a fair criticism, and how do you embed cultural change in every exercise, activity and aspect of service life? I will start with Air Chief Marshal Smyth.

I am seeing the change happen. I think it starts with incentives like very overt and visible role models. Mr Bailey has already picked out one of the role models in the room here, but we have worked hard across the Royal Air Force to make sure we have the right role models—if I can see it, I can be it. This summer, both the commanding officers at our officer school and our aviator school will be women. They competed for it fairly and won those jobs because they are the best people for it. We have just recently had a woman commander come in to run the Red Arrows. Many will have seen that play out in the media. She won because she was by far the right person for the job. The biggest change that I have seen, particularly in the last five years in my service, is where we have presented broader opportunities and opened the aperture and removed some of the barriers that were there before and had been for many, many years. For example, you had to be a pilot to be a station commander. Thankfully, previous service chiefs removed those barriers. That allows more people to apply and compete for those jobs. We are now seeing more females pull through to those quite formative roles, particularly at the wing commander to group captain level. That sets them up to compete and go right up to air rank. Just as an anecdote, at the end of January I took my senior leadership team two and a half days around the Air Force. We visited eight different stations doing operational updates, and out of the eight stations, seven were women station commanders. That would not have been the case five years ago. So I am seeing a tangible difference in the Royal Air Force because of the interventions that we have made.

You mentioned role models, which are extremely important. Perhaps I can ask General Sir Gwyn Jenkins to focus on the actual mechanisms you are using to get that cultural change into the tasks, exercises and aspects of the force’s life.

Absolutely. Cultural change for me means systemic change. The culture is the manifestation of the incentives in the system that cause the way people interact with each other. That fundamentally comes down to leadership at all levels. Leaders really make a difference in our system. We spend a phenomenal amount of time and effort educating and training our leaders in how to lead. But it comes back to what I said. Unless I can assess the leader on the impact they have on their people, we are very vulnerable to toxic leadership in our system, and it is very difficult to identify individuals who can create the environment that we want. Traditionally when we have looked at our leaders, we tend to assess the outputs that they manage to create. We are not very good at assessing how they got there in the first place. This is really important because the leadership at all levels is what will be able to implement the policies that we are trying to create. It is what will be able to create the environment for the teams to flourish. We ran our first trial on the new assessment model for leadership in the autumn, and it produced some really interesting outcomes, not least of which was highlighting individuals that in the current reporting system would not be highlighted for promotion, and yet they create a fantastic, successful environment for their people. Similarly, other individuals might be highlighted as being successful in the current reporting system, but are having a very negative effect on their people and undermining the organisation and what we are trying to achieve. Transparency and assessing leaders becomes a really important part of what you are talking about, which is the practical measures that we can bring to bear that will engender the cultural change that we have to have in the Armed Forces. Just lecturing people on the culture we want will not produce the results that we need. We have heard today about a whole range of measures that we are putting in place to improve the safeguarding of our people, to improve their ability to raise complaints and improve the position of women in our services in prominent positions. However, unless we can reach in and make some of these detailed changes, it is going to take a very long time to get to where we need to be—and we do not have a long time.

So you have done quite a lot of analysis?

More than analysis, we have begun making the change to the leadership assessment models.

So you are saying that in some cases you have had pushback on some of the cultural change and that you are tackling those leaders in that respect?

No. I am saying that unless we can pick the right leaders at all levels within the Armed Forces, we will not be able to accelerate the cultural change that we are trying to engender here. It is not necessarily about pushback but creating leadership excellence—people who can achieve the results that we need for the difficult tasks we do but also in a way that helps our people thrive within the environments we put them in.

General Sir Roly Walker, you clearly referenced misogyny in wider society. We have heard about it in schools and about toxic masculinity online. I am interested in any pushback you get from your more senior staff, but also the challenging task you alluded to of your younger generation of recruits coming in and how you deal with changing the culture from day one.

Can I start, Ms Lewell, by confirming that the Children’s Commissioner visited Harrogate on 20 January? We have not seen the report, but we will follow up on the statistics that we discussed earlier on.

Do you know when her report is due?

