[AFB0030]

Written evidence submitted by Help for Heroes

 

The Armed Forces Covenant represents a commitment that those who serve or have served in the Armed Forces, and their families, will be treated fairly and not be disadvantaged because of their service. In certain circumstances, such as injury, illness or bereavement, special consideration should apply.

Since its introduction in 2011, the Covenant has improved awareness of the Armed Forces community’s needs. However, its effectiveness has often depended on local leadership and relationships, resulting in uneven delivery across the UK.

While the Armed Forces Act 2021 was a foundational step in placing the Covenant on a statutory footing, its scope was limited to specific policy areas and did not bind national policy-makers. This created a structural mismatch whereby local delivery bodies were required to have due regard, but many of the policy decisions shaping veterans’ lives sat outside the legal framework.

The proposed extension of the Covenant Legal Duty to central government departments is therefore a welcome and necessary step. Many of the policy areas that affect veterans’ ability to live well after service will now be under this scope. Bringing a wider range of policy areas within scope should help address systemic issues and improve consistency. This is particularly important for wounded, injured and sick veterans whose recovery spans multiple systems. Recovery does not end at the point of clinical treatment; long-term independence often depends on coherent interaction between healthcare, adult social care, welfare benefits, housing and compensation systems. Extending the duty strengthens continuity across that recovery pathway.

As an example, financial wellbeing and access to compensation and benefits remains a recognised area of disadvantage for veterans and their families, and this has previously not been under the scope of the legal duty. This means that significant disadvantage exists in the way military compensation is treated. Payments from the Armed Forces Compensation Scheme or War Pensions are meant to recognise injuries, illness, or loss of life from service, rather than to replace income. Yet all too often they are counted as regular income when deciding a veteran’s eligibility for welfare benefits like Pension Credit.

This inconsistency illustrates how disadvantage can arise not through intent, but through policy design decisions that have not fully accounted for the service-related context of compensation payments. Extending the duty to central government departments provides an opportunity to address such structural issues at source.

In an area such as immigration, despite the Government’s manifesto commitment to waive fees for indefinite leave to remain for families of non-UK personnel, there has no progress in bringing about this policy change that is disadvantaging those who have served alongside our armed forces.

Extending the duty to central government departments is appropriate and overdue. However, the effectiveness of this change will depend heavily on the quality and clarity of the accompanying statutory guidance. In particular, the duty must be meaningfully embedded at the policy design stage, not solely at the point of delivery. Many of the most consequential decisions affecting veterans occur upstream within departmental policy development processes.

To date, guidance has not always provided sufficient clarity to public bodies regarding the practical steps required to meet their obligations. This is particularly important given the expanded scope and the complexity of veterans’ needs. Many veterans do not fall neatly into single service categories, and the most effective examples of “special consideration” often require joined up working across policy areas and departments.

Without clear processes, minimum standards, or reporting mechanisms, it remains difficult for members of the Armed Forces community to understand whether the duty has been meaningfully applied in their case.

While “due regard” is a recognised public law standard and an appropriate mechanism for this duty, its impact depends on transparent documentation of how service-related disadvantage has been considered and mitigated in practice.

Statutory guidance should therefore:

Veterans should also have clearer routes to redress where the duty is not met, and Parliament must be able to scrutinise delivery effectively.

While annual reporting from the Government to Parliament provides an important transparency mechanism, the extending scope must be accompanied by clearer national standards and measurable performance indicators which are needed to assess impact meaningfully. A stronger evidence framework would enable:

Without this, there is a risk that the Bill’s ambitions will not translate into consistent improvements for the Armed Forces community. There is a particular risk that, without measurable standards, compliance becomes procedural rather than transformative.

Although the Bill extends the duty at departmental level, services are delivered through a complex landscape of regulators, arm’s length bodies and local providers. For consistency and accountability, the legislation and subsequent regulations should ensure the duty applies across the full delivery system in all four nations.

This should include clarity on the applicability of the duty to combined authorities, mayoral authorities and relevant arm’s length bodies, in order to avoid gaps in accountability.

Extending the scope of the duty will require service providers to give greater consideration to the Armed Forces community in policy development and decision-making. This may necessitate changes to internal processes, staff training, and data collection.

Over time, embedding structured consideration of service-related disadvantage at an earlier stage in decision-making should reduce the likelihood of crisis interventions, complaints and inconsistent outcomes.

Greater clarity at national level should ultimately support service providers by reducing uncertainty, improving consistency, and enabling earlier, more effective intervention. Over time, this should reduce the need for complaints, appeals, and crisis responses, benefiting both providers and service users.

 

We do not believe the expansion will create significant additional costs. There may be modest cost and resource implications for central Government to develop effective guidance on implementing the extended. Such costs are highly likely to be offset by the benefit of improved decision-making regarding the Armed Forces community which will, over time, result in a reduction in demand for other services.

We recognise that effective implementation will require appropriate resourcing for guidance development, training and cross-departmental coordination. The scale of expansion across Whitehall suggests that careful attention should be given to ensuring sufficient capacity to support consistent application.

As part of the equality impact assessment that was made during the passing of the Armed Forces Act 2021, it was estimated: ‘the main costs of this legislation will fall on the public service providers, requiring changes to policy-making, and decision-making processes, and also through an increase in the use of their complaint processes. Whilst the additional costs incurred through the complaints process are considered zero, there are likely to be minimal cost implications to public service providers.’

Extending the Covenant Legal Duty to the Devolved Administrations will help ensure consistency across the UK in what is produced, demonstrating both the letter and spirit of the Covenant while respecting and reflecting the devolved context wherever possible. Implementation should aim for parity of outcome rather than uniformity of mechanism, recognising the differing health, social care and welfare structures across the UK. If supported, it will ensure persistent issues within the Armed Forces community can be adequately addressed.  It is essential that devolved Governments provide appropriate resource and maintain robust evaluation mechanisms.

Public understanding has assumed that central Government has responsibility for delivering the Covenant, despite this not being the case up until now. Extending the duty to central Government should provide clarity of responsibility and improve implementation, provided it is supported by robust guidance, effective monitoring and accountability mechanisms. The extension addresses a key structural weakness in the current framework. The determining factor in its success will now be the strength of statutory guidance, the clarity of accountability mechanisms, and the development of measurable outcome standards. Without this, there is risk that the Bill’s ambition will not translate into consistent, measurable improvements for the Armed Forces community.

 

2 March 2026

 Sensitivity: Operational