Meeting of the Parliament 03 December 2019
Last week, in the debate on mental health, I raised the issues that are facing soldiers and veterans. I was somewhat surprised to be challenged by Willie Rennie for doing so. I sought to highlight the loneliness and isolation that many people face when they leave the armed forces and the mental health issues that ensue.
I also mentioned that both the first and second world wars were all-encompassing by nature and that there was a sense of shared experience for the soldiers returning home—a mainstream understanding of what they had undergone. However, the nature of our armed forces and of the conflicts that they fight have changed multiple times since then and we know that the experience of armed forces members is now not so widely shared. For people wishing to leave the armed forces today, there is little mainstream understanding of what it is like to serve—no national shared experience that can inform their welcome home.
Any veteran making the transition from military service to civilian life will face some degree of difficulty and isolation, but as our understanding of mental health improves, we begin to understand just how challenging that transition can be. For armed forces veterans, who have been totally immersed in the armed forces culture and separated from loved ones for long periods and who may have psychological or physical injuries, those factors are multiplied. That helps us to understand why 65 per cent of armed forces veterans find that exiting the armed forces causes them to feel lonely or socially isolated.
We have to be proud of the Scottish Government’s commitment to strengthening the bonds between our society and the armed forces community and of the fact that in Scotland we welcome former service members as valued members of the civilian community. That is why I welcome the Government’s strategy for our veterans, which is a collaborative approach that acknowledges the challenges faced by the armed services community. It sets out a clear vision to support it across a range of themes, including community, relationships and health and wellbeing.
We know that returning service members have a wealth of talents and experience that are easily transferable to our economy and our communities. As a society, we benefit when veterans are able to transition back to civilian life successfully, so I am pleased to see the efforts of both the Scottish and UK Governments to tackle the serious issue of social isolation in our armed forces community.
However, we have to acknowledge that the issues faced by our veterans often arise from their time in service, which is where many problems occur. The pay increase of 2 per cent for the armed forces is below the increase in average earnings, forces personnel have been subject to a public sector pay cap, and recruitment and retention is in crisis—I think that there is a recruitment shortfall of 8.4 per cent. The disastrous handling of the contract with Capita has caused problems as well, and we have huge downsizing at a time when the roles for and demands of the armed forces have increased dramatically.
We also have the situation—I fundamentally disagree with Jackie Baillie on this—in which we intend to spend up to £200 billion on nuclear weapons that should never be used when we cannot pay the average earnings to our armed forces personnel. That is a scandal—it is obscene. In addition, we have known for some time that there are major shortages in equipment, whether it is helicopters or boots, and we have seen a year-by-year reduction in the training opportunities available to members of the armed forces, which is part of the reason for the retention and recruitment crisis that we have.
If we want our veterans to have the best possible start when they rejoin civilian society, we have to ensure that their experience in the armed forces is a good one. As Gordon MacDonald pointed out, the quality of some service accommodation is absolutely appalling. I know one family who has been through three different education systems in three different countries within three years, and in substandard accommodation. Such experiences have a major effect on veterans.
This debate is about the armed forces and veterans. If we are serious about looking after our veterans, we have to make sure that their experience in the armed forces is just as good as we expect their experience to be when they come out of the armed forces.
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