No, I do not, but she did visit. In answer to Dame Nia’s question, I would describe our interventions around three things, but I will frame that first. Yesterday, for the first time, I met one of our officers who has just completed a four-year PhD looking at the lived experience of Army servicewomen. That opportunity was taken up a while ago, she has now finalised her PhD, and once she goes through viva it will be published. One of her main conclusions is that to bring about the changes and interventions that we want to see, we really have to focus on our youngest cohort—not just the senior leaders, but our youngest—because that is where change happens fastest. She will make a whole series of recommendations—I commend her PhD, and certainly the executive summary to it—and I will be following up with her. Her name is Marcelle Grace, and it was pretty inspirational hearing her. Our interventions specifically fit round what we call—I will not go into the details—the “eight wells”: leave well, join well, adapt well, train well, live well and so on. There is a whole series of lines in there, but there are also some very specific initiatives around how we develop a cultural measurement framework. I discussed this with the Committee last year. That has been rolled out and further developed. Alongside that is the digitalisation of a lot of the resources that we give our junior leaders to bring to life values, standards and behaviours, so that we can point them towards good is, what bad is and what you do about it. It comes back to a lot of the work we do in the early weeks at Harrogate, which is about education on what the procedures and expectations should be. There is a whole range of toolkits, which are all being rolled out, and a series of pilots, which have proved to be very positive in giving our junior leaders the resources they need to lead in the way they want to. I am really proud of what my predecessors did with something called Operation Teamwork. Once a year the Army, less those on operations, stops and talks about teamwork, within teams at every level and in every unit across the Army. That is an introverted conversation about how to make the team a better team. In many ways, that is how we are bringing significant cultural change in at the lower levels, and that is meeting the very comprehensive top-down Raising our Standards programme. That combination of top-down and bottom-up is making quite a change. The third area, on which we are moving out and doing more, is essentially a sense and warn facility. This is increasing the use of data analytics to find the signal in the noise we get from all the surveys, so that we can isolate the problem areas—where are there habitual problems and what are the right interventions to deal with them? We are getting much more precise in those interventions. For example, all our one-star commanders now go through a comprehensive—almost a rerun—of what was the Regular Commissions Board and is now the Army Officer Selection Board. They go through that on promotion—on consideration—to one-star commander. They effectively go through a retest of whether they are still up to the mark. A lot of interventions happen there to ensure that when those officers become senior officers they role model positive behaviours. A really key component of this sense and warn facility is the Army Servicewomen’s Network, which I cannot commend more highly to you. It has been able to frame and make me realise what this looks and feels like from inside, and to trigger that sense of personal, professional and just human responsibility to allow our members to do the one thing they want to do, which is to come to work, be safe in their occupational health and physical health and confident in the safeguarding, and just be respected for serving the nation. It is not a difficult ask, so thanks to them.

This one is for the director of conduct. Prospect trade union described the MoD to us as “one of the worst places to be a woman in the entire defence sector”. As the MoD’s director of conduct, equity and justice, how do you react to that perception?

We have, particularly over the last couple of years, done quite a few civilian-focused interventions. There are two aspects here: one is about how we can better support our civil servants, and another is about recognising that they are usually working in a whole-force environment. A lot of the work that is focused on how we better support and better address behaviours, and better educate our Armed Forces colleagues, helps to support our civil servants. Similarly, we have to hold our civil servants to account for their behaviours, including their behaviours towards service colleagues. One of our non-exec directors did an independent review of the civilian complaint process, which identified a number of changes we needed to make in order to make that more robust, similar to the changes we made in the service complaints system a couple of years ago. We have put £2 million to £3 million into that system. We have significantly increased the number of folk in that complaint system. The My Complaint app that we were using in the service complaints space also helped us to increase engagement with our service colleagues, and we have now transferred that into the civilian world as well.

Sorry, but could we go back to the perception that Prospect had? Do you think they are right or wrong in saying that it is the worst place in the defence sector to be a woman?

I am conscious that they did a fairly small, limited survey that identified some concerns. We are particularly interested in getting a fuller, larger, more comprehensive, analytically valid survey. One of our ambitions is to do the sexualised behaviours survey for civilians in the not-too-distant future. That will give us a really analytically valid understanding of the challenge, as well as the feedback we get from talking regularly to folk who are perhaps experiencing some of that. We recognise some of those concerns, and hence we have had those reviews. The reviews highlighted a concern about the civilian casework system. We have introduced—I cannot remember the exact number—13 or 14 differences to that system, introducing more independence into it and investing further into it. We are using the app, enabling the ability to report anonymously as well. I know colleagues may not see an increase in reporting as a sign of confidence, but one of the points often made is that people would not raise things previously. We saw an approximately 300% increase in complaints being raised. We have seen complaints being dealt with far more quickly, and we have introduced independence in that decision making. All that is indicating to us an increased confidence in using that system, which then enables us to take action against perpetrators. Under the zero tolerance policy, more than 230 people have exited the services in that period.

Sorry—I am getting deluged in processes and statistics. Let me ask the question a different way. You used to work at Network Rail; is the MoD a better or worse place to be a woman than Network Rail?

I am hesitant to say things about a previous employer, but there are some parallels with the infrastructure industry, which is also extremely heavily male-dominated. Certainly, in my role there I saw not dissimilar issues in the broader infrastructure industry. What can we do, as Defence, to improve? In the infrastructure industry they are reliant on civilian police and the civilian justice system for criminal matters, and they are reliant on employment law and processes. We have more control over our service complaints system and our service justice system, and I have seen more investment, in my time in Defence, to get after these things. I used to work in the financial services industry as well. I have been spoken over, ignored and cut off in all those environments. I have been asked to make the tea and take the notes in all those environments. I have seen colleagues in the infrastructure industry who do not have PPE that fits them properly. That is not to say that we should suddenly rest on our laurels in Defence at all—we need to continue to work super hard—but, in my personal experience, I have seen that in a number of industries I have worked in.

The Minister has had even more jobs: she was briefly a civil servant before joining the military; then it was journalism, financial services and tech; and then she was a Labour Back Bencher and is now a Minister. I have a similar question; I am pressing to test whether Prospect’s statement is a valid comparator. In all those roles and sectors you have worked in, Minister, could you say which was the best and which was the worst place to be a woman?

Honestly, I would say the best place was in the Army. I am not saying that just because I am here in front of you in this role. One of the most important things that I take seriously as a Minister is holding the MoD to account. It is a strange role: I am not here to defend it or lead it; I am here to hold it to account as well. The structures, processes, people and training in place in the military to invest in you as an individual are second to none. When I look at my military career, the things I got to do, the things I learned, the people I worked with, the places I went and the experiences I had were fantastic. We can point to really significant efforts to try to understand the extent of the problems we have. I do not think I would see those efforts—the surveys that we have and so on—across all the other organisations I have worked in. Of course, there is always the differentiation in having a service justice system; obviously, there is not a financial service justice system. One example worth using is that, a few months ago, I was subjected to unacceptable behaviour on the tube by somebody I did not know. Would I turn around and say, “Public transport is not safe,” or, “Women should not use it”? Of course I would not say that at all. It is really important to understand that it does not matter where you work as a woman, unfortunately: you will be subjected to unacceptable behaviour. That is why my focus is on what we are doing to prevent—we are doing everything we can to prevent, of course—and what system kicks in when someone is subjected to that. But to repeat my answer to your question, it was the Armed Forces.

Minister, I want to ask you about properly fitted equipment and body armour. That was a big part of the Atherton report, which had clear recommendations on this. Do you accept that it is unacceptable for women to have less ballistic protection than their male colleagues with the standard issue body armour systems that we give out?

Yes—I have personal experience of this. I can think back to an exercise we did at Sandhurst where, for various reasons, the female platoon got the body armour but you just had whatever size there was, and people just had to grab whatever there was. In a subsequent exercise, lots of women were injured, and some people said, “Oh, the girls are getting injured on exercise.” Of course they were, because they were wearing body armour that was four times too big. Of course they were getting injured. I always found the conversation frustrating. We make body armour that fits dogs, and if that is a cost-effective thing to do, why not? One thing I want to say, and this comes back to the previous question about the change in culture since I left, and I think the Atherton report had a big part in this—I really tip my hat to Sarah Atherton for how consequential the report has been—is that there has been a real step change in the conversations around women’s bodies, women’s performance and what women need. Sometimes, there could be a feeling that women were being allowed to come and join in on the Armed Forces, and I really think that that has seriously begun to change. We are not embarrassed to say now that women need different body armour. I would say that a lot of men do not have the right body armour, and it is really important that, when we talk about having a range of fits for body armour, it is a range of fits for men and women. When we talk about menstruation products being sent down the supply chain, we are talking about that in a way we would not have when I started serving. We had a euphemism for these kinds of things. We talk about impacts on culture and some of the things we are doing, but we should not underestimate things like that that were not done to improve culture, but I feel like women are taken much more seriously.

That is great to hear, and the evidence clearly shows that female-contoured plates make a huge difference—up to 40%—in providing increased ballistic protection, but we still do not have consistent provision or a funded programme to deliver that into service.

We have a programme called the tactical ballistic plate project. We have given comprehensive military advice to Ministers, and my understanding is that Ministers have directed DE&S and therefore the procurement agency to proceed with that, so we would expect to see that on contract in the next few months. That is my understanding of the situation.

And that is specifically female-contoured plates.

It is to do with the different body shapes that the Minister referred to. There are men who do not have the same level of ballistic protection because of the shapes of their bodies as well. The assumption is that there will be four variants to account for the variability of body shapes, such that every serviceperson in the Army, the Navy and the Air Force who would wear body armour in a dismounted role will have acceptable levels of ballistic protection. I would hope that it would cover contoured body armour.

The female contour is the absolutely key piece. I have heard it referred to that you are looking at just getting a smaller plate, but that does not answer the issue I am trying to solve.

I could not agree more, and that is why the initial contract we have recommended will proceed and is funded, and there is money in the line for it. My understanding is that it now sits with the National Armaments Director to go to market to work out the best products and arrangements. It is not just about the plates, but the load-carrying equipment and how it is distributed on the body—all that is part of this programme. My understanding is that we are not waiting for the defence investment plan to be published—there is none of that—it is, “Get on with it.” Ministers have been very clear: “Get on with it as fast as possible.” It is now down to our procurement agency to work with industry partners to come up with the best way to achieve the outcome you speak to, which is that all service personnel have the correct ballistic protection, based on the threat environment they are going to, that is sympathetic to their body shape, which covers geometry as well as height, width and other things. Clearly, the longitudinal study at Sandhurst—which we referred to before you arrived—into women in ground combat is about trying to prevent injuries as by wearing the right thing.

I have met some of your new recruits, General Sir Roly, who have been seen in selection, yet when they turn up to start their term they do not get kit that fits them, even though you have seen them physically. Cadets have told me how frustrated they are to have gone through that process and not have that kit, so that is really good news to hear. The Committee is very interested in this piece, so we are keen for you to keep us updated on how the process goes.

Can I briefly add that there is the same approach to flying equipment? That is obviously about not ballistic protection but fire protection and fire retardancy. We are taking exactly the same approach with new flying equipment for the body contour. The same goes for going to the bathroom in the aeroplane, particularly in single-seat fighters. We are moving forward with that equipment so that that is a much easier event.

Brilliant.

General Jenkins, you will be aware that we have an inquiry into the Afghan data breach and the resettlement schemes. Given that we will not have the pleasure of you giving evidence to us for that, I wanted to ask you about it directly. We heard evidence during our inquiry that a Minister asked you directly whether you were going to resign over what happened. Did you consider at any point resigning, taking leadership responsibility for that breach, or any other form of personal accountability?

I will not step over what an inquiry might say. I can only say that I am very happy to take responsibility if I am found to be responsible for that data breach. I never considered resigning because I did not believe that I was responsible at that point for any of those breaches or that decision.

You will be aware that the verification process has been termed by many as slack and unprofessional because it led to the mass rejection of applications for resettlement to the UK from Afghan triples, hundreds of which were later overturned in a review. Do you acknowledge any leadership responsibility for that?

Again, I do not want to step over what an inquiry might say or find. All I can say is that the processes that were in place at that time, which were then revised, demonstrated that we were a learning organisation and that we took action based on discrepancies when they were identified.

Thank you very much for putting that on the record. I am very grateful to all of your good selves. It is particularly pleasing to see all three chiefs appear with the Minister and the director. That illustrates not only to the Defence Committee but to the wider public how seriously you take women in the Armed Forces and the need to improve things for the betterment of our Armed Forces, not just to increase recruitment and retention but to illustrate to young girls and women out there that a career in the Armed Forces is something for them. We look forward to progress on this important issue, Minister. No doubt, we will be discussing it in the future